Re: [DNSOP] punctuation follies, I-D Action: draft-ietf-dnsop-alt-tld-15.txt

[John Levine <[e-mail]>]

It appears that Peter Thomassen  <[e-mail]> said:
>
>
>On 6/27/22 22:05, John Levine wrote:
>> But there is a
>> great deal of software that expects the names it uses to look like
>> hostnames, and won't work with anything else.
>
>The software for new applications which would use a _foo pseudo-TLD namespace is not yet written. It is for future applications, for which we
>can hope to push TLD-like use of things like "onion" into namespaces like "_onion".

History suggests that you and I will both be dead before that software is
widely enough used for anyone to care.

>I see no reason why, if Tor was started today, the software written for it should not be able to support _onion, if that was the BCP for doing
>it. Tor software would be written for that purpose at the time. Or am I missing something here?

The particular issue for .onion was SSL certificates which use an
identifier with a syntax essentially the same as DNS hostnames. In
theory, we could ask the SSL people to change the rules to allow
_names, in practice, even if we could persuade the IETF to update the
spec, it would take a long time for the changes to percolate out into
the field. There is still plenty of software using TLS 1.1 which was
published in 2006 and deprecated a year ago.

You'd also need to update web browsers and the SOCKS proxies that are
usually used to connect the TOR sessions to the browsers. How much
time are you prepared to spend to persuade them all that they should
allow _label as the rightmost label?

R's,
John