Radical-safest TLDs in 2014

Cathal Garvey cathalgarvey at cathalgarvey.me
Tue Oct 7 02:08:53 PDT 2014


> Can we further reduce ambiguity by reducing the set to those TLDs
> recognized by ICANN?

Isn't it more useful to reduce the set to TLDs that the "average user"
can connect to? That's why I shared the rumours about .onion in Firefox:
who cares what ICANN thinks, if a large enough userbase can access it
OOTB without configuration?

By contrast, .onion *today*, along with .i2p and .bit, are all
configuration-heavy, meaning virtually nobody will actually access or
use them unless they're already completely dedicated customers. The Silk
Road managed to pull people in because it was essentially the only place
to buy drugs "safely" online (along with plenty of other reprehensible
things), but that's a completely exceptional case.

I'm thinking of benign web services that enrich the world in some way,
but suffer censorship or legal assault because they disturb the
status-quo. The next start-up that MPAA want to crush, or the next
whistleblowing site, or the next transborder social network. Those
people will need TLDs they can rely on. If .onion goes surprisingly
mainstream in the near future, that'd be very powerful.

Of course, .onion will remain slow as sin, but for those websites they
can use .onion with 304 redirects to non-onion TLDs for each visitor; as
their clearnet TLDs get shut down they can just register new ones and
304 redirect to them on the fly for each new visitor; whack-a-mole on a
grand scale, a total losing battle for the censors. The critical bit is
that there's one canonical URL for new visitors that will always lead to
service.

On 06/10/14 21:00, Travis Biehn wrote:
> Rysiek,
> Can we further reduce ambiguity by reducing the set to those TLDs
> recognized by ICANN?
> 
> I don't think you can 'rely' on any of them, to coderman's point.
> 
> Your best bet is to enumerate the list of TLD delegated authoritative
> servers, then recursively send legal threats to each.
> 
> The one who demonstrates the most impressive apathy may be your winner :)
> 
> Of course, you may want to follow the concept of pitting two noncooperative
> countries against each other.
> If the threat to your name isnt specifically tied to a subset of all
> jurisdictions.. You might have a problem.
> 
> You might, then, establish a protocol. The hash of the website CNN.com's
> contents, for instance, may serve as a backup domain.
> 
> Realistically its really down to finding a cool registrar & TLD pair. TBP
> may be your best example here.
> 
> As a final note: if you're worried about these kinds of problems you
> probably shouldn't be using clearnet.
> 
> Travis
> On Oct 5, 2014 6:50 PM, "coderman" <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 10/5/14, rysiek <rysiek at hackerspace.pl> wrote:
>>> ... which TLD should I choose for a "clearternet"
>>> version of the website?
>>
>>
>> for present day, "clearnet" version,
>>  winner is .bit / namecoin.
>>
> 

-- 
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