On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 8:20 AM, George Kadianakis desnacked@riseup.net wrote:
Nick Mathewson nickm@torproject.org writes:
Section 2.1 and elsewhere:
I suggest that we require all address suffixes to end with .onion; other TLDs are not reserved like .onion is, and maybe we shouldn't squat any we haven't squatted already. I think we might also want to have all output addresses end with .onion too.
I suggest also that we might want to reserve part of the namespace for standardized namespaces and some for experimental or local ones. Like, if we standardize on namecoin that could be .bit.onion, but if we don't, it could be .bit.x.onion.
I have mixed feelings about keeping the .onion suffix.
One one hand it seems like The Right Thing to do, since we managed to get .onion standarized in the IETF which comes with various benefits. Also, starting to squat other tlds arbitrarily seems like a silly thing to do.
However, I also dislike asking users to visit something.bit.onion instead of something.bit, since people are not used to the second tld having a semantic meaning, and I can imagine people getting very confused about what it means.
Indeed. And I'm not only concerned about people becoming confused: I am also worried about confused programs.
Right now, it is easy to answer the question "will Tor handle this address specially" -- the only special addresses are the ones ending with ".onion", and the legacy suffices ".exit" and ".noconnect" as documented as address-spec.txt. But if we allowed arbitrary TLDs in this proposal, then _any_ hostname would potentially be an address that Tor would handle specially.