-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 On 07/08/2015 02:33 PM, Edward Lewis wrote: > > But I keep coming to this, decidedly non-engineering, question: What > if someone uses RFC 6761 to get an offensive name registered as a > special-use domain name? >
TL;DR: you cannot avoid subjectivity, you have to embrace it. Your entire post is very interesting and thoughtful, Edward, but I wanted to follow-up on my response to Suzanne and focus on your mention of subjectivity and engineering. There's no way we cut subjectivity out of the process, because decisions are made by humans, on objective criteria (e.g., my previous response: "registered or not"), and on subjective criteria (e.g., your examples of visual similarity, offensiveness, and more generally meaning--in the previous conversations regarding P2PNames usability issues came up between, e.g., .onion, and .onion.alt) When "domain" names are meant to be used primarily by humans, coming from various backgrounds, cultures, languages, avoiding offensiveness certainly is an impossible challenge to meet--if the dirty word does not exist in a language you know, it might still make people smile or frown in another culture. It's mostly a matter of perspective, and that is irreducibly subjective. I think it's quite important indeed to keep in mind that humans will judge whether an application is valid or not, and no, that's probably not an engineering question. But it can be established that applications matching a visually-similar, confusing, or otherwise threatening name can be rejected on security considerations; similarly, a name obviously offensive to humanity, life, or the values promoted by the Internet culture of planetary cooperation should be discouraged. This is certainly a mind-blowing perspective to an engineer, and a seemingly intractable issue to put skin on dead cold technology, but in the end humans create, and humans decide what technology should do or not. In order to avoid the inevitable conflict of the limits of morality and ethics (e.g., who decides that .fsck is not available), this ultimate consideration should be left to the community, and not to arbitrary rules: if it's easy to find an objection to an illustrative .con special-use wannabe for its (English) meaning and its proximity to .com, it's less easy to grasp its dirty meaning in French; this example could certainly be rejected on the ground that it may confuse users (especially as typing n instead of m on many keyboards is an easy mistake) and pose a security risk; but rejecting it, or another similar example, on the grounds it can be taken as an insult or refer to usually intimate parts of someone is a cultural and moral call that should not be written but tacit. So, to summarize, when considering Special-Use Domain Names candidates*, I'm for: - - rejecting based on current use in DNS (to avoid name conflicts) - - rejecting based on proximity of an existing name when it can lead to confusion and pose a security risk - - recommending rejection when the word is threatening or contrary to cooperative and humanistic values (e.g., UNDHR) - - suggesting rejection when the word can be considered offensive * I guess IANA could tell better about how that fits their own process for TLDs. > > Last calls are only heard by those that are subscribed to the lists. > *** Should IETF use social media to expand their reach? (@ietf? @dnsopwg ?) == hk -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iQJ8BAEBCgBmBQJVnrMyXxSAAAAAAC4AKGlzc3Vlci1mcHJAbm90YXRpb25zLm9w ZW5wZ3AuZmlmdGhob3JzZW1hbi5uZXRFQ0IyNkIyRTNDNzEyMTc2OUEzNEM4ODU0 ODA2QzM2M0ZDMTg5ODNEAAoJEEgGw2P8GJg9JokP/jIYL2mtSgh2UPx5mogX+f9H HR55z/bzX81pB1RUXyTXXRghVHHCmIPz+luKBkeA9+USAuQ/h3qQsrTpLtWHTo18 PgPl0nsG90IUDVtlx9Q0tIPR1zYtLIsLLEpqCY+GKdp7y7llAHhh7ASJkpC1nOSl DXiPjG3TX2WLGglfLd8o9bDbm2DF/CEAOmalFZjh+FsOuKaT6m07CtdFsdasIeAN f/qie61Hzny36kDxmTWmhhXW9we/B6PURScAEcpusukJXlT3ViBeozgVQCnvSr2L mfHvFAmWY32yk6Oe8Ss5fN8D6r1hlSlkiatofzPY/A659T/fUBAIVuA7luA17lQI jD9hH6mm0W0djJKLjRnKzmcM6/37kH7sdrX1vei13jovwc6IwjFptiTu31s8QUwV Tm9v6E3xm4pJJlwJ03BKCLQg8vpJbrllS/U/E3mRpsip02hljvmem6fRZJolu3LG Vw8Ocs7nN20ibiZt1iepPJXYfW3wMGFR8QBNoI4BMjSWJcuqIefMx4N9+Eute9jQ Jnb0iTRT1xCV8B/dr/OoXB4mJVtiu/zbAOHlTn/wqFVr4ZZYTdeRvgCgmXkXql3a o8LhHL98zzC9OkyKloNiRLI7QeMHCyHDamp0vvD3OwOX7yJK16s1LFwJk0DglzOI oEw/EV2ELKtxfleyZXek =R5oG -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
