Reserve pages for companies when Safe Network goes live?

The problem with this and most whackamole hacks is that it would be voluntary (which is why I suggest focus on the fundamentals that are baked in and much harder to subvert).

@jlpell is correct though that we could register and ‘burn’ those addresses, much like the early bitcoin wallets but less of a worry tbh.

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Honestly I do think that burning the current TLDs is a good idea anyhow. Saves silly squatting and silly bogus selling of “subdomains”. But also saves people who type name.com from being tricked

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more than just the three letter TLDs .info and many others such as .io need protected as well.
This could be a big job so lets see Maidsafe or the Foundation’s authorised delegate make some dosh off it without it being a pure rip.

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A script can do this easy. So no matter if 100 or 100,000 - just time for script to run. There are already lists of all TLDs out there to use

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Thank you all for the great discussion! There is a lot here, but I think my main concern would be addressed by just burning the TLDs from the clearnet. I would say just burn the list as it is when the network launches, any TLDs that are created after that aren’t that critical since people won’t have the muscle memory associated with them like they do the ‘.com’ sites. The TLD names in NRS could point to a helpful page explaining this is the Safe Network on not the WWW with some good introductory info for onboarding newbies. This would probably be enough to prevent 90% of the phishing problems.

In terms of reserving company sites, from a purist perspective, I would say if a company doesn’t register their name right away ‘not my problem’. But from a network perception perspective to the new user, if their favorite siloed sites on the clear net become phishing pages, manifestos about why company XYZ is evil, porn, whatever, there will be A LOT of people turned off by this. For example, today when non-techy (dare I say 'normal) people think about TOR or bitcoin, it is perceived as this shady underworld where people go to buy drugs or look at illegal things. The vast majority have never fired up a TOR browser or purchased a bitcoin, but they’ve heard things from their friends or from the talking heads on the television. The value of these technologies isn’t apparent to these people. My fear is that the Safe Network will be perceived the same way without some intervention. In terms of number of sites, I was thinking somewhere in the top 1000 to 10000 range. Anything below this and the most vulnerable users probably aren’t going to these sites anyway.

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This is why I think it is reasonable to reserve some short TLDs until Safe has more general awareness.

This could be done entirely algorithmically/deterministically, eg:

  1. At launch, reserve every tld under 4 chars in length.
  2. Every month (or N network operations), one of them becomes available for use.
    eg, .a, .b, .c, … .aa, .ab, .ac. … zz, .aaa, … .zzz. (taking into account other languages, alphabets as well)

The general idea would be to spread these out over time, perhaps aiming for 100 years or even a millenia, so that there’s not such a benefit to a mad squatting rush at the beginning.

I would suggest we even go one step further and require that every name must have one of these short TLDs. That would prevent squabbles over the “special” TLD names. If no one can have one, there’s nothing to be jealous of.

So basically, if McDonalds misses the first 48 months of Safe Network operationn, they can still obtain McDonalds.ad. And farmer Joe McDonald can come along in 10 years and still get McDonalds.gv, etc, etc.

I suppose squatters would still try to jump on the potentially most profitable names in each namespace as they come around, but at least there is a sort of competition for it, and thereby more availability and lower prices than a single global namespace.

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@danda, if you limit them to 4 chars then I see no reason to ever release them. The very reason to lock them up in the first place will remain for years. And ones like .com. and .net. and .org. you would never release. So how would you choose.

Better to just leave them locked up and save any of the silly race to grab it for the wrong reasons. Like scamming one way or another.

Also keeps it real simple too. No core code to break or some app run by some governance to control them.

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Of the solutions so far, burning TLDs send the least bad to me, but still something that I’d rather not do. What will we hobble next?

The desire to do this is out of fear, and based on an assumption, and the fearful imaginings of what may flow from the assumption. IMO the Risk is low and I don’t believe it would affect adoption significantly regardless.

So I’d still like it if we at least attempt to investigate how feasible this imagined vulnerability to fishing scams is, before deciding on what we imagine will solve it.

That’s the challenge I’d like to set to those who want to lock out a number of TLDs. Please first demonstrate, or explain in detail how your imagined fishing attack would catch people - using the UX that Maidsafe have planned.

I suspect part of the fear here comes from not realising how different this will be to the internet as it is now, and how much more protected users of Safe will be. I think we’d all learn a lot from such an analysis, me included, so it would be a useful thing in any case. It could even become a good marketing resource.

As far as burning all common tlds and hobbling go, I would look at it from the same perspective as the reason Safe Browser does not connect to the oldnet. That decision is to make things safe, not hobbled. Same could be said about burning the oldnet tlds for logical consistency.

I’m starting to like the alternative solution better though, which is to hardcode a constraint that all public names must be 5 characters or longer. OP Problem solved. A simple rule.

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The difference I see between the browser and burning TLDs is that one is final, while the other is optional and in time anyone can opt out by using a different browser.

The reason I used the word hobbling is because the change is permanent, those TLDs are lost from that NRS forever. It may seem a subtle difference, but it triggers something negative in me - like a closing down of opportunity, of freedom - and so far without anyone having demonstrated the necessity or the value. Just fearful speculation.

Looking from this perspective, disallowing all short names is far worse IMO. There would be millions of combinations lost forever, many great names, again because of fearful speculation and without putting in effort to characterise and justify this.

Many of us here love to come up with ideas for solving problems, but if we don’t also look at whether this is a problem worth trying to solve, it’s likely to be at best wasted effort and could be making things worse for no reason at all.

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Well, then the only solution I keep coming back to is a public burn where the keys are known and it’s a perpetual public bulletin board that serves as a source of PUT income for the network.

Let’s be sure of the nature of the problem, or if there is a problem at all before coming up with solutions.

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Scammer owned or not, the perpetual squatting on common tlds and basic words is a problem that exists.

It is equivalent to restricting Everyone from using certain letters of the common alphabet used for centuries when trying to verbally communicate, but allowing a select group to continue using those letters because they were the first to “claim” them in the modern age.

Dosn mk lo of sns…

That’s why I tend to advocate for a public burn of those tlds/names. They will still exist, but everyone has the ability to use them. They become a public square.

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I agree squatting is a problem but have not liked any of the solutions I’ve seen so far, and I think that goes for the community as a whole as we’ve had some epic threads about this. Some like one or other ideas, others not.

Squatting is a related to the OP, but the diffiulties it poses are I think quite well understood. But I think it confuses things to move onto squatting here because again it avoids the question of whether the scenario in the OP is a significant problem in the first place.

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@Seneca has already found a decentralized solution to the squatting problem:

This system reduces incentives to squat a name because you are not sure to keep eternally the lead for a name. Your version of the name will lose its rank when someone pays a higher bid (either the legitimate owner of the associated brand name or another, more greedy, squatter).

As safecoins paid for increasing names rank are recycled, this system helps the network sustainability. I foresee fierce battles to get control of names like google, amazon, facebook, … They will be costly for the contenders, but healthy for the network.

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Then you are back to a single global namespace and a gold rush for squatters to grab them all. This is a step backward from even icann, imo.

no governance in what I proposed. hence, deterministic.

  1. A single global namespace incentivizes squatting. Either for profit or just for fun and bragging rights, or out of vindictiveness, anger, revenge.
  2. Multiple entities exist with the same (legal) name, brand name, nickname, etc. A single global namespace allows one (at most) to use that name.
  3. Many people/organizations will not even hear about Safe Network until early adopters (squatters) have gobbled up all the most interesting names. So latecomers are punished, and may be turned off by this.

doesnt solve squatting. doesn’t solve situation where multiple entities (businesses or people) have the same legal name.

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That’s the challenge I’d like to set to those who want to lock out a number of TLDs. Please first demonstrate, or explain in detail how your imagined fishing attack would catch people - using the UX that Maidsafe have planned

Now this is a capital idea. On the next iteration of testnet, I may try to create such a fishing page! Would be instructive at least :slight_smile:

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I think this belongs in the squatting / DNS topics and is getting in the way of the discussion of the issue raised in the OP. We’ve already done DNS and squatting to death without result so if this is more of that I’ll probably drop out of this discussion.