[tor-talk] Possible solution to next-gen onion services UX disaster

Alec Muffett alec.muffett at gmail.com
Sun Mar 12 22:43:28 UTC 2017


Having lived through a period where email addresses as we know them (
foo at example.com) were pre-emptively declared to be a usability disaster
zone, and seeing the resultant train-wreck of X.400 addressing being
foisted upon the UK academic community as a simple, clear, and intuitive
replacement:

    "G=Harald;S=Alvestrand;O=Uninett;P=Uninett;A=;C=no"
    see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.400

…having seen this (-^) to be declared as self-evidently better and then
watch it die as RFC822 took over the world, then I for one am inclined to
ask tor just to roll out 53(?)-character Base32 addresses and "see what
happens".

Trying to forward-guess the community seems often to land in disaster.

    -a

ps: if the above looks familiar, it's because the X.500 directory services
that were invented to support X.400 email were later resurrected from the
dead as LDAP, because you can't keep a bad idea down in the "identity"
space.

pps: i was a university sysadmin in the early 1990s; the ISODE consortium
literally gave us a high-end server to deploy X.400 and X.500 code on, a
server which sat idle because nobody liked X.500.  So I used it to develop
password cracking software.

-- 
http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/aboutalecm


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