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by thanksgiving
3201 days ago
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> And yet you can't create your own small phone network, assign whatever numbers you want to your users, and expect others to interconnect with you or honor your numbers. Telephony is federated within an internationally regulated system, to claim that this in any way supports federation in a similar manner as what is being discussed is to fundamentally misunderstand how the system works. Wait, but if telephony is regulated then so is our DNS system. After all, Verisign (I think) owns "dot com". I am not sure about the last statement but the point is that you have to go to a registrar to get a domain name. So, is email not truly federated either? Thinking about the problem, we need some kind of identifier that is not controlled by a single entity and yet there is a consensus as to how we route traffic designated to that identifier. Ideally, we want to be able to designate multiple clients with the same identifier which only complicates the issue. Is there a solution to this? |
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What do you mean by "our"?
There is nothing that "forces" anyone to use ICANN DNS.
(There is certainly coercion and peer pressure to follow along, but as a technical matter anyone can break free at anytime. It is just a matter of changing some defaults and running some software yourself.)
People use ICANN DNS for one of the following reasons
1. because they do understand the technical details such as changing defaults and running a local authoritative server serving a root.zone file,
2. because their business relies on ICANN DNS somehow or
3. "because that is what everyone else is using" or some similar belief where any variance from status quo is per se failure.
The encryption that Signal uses is not likely to be broken. Because Marlinspike did not write it.
The protocol is a different matter. Uncertainties abound.
The author of the encryption is not the author of the protocol and if I recall the author of the encryption questioned why the distribution of the software has to be controlled by one company. (Answer: It doesn't.)
Signal is a classic example of some software (in this case written in Java) whose adoption on its own merits the author has deemed "inadequate" and so the author attaches it to some very widely adopted platform or other widely adopted software. This results in instant mass adoption.FN1 It is like entering into a distribution agreement.
Challenging this decision with respect to Signal results in mundane philosophical arguments about "user experience".
The beautiful thing about the encryption that Signal uses is that it is not attached to any particular software or platform. It gains adoption on it own merits, not by making a deal with a company like WhatsApp/Facebook.
Anyone can write software with the same encryption that Signal uses, and it does not have to be entwined with a protocol controlled by Facebook.
FN1. Another recent thread mentioned how web browser authors partner with popular software such as "CCleaner" to silently install their browser along with "CCleaner". As a result, every user who installs "CCleaner" also installs Chrome (and maybe some other malware). Parasitic software distribution. When it comes time to boast about browser "market share", the method of distribution, the presence or absence of conscious choice by the user, is not reported.