--On Tuesday, July 21, 2015 07:26 -0400 Ted Lemon
<ted(_dot_)lemon(_at_)nominum(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
It's used to solve that problem because it's the easiest
hack to make it work, not because it's the right thing to do.
Ted, independent of SOCKS or other possibilities, I suggest one
of the things that can be said about apparent domain names that
are not expected to resolve in the DNS but are lexically
indistinguishable, overuse of TXT RRs, etc., is precisely "used
to solve that problem because it's the easiest hack to make it
work, not because it's the right thing to do.". One difficulty
is that such hacks don't scale particularly well. One or two of
them (I note that "localhost." is just about as old as the NDS)
is not a problem (although perhaps still a hack). Beginning to
add them in large numbers makes them harder to track, increases
the chance of leakage, and probably implies that we will
eventually need new hacks to categorize and organize the other
hacks.
It still might be the right thing to do (although I agree with
George, Andrew, and others that, if we are committed to good
design and engineering, we ought to be doing better). My
concern is much more about how we (speaking very broadly)
organize the decision-making about particular names than about
the alternatives but, again, if the IETF is actually supposed to
be doing Internet Engineering rather than Internet Name
Selection, we should probably be concentrating a bit more on the
former than the latter.
best,
john