<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><br class=""><div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Aug 8, 2015, at 1:44 PM, Paul Syverson <<a href="mailto:paul.syverson@nrl.navy.mil" class="">paul.syverson@nrl.navy.mil</a>> wrote:</div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>Hi Paul!</div><div><br class=""></div><div>I think it would be valid to propose a third direction, which is to partially give-up arguing about the importance of Zooko’s Triangle and instead make attempts to meet human beings and computers somewhere in the middle. </div><div><br class=""></div><div>I don’t believe that this direction should preclude development of the other two - they might indeed be complementary - but making Onion addresses accessible in the ways that an IPv4 “dotted quad” is, or that an IPv6 “::” field-pad does, cannot be a bad thing.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>There is, as you point out:</div><div><br class=""></div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">One is to produce human meaningful names in association with onion<br class="">addresses. </div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>…which is akin to the layer that DNS provides atop IP addressing; everyone with a domestic DSL router probably has “<a href="http://192.168.1.1" class="">http://192.168.1.1</a>” bookmarked somewhere, which is more direct and unambiguous than the “<a href="http://router" class="">http://router</a>.local” that it may also masquerade as, by providing DNS bootstrap through DHCP.</div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">The other that I am aware of is to bind onion addresses in a human<br class="">meaningful way to existing names, typically registered domain names,<br class=""></div></blockquote><div><br class=""></div><div>I recall the discussion we had inside Facebook, along the lines of <i class="">“why don’t we register “<a href="http://onion.facebook.com" class="">onion.facebook.com</a>” and issue a redirect, rather than forcing people to type this gibberish?”</i> - an argument which was won by the observation “we are putting this out for people to have trust, and why should we make them trust DNS+redirection when we can instead give them something direct and unambiguous"</div><div><br class=""></div><div>You’ll gather that I like “direct and unambiguous”. :-)</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Hence: let there be innovation. </div><div><br class=""></div><div>Please let a thousand discovery mechanisms bloom - including peer-to-peer directories and tweeted URLs.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>But, what they boil down to, please let *that* be human-readable, too. The more I like about it, the more I like:</div><div><br class=""></div><div><pre style="white-space: pre-wrap; widows: 1;" class="">a1uik-0w1gm-fq3i5-ievxd-m9ceu-27e88-g6o7p-e0rff-dw9jm-ntwkd-sdxxx.onion</pre><div class=""><br class=""></div></div><div>…where the final “xxx” is a 15-bit truncated secure hash of the rest of the original raw address bitstring.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>That way people looking to quickly compare addresses can check the first octet, and the last, and sample a few of the inner ones (“…people compare glyphs not words…” / “there’s IEVXD and there’s E0RFF, I like that one, it’s like Eeyore in Winnie-The-Pooh, and 0WLGM reminds me of Owls") and be reasonably satisfied and reasonably secure. </div><div><br class=""></div><div>And the XXX can be checked by the browser and tell the user that they’ve goofed-up cut/paste/typing-it-in. And then they bookmark it once it loads.</div><div><br class=""></div><div> - alec</div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><div class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">—</div><div class="">Alec Muffett</div><div class="">Security Infrastructure</div><div class="">Facebook Engineering</div><div class="">London</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>