Re: [homenet] RFC 7788-bis (and also draft-cheshire-homenet-dot-home-03)

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

BTW, to do your excellent disquisition on this topic a tiny bit more
justice, I think the point where you and Stuart probably disagree is that
you want to take into account networks that will use homenet router
technology that are already using .home for something else, whereas Stuart
doesn't think this is a real use case.

I agree with you that it is a real use case we need to account for.

On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 6:38 PM, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:

> Violent agreement here.   Hence, ".homenet".   :)
>
> On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 6:34 PM, Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>
> wrote:
>
>> Dear colleagues,
>>
>> On Fri, Jun 17, 2016 at 09:37:06AM +0100, Ray Bellis wrote:
>>
>> > Whilst there may be "undermined" ways it's being used, it's clear that
>> > most of the ways it's used are just because some vendors and sites
>> > decided to use that for their default *site local* domain which makes it
>> > completely consistent with what we need.
>> >
>> > I therefore completely disagree on point #1 - officially allocating
>> > .home for this purpose and having it "sunk" by default on internet
>> > facing recursive resolvers would IMHO actually *help* with the traffic
>> > hitting the root and reduce leakage of it.
>>
>> The argument above, which is rehearsed to some extent in
>> draft-cheshire-homenet-dot-home-03 (although there IMO more subtly),
>> is interesting to me, in that it appears to start with the exact same
>> premises I do and reach the exact opposite conclusion.  I believe this
>> is because of some unstated premises, and so I'm going to attempt to
>> lay out the premises as I understand them as completely as I can.
>>
>> To do this, I'm going to draw some inferences about what Ray was
>> arguing and about what is in draft-cheshire-homenet-dot-home-03.  I
>> hope the authors indulge me, and I hope you, Gentle Reader, do not
>> mistake my inferences as speaking correctly either for Ray or for
>> Stuart.  Since they're both here, they can correct what I get wrong;
>> but I think trying to lay out this different story might help us.
>>
>> I think we all agree that the label home, in the top-most position of
>> a domain name (but maybe not a name in the DNS), is in use by some
>> people.  I think we all agree that at least some uses of that name are
>> somehow related to "stuff in my house behind my home-router-like
>> thing".  And I think we all agree that, whatever basis for that use
>> is, it either is not or ought not to be related to any actual
>> delegation of the name in the DNS.
>>
>> With the above premises, I conclude that home is by definition not
>> suitable for our purposes.  I conclude that from these additional
>> premises:
>>
>>     • that, given the detectable pollution of the namespace at and
>>       beneath home, there is a significant population already using
>>       the name for some purposes, we know not what;
>>
>>     • that if we want an identifier to be some sort of protocol switch
>>       by which we tell software to do something novel, we need an
>>       identifier that has at least a modest chance of not running into
>>       widely-deployed use for some purpose not defined to be
>>       consistent with the protocol switch;
>>
>>     • that it is at least fantastically difficult to suss out all the
>>       strange things people are already doing with "in the wild"
>>       undelegated names in the DNS, even if we make the dubious
>>       assumption that there is something like a rigorous design behind
>>       those doings;
>>
>>     • that strings that could be used as protocol switches are
>>       fundamentally machine-directed rather than human-directed, and
>>       therefore have a certain arbitrariness about them.
>>
>> With the same premises, I think the opposite argument is that home is
>> entirely good for our purposes, because of the following additional
>> premises:
>>
>>     • that we have (or we can get, which is what
>>       draft-cheshire-homenet-dot-home-03 is asking for) a pretty clear
>>       idea that all the uses of home are already more or less what
>>       we're trying to do;
>>
>>     • that picking the same string is very unlikely to break any of
>>       the existing behaviour;
>>
>>     • that a meaningful string to a human user is of high importance
>>       here;
>>
>>     • that a primary (or even important secondary) motivation for the
>>       allocation would be to capture traffic that should never have
>>       been destined for the root in the first place;
>>
>>     • that with adequate documentation, a possibly-conflicting use of
>>       home would not have negative effects.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I think the effort to document what people are actually doing with
>> home is laudable, and I hope it succeeds in producing a more-or-less
>> complete account of the use of that name.  But I do not see how we can
>> get from "documenting these uses is good" to "having documented it,
>> you can then use the name that way."  The kind of exhaustive survey
>> that would be needed to show the real uses of home would cost far more
>> in time, effort, and money than the convenience of the string
>> presents.  Moreover, it's not even clear that this would be the
>> "right" string.  For lots of people on Earth don't use Latin writing,
>> never mind English words.
>>
>> I hope this explains why I think proceeding with home is problematic.
>>
>> Andrew (speaking only for myself).
>>
>> --
>> Andrew Sullivan
>> [e-mail]
>>
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