In a discussion on a private mailing list, the issue of decentralized DNS was raised, in light of the recent battles between the corporate media working through government versus the pirate industry. Why would a bunch of Christian Open Source geeks be interested? It’s not just the technology angle.
At the risk of oversimplifying, we can describe DNS as the system behind the scenes by which computers pass information across the wires of the Internet. You think in terms of the name of a website, and maybe you know enough to type in “someplace” you want to visit, and it has to end in something like “.com” — you have to have the dot and an ending. Some may even realize you’ll have more than one dot in the name of the place. That we think of it as names, and in our minds as geographic places, is foreign to the computers doing all the work. To them, it’s a matter of passing ones and zeros in streams to other computers based on purely numerical addressing. It’s not places and names.
And all of this assumes a certain amount of trust. Given all the wires are owned almost exclusively by governments and large corporations, you’d naturally assume those entities have some interest in making this stuff work to their satisfaction. It has to be reliable so they can make money or maintain control, or whatever justifies the expense of running those wires and the computers. Your computer does not likely connect directly to the Net, but goes through several other computers first, typically owned by your ISP. All those governments and companies get together and set up a central means of sharing control among themselves, and trade some highly protected certifications between each other to make sure the mutual trust system works.
In times past, it was otherwise pretty much hands-off what computers passed across the wires. Then some smart-alecks started passing stuff annoying, then actually harmful to computers and to the business of folks who were paying to keep the whole thing alive. So it required some sort of protections. We all know about anti-virus and so forth, so that means protection distributed among the systems — decentralized. Except, the viruses are detected and stopped based on some centralized provider of information. It’s always been that way, a hybrid maintaining tension between centralized and decentralized. Somebody will always be displeased by the current balance, seeking ways to push things in one direction or another. For the most part, it works. Right now we are passing through a rough patch, where the tension is high and balance is wobbly.
Decentralized DNS has been tried on various scales since long ago. Indeed, in some ways it has always been in use, but restricted to a select few participants. It hasn’t worked that well, so there has to be a compelling reason for keeping it alive. Mostly it has been in the form of piggy-backing onto the regular system, by encrypting the traffic so that those passing the information have no idea what it is, only where it is going. Trying to come up with private wires running the same routes as the common wires used by everyone else is pretty hard to justify, so it’s easier to hide your stuff in the vast streams of everybody else’s stuff. And now we have increasing use of wireless transmissions (basically radio waves), which only complicates things, because wireless currently has to re-enter the wired system sooner or later. Yet it has the potential of working entirely without the wires, so long as your radio signal can reach the desired destination, or be passed along by other wireless connections. That’s another thing entirely.
If the only thing we can get from all this debate and technology warfare is Hollywood filth, cookie cutter music and porn, I could care less. I have TV and movies, and vastly prefer live performance of any music over commercially controlled, canned and poorly engineered noise any day. But I believe popular garbage entertainment is merely the reason money and effort will go into something I can use for other purposes.
While I certainly enjoy playing with computers, testing software and learning how to fix stuff, and surfing the Net, the whole thing is merely a tool. Not only do I have a purely spiritual motive for wanting to play in cyberspace, but it appears my message appeals to a rather narrow slice of humanity, thinly scattered. To share anything useful at all, it has to be accessible to as many humans as possible, as cheaply as possible. Right now, the Internet is the only route of exposure. Having suffered at the hands of the centralizers who objected to some of my gospel motivated behavior, I am quite sensitive to the whole issue of centralized versus decentralized. This isn’t simply one tool of many, but the single most important tool I have right now.
The current balance of power between the centralizers and decentralizers makes the former a bigger threat to my mission. Favoring the corporate run government oppression most certainly won’t help me, any more than it helped the Apostle John, who called it “Babylon.” But I am also in no position to fight pirates, porn addicts and other filth in their use of the Net. My mission gains nothing by trying anything beyond the usual verbal appeal for sanity and repentance. That’s how the Kingdom works. If some new technology idea helps the pirates and hinders government controls, it will likely bless me, too.
