Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-dnsop-onion-tld-00.txt> (The .onion Special-Use Domain Name) to Proposed Standard

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

On Jul 21, 2015, at 7:48 AM, Sam Hartman <[e-mail]> wrote:
> However, efficiency of implementation is a concern it's reasonable for
> the IETF to value and we typically value it highly.
> Being able to implement things like TOR on top of sox shims, and being
> able to implement hidden services on top of SOX shims is very valuable.
> It allows us to add support for hidden services without modifying the
> end applications.

Absolutely.   However, it is perhaps worth noting that there is a long-standing solution to the problem that doesn’t require socks: nsswitch.conf.   It’s not the right architectural solution either, for a couple of reasons: not an appropriate UI for non-hackers, and a bit too dependent on the list of things switched being small.   But the point is that this is actually a pretty well-understood problem, and if, as a policy, we continue to add special-use names as required, the solution to the problem of how to handle these special-use names in the host stack is already well understood.