Found via Web Numbers | Hacker News
I mention it here in case it becomes a thing, and being able to index such things.
Having TLS certs for IPs seems great, no domain cost- but maybe other issues of people trusting the host (nee ip). phishing etc.
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I don’t use autocomplete, and I don’t have any browsing history, so I would need to memorise IP addresses with this system. IP addresses obfuscate meaning more than they enhance it for humans. Address books mitigate this, but I would still need to somehow know and remember that the authoritative address for x.org is 131.252.210.176 in the first place. How do I know that’s the right IP address? It’s a lot harder to parse than human-readable words.
I wonder what happens if the IP address changes also. Domain names expire sometimes, but it’s far more commonplace for people to move to a new provider (and thus need to get a new load balancer), so the IP address will inevitably change. And that leaves the space ready to be claimed by a malicious actor.
And yeah, DNS providers + ICANN make it more difficult to register domains. This is also a good thing. If you don’t own the trademark for a business that has a closely-associated domain name, ICANN is liable to pick up on it proactively and hound you for proof that you own the trademark. And they can also kick off serious criminals who need to fallback to .onion addresses or something more niche to run their enterprises.
For small, short-lived sites, Web Numbers might make sense. But usability and security wise it seems like a notable downgrade for the sake of ease of use of admins.
I like DNS, for all its faults. And there are faults, which are described in this article.
This post also links to OpenNIC, which is an interesting project I’d never heard of before.
I think it’s an interesting idea but I’m not a big fan of it in its current state.
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