From: mccoy@communities.com (Jim McCoy)
Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 09:54:11 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Alternic.net (was domain zapping)
Message-ID: <v02140b02adf75a42eda3@[205.162.51.35]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


John Fricker writes:
> At 05:54 AM 6/26/96 -0400, Perry wrote:
[...regarding alternte registries...]
> >
> >They can offer to sell you anything they like, of course, and you can
> >pay them, but you don't get anything at all for the money. Domains
> >registered with them don't appear in the real DNS.
>
> What constitutes "real DNS"?

For 99.99999% of the Internet "real DNS" is defined by the root server list
distributed with the most recent version of BIND.

> DNS server administrators need only add one line to their named.boot file to
> resolve .nic hosts.
>
> secondary       nic     204.94.42.1             db.nic
>
> It's that easy!

Sorry, but this only gives you domain name resolution for the .nic TLD, not
the other new top-level domains they want to create or any domains that
alternic is proposing to provide service for.  To do that one needs to add an
appropriate line into the root.cache file (or whatever the root server list
is in your name server setup), at which point you are also trusting alternic
with pointing you properly to any domain they get queried on.

> The concept of centralized name resolutions is flawed and
> only exists out of habit.

It is not just about habit, it is also about trust.  There are alternatives,
but they need to be thought-out much more than this alternic stuff...

jim