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

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

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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