On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 17:53, Robert Ransom rransom.8774@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not going to follow that link.
… yet you're going to comment anyway, based merely on your imagination of what it contains? O.o
(Tor specification-change proposals are sent to the tor-dev mailing list in their entirety and copied into a Git repository for archival, not left on an easily-changed web page.)
Yeah: that's the point. This is a proposal, not a full implementation let alone a final one. It's going to be edited.
We would like a naming system which provides *memorable* names, if that is possible. (I've never seen a distributed naming system which provides secure and memorable names.)
"I've never seen" isn't really a statement about my proposal.
But we care even more about other usability properties of a naming system, such as how easily users can type a name given a copy of it on paper, how easily users can transfer a name to a friend over the telephone, and how easily users can compare two names maliciously crafted by an attacker with plausible computational power to be similar (whether in written form or in spoken form).
All agreed there.
choice of name (though it has the required *canonicality* of names),
By proposing to add a new naming system for Tor's existing hidden service protocol, you are already assuming and claiming that hidden service names do not need to be canonical. Why do you think ‘canonicality’ is required?
… you just contradicted yourself within two sentences.
Canonicality is mandatory for domain names of all kinds; otherwise there's no way to advertise them, transfer references to them between users, etc. If your name for some service only works for you, it's not very useful.
and has a somewhat absurdist definition of 'meaningful'. :-P
Then your system's names are unlikely to be memorable.
Not true. Consider that e.g. mnemonics used in med school *all* consist of absurdist phrases.
It would be more memorable if it's short and operator-specified, but for that you need a petname system, which this is not.
The dictionaries required by a dictionary-based naming system strongly influence whether the resulting names will be memorable.
Yes, of course. So will using good syntax generation.
The usability tests which will prove that your scheme does not provide sufficient usability benefit to justify shipping many large dictionaries with Tor cannot begin until after you have collected the dictionaries.
a) who said it requires 'many large dictionaries'? b) I said upfront that the point of asking for comments is to make sure the dictionaries collected are good a priori. Your challenging my proposal by saying that we need dictionaries before testing — which is obvious; you can't implement this scheme without dictionaries — seems pointlessly combative to me.
I suggest you try actually reading proposals before bitching about them. We addressed most of the issues you mention in the proposal.
- Sai