The Web Is Broken: how DNS breaks almost every design principle of the internet | The Recompiler
▻http://recompilermag.com/issues/issue-1/the-web-is-broken-how-dns-breaks-almost-every-design-principle-of-the
Cynthia Taylor
My favorite thing about the Domain Name System (DNS), the system used to translate from Domain Names to IP addresses, is that it used to just be a guy named Jon.1 When the internet was young, if you had an IP address that you wanted a name connected to, you would contact Jon, and he would add your name-IP translation to a text file, and the updated text file would be shipped out to all twenty people on the internet. (This text file, hosts.txt, still exists in some form on most operating systems.2) Then, around 1983, there were suddenly more computers on the internet than Jon could reasonably deal with, and they threw together the Domain Name System, using all the assumptions of an internet where all of the users were reasonably nice graduate students, and it had not yet crossed anyone’s mind that maybe one day you could use this thing to steal credit card numbers. Later we figured out that maybe, just maybe, people might lie on the internet, but we never bothered to go back and fix it. Now it’s too big to reasonably change. This, dear readers, is the story of the internet.
#LOL