GNUnet News: NGI Zero Entrust: “GNS to DNS Migration and Zone Management”

November 15, 2022 by Michael G

NGI Zero Entrust: “GNS to DNS Migration and Zone Management”

We are happy to announce that we have successfully aquired funding for further
GNS development and polishing!

The GNU Name System specification is in its

final stages

.
Migration paths and large-scale testing as well as generating interest in running GNS zones and registrars is the next logical step.
Hence, this project aims to

Facilitate the management of GNS zones by administrators.
Provide users with means to resolve real-world names by (partially) mirroring the DNS root zone.

Ad 1.:

To ease adoption, a framework for GNS registrars will be developed for zone management.
The registrar framework will allow GNS zone administrators to provide
a web-interface for subdomain registration by other users.
The services may also be provided for a fee similar to how DNS domain registrars
operate to cover running costs.
The framework is envisioned to support integration of privacy-friendly payments with

GNU Taler

.

Ad 2.:

We are already hosting and shipping a zone for
gnunet.org
as part of our GNS implementation.
To demonstrate how existing DNS registrars could migrate zones from DNS to GNS
we plan to run multiple GNS zones ourselves which contain the zone information from real-world DNS top-level domains.
This will also show how GNS can be used to secure the existing DNS namespace from
censorship and outages when used in parallel.
A selection of existing top-level domains for which

open data exists

will be hosted and served through GNS in order to facilitate the daily use of the name system.
We are are planning to integrate at least three DNS zones and publish them
through GNS for users to resolve in a default GNUnet installation.

Watch this space and the mailing list for updates!

This work is generously funded by

NLnet

as part of their

NGI Zero Entrust Programme

.

In praise of Plan 9

November 15, 2022 by Michael G

Plan 9 is an operating system designed by Bell Labs. It’s the OS they wrote after Unix, with the benefit of hindsight. It is the most interesting operating system that you’ve never heard of, and, in my opinion, the best operating system design to date. Even if you haven’t heard of Plan 9, the designers of whatever OS you do use have heard of it, and have incorporated some of its ideas into your OS. Plan 9 is a research operating system, and exists to answer questions about ideas in OS design. As such, the Plan 9 experience is in essence an exploration of the interesting ideas it puts forth. Most of the ideas are small. Many of them found a foothold in the broader ecosystem — UTF-8, goroutines, /proc, containers, union filesystems, these all have their roots in Plan 9 — but many of its ideas, even the good ones, remain unexplored outside of Plan 9. As a consequence, Plan 9 exists at the center of a fervor of research achievements which forms a unique and profoundly interesting operating system. I’ve never used Plan 9, but whenever I read about I feel like it makes sense, like that’s how things are supposed to be. I’m sure its approaches present their own unique challenges, problems, and idiosyncrasies, but the idealised reality in articles like these make me want to jump in.