internet – Terence Eden’s Blog

This time is different

@edent — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 12:34:39 +0000

3D TV, AMP, Augmented Reality, Beanie Babies, Blockchain, Cartoon Avatars, Curved TVs, Frogans, Hoverboards, iBeacons, Jetpacks, Metaverse, NFTs, Physical Web, Quantum Computing, Quibi, Small and Safe Nuclear Reactors, Smart Glasses, Stadia, WiMAX.

The problem is, the same dudes (and it was nearly always dudes) who were pumped for all of that bollocks now won't stop wanging on about Artificial Fucking Intelligence.

"It's gonna be the future bro, just trust me!"

"I dunno, man. Seems like you say that about every passing fancy - and they all end up being utterly underwhelming."

"This time is different!"

*sigh*

The investor who says, “This time is different,” when in fact it’s virtually a repeat of an earlier situation, has uttered among the four most costly words in the annals of investing.

16 rules for investment success - Sir John Templeton

All of the above technologies are still chugging along in some form or other (well, OK, not Quibi). Some are vaguely useful and others are propped up by weirdo cultists. I don't doubt that AI will be a part of the future - but it is obviously just going to be one of many technology which are in use.

No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.

Terry Pratchet's ~~Faust~~ Eric

The ideology of "winner takes all" is unsustainable and not supported by reality.

Preventing NAPTR Spam

@edent — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 11:34:47 +0000

You're the sort of cool nerd who knows all the weird esoterica which makes up DNS, right? In amongst your A, AAAA, SOA, and MX records, there's a little used NAPTR. Yes, you can use DNS to store Name Authority Pointers!

What?!

It is yet another of those baroque standards which spits out things like:

cid.uri.arpa.
;;       order pref flags service        regexp           replacement
IN NAPTR 100   10   ""    ""  "!^cid:.+@([^\.]+\.)(.*)$!\2!i"    .

Essentially, it is a way to store contact details within a DNS record (rather than in a WHOIS record).

Back in the early 2000s, the dotTel company opened the .tel TLD with a promise that it could be used to store your contact details in DNS⁰. The idea was simple, rather than storing my phone number in your address book, you'd store my domain name - https://edent.tel/

If I updated my phone number, changed my avatar, or deleted an old email address - your address book would automatically update via DNS. Nifty!

If you didn't know a company's phone number, you'd dial example.com on your phone and it would grab the phone numbers from DNS. Wowsers trousers!

You can see an example by running:

dig justin.tel NAPTR

You'll get back something like:

NAPTR   100 101 "u" "E2U+web:http" "!^.*$!http://justinkhayward.com!"

A phone number stored in a NAPTR would look something like:

NAPTR   100 100 "u" "E2U+voice:tel" "!^.*$!tel:+442074676450!" .

Brilliant! But there's a problem - aside from the somewhat obtuse syntax! - and that problem is spam.

Those of you old enough to remember putting your unexpurgated contact details into WHOIS know that the minute it went live you were bombarded with sales calls and scammy emails. So putting your details directly into DNS is a bad idea, right?

.tel thought they'd come up with a clever hack to prevent that. As they explain in the .tel privacy paper, records can be individually encrypted.

Alice has her contact details on alice.tel
Bob has his contact details on bob.tel
Alice agrees to share her phone number with Bob.
Alice looks up Bob's public key from bob.tel.
Alice encrypts her phone number.
Alice generates a new DNS record specifically for Bob - bob123456.alice.tel
Alice shares the name of the new record with Bob.
Bob downloads the NAPTR from bob123456.alice.tel and decrypts it with his private key.
Bob periodically checks for updates.
Alice can decide to revoke Bob's access by removing the data or subdomain.

Clever! If convoluted. You can read more about the way friendships and public keys were managed and some more technical details.

Are there better ways?

Multi Recipient Encryption

When people say "you can't give Government a secret key to your private messages" they are technically incorrect¹. Multi Recipient Encryption is a thing.

Here's a very simplified and subtly wrong explanation:

Alice creates a temporary public/private keypair.
Alice encrypts some text with her temporary public key - resulting in e.
Alice encrypts the temporary private key with Bob's public key - resulting in k1.
Alice encrypts the temporary private key with Charlie's public key - resulting in k2.
Alice publishes the concatenation of e+k1+k2
Bob downloads the file, decrypts his version of the key, and uses that to decrypt the message.
Charlie does the same.

In this way, both recipients are able to decipher the text but no one else can. So can we just shove an encrypted record in the NAPTR? Not quite.

There are two main problems with this for DNS purposes.

The encrypted size grows with every recipient.
Every time a new recipient is added, everyone needs to download the data again even if it is unchanged.

Generally speaking, DNS records are a maximum of 255 characters - although they can be concatenated.

An extra record could be used to say when the plaintext was last updated - which would let existing recipients know not to download it again.

Monitoring for changes would allow a user to know roughly how many recipients had been added or removed.

What other ways could there be?

What else could be done?

Here's the user story.

I want a friend to subscribe to my [phone|email|street|social media] address(es).
I must be able to pre-approve access.
When I change my address, my friend should get my new details.
I need to be able to revoke people's access.
This should be done via DNS².

Using an API this would be playing on easy mode. A friend (or rather, their app) would request an API key from my service. I would approve it, and then ✨magic✨.

DNS isn't technically an API although, with enough effort, you could make it behave like one³.

So - how would you do it?

Even back in 2009 I didn't think it was terribly compelling. By 2013, it was almost dead. And in 2017 it became just another generic TLD. ↩︎
The worst type of incorrect. ↩︎
Why DNS? Because I like making life difficult. ↩︎
If you were a sadist! ↩︎

Get the location of the ISS using DNS

@edent — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 11:34:33 +0000

I love DNS esoterica. Weird little things that you can shove in the global directory to be distributed around the world instantly(ish).

Domain names, like www.example.com usually resolve to servers. As much as we think of "the cloud" as being some intangible morass of ethereal Turing-machines floating in probability space, the more prosaic reality is that they're just boxen in data centres. They have a physical location.

Got a tricky machine which is playing silly-buggers? Wouldn't it be nice to know exactly where it is? That way you can visit and give it some percussive maintenance.

Enter the DNS LOC record!

The snappily titled RFC 1876 is an experimental standard. It allows you to create a DNS record which specifies the latitude and longitude of your server. Of course, some data-centres are very tall and some are underground. So it also contains an altitude parameter.

The standard allows for a minimum altitude of -100,000 metres - deep enough for any bunker! The maximum altitude is 42,849,672 metres which is high enough to allow it to be used on satellites in geostationary orbit.

So, as a bit of fun, I decided to create where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io

It isn't a website. You can't ping it. There's no way to interact with it except by using DNS. Yup! You can use a DNS query to get the (approximate) location of the International Space Station!

Linux and Mac users⁰ can run:

dig where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io LOC

And receive back the latest position of the ISS:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io. 1066 IN  LOC 47 24 53.500 N 66 12 12.070 W 430520m 10000m 10000m 10000m

The DNS records are updated every 15 minutes on a best-effort basis¹.

How

The lovely people at N2YO have a website which allows you to track loads of objects in orbit. They also have an easy to use API with a generous free tier.

Calling https://api.n2yo.com/rest/v1/satellite/positions/25544/0/0/0/1/&apiKey=_____ gets back the latest position:

{
    "info": {
        "satname": "SPACE STATION",
        "satid": 25544,
        "transactionscount": 7
    },
    "positions": [
        {
            "satlatitude": -21.25409321,
            "satlongitude": 140.3335763,
            "sataltitude": 420.09,
            "azimuth": 292.92,
            "elevation": -70.95,
            "ra": 202.69300845,
            "dec": -32.16097472,
            "timestamp": 1751366048,
            "eclipsed": true
        }
    ]
}

Note that the altitude is in Km, whereas the LOC format requires m.

The latitude and longitude are in decimal format - they need to be converted to Degrees, Minutes, and Seconds.

There were only a few free domain name providers who offer an API for updating LOC records. I went for deSEC a charity from Berlin. They have comprehensive API documentation.

Adding the initial LOC record is done with:

curl https://desec.io/api/v1/domains/where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io/rrsets/ \
    --header "Authorization: Token _______" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/json" --data @- <<< \
    '{"type": "LOC", "records": ["40 16 25.712 S 29 32 36.243 W 427550m 0.00m 10000m 10m"], "ttl": 900}'

However, updating the record is a little trickier. it needs to be sent as an HTTP PATCH to a subtly different URl. The PATCH only needs to send the data which have changed.

curl -X PATCH https://desec.io/api/v1/domains/where-is-the-iss.dedyn.io/rrsets/@/LOC/ \
    --header "Authorization: Token _______" \
    --header "Content-Type: application/json" --data @- <<< \
    '{"records": ["40 16 25.712 S 29 32 36.243 W 427550m 0.00m 10000m 10m"]}'

I set the Time To Live at 900 seconds. Every 15 minutes my code runs to update the record². That keeps me well within the API limits for both services. I could add TXT records showing when it was last updated, or other sorts of unstructured data, but I think this is enough for a quick proof-of-concept.

There you have it! A complex and silly way to demonstrate how DNS can be used to hold the most unlikely of records³. Say, I wonder how you'd represent the co-ordinates of the Mars Rover…?

http:, ftp:, and ... dict:?

@edent — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 11:34:56 +0000

I went for a spelunk⁰ through an ancient codebase a few weeks ago which contained a curious regex that I just couldn't grok¹.

{<((https?|ftp|dict|tel):[^\'">\s]+)>}i

I'm familiar with HTTP and FTP. I worked in the mobile industry, so knew that tel:+44... could be used to launch a dialer.

But DICT?!?!?!

It turns out that, lurking on the Internet are Dictionary Servers! They exist to allow you to query dictionaries over a network.

For many years, the Internet community has relied on the "webster" protocol for access to natural language definitions. […] In recent years, the number of publicly available webster servers on the Internet has dramatically decreased. Fortunately, several freely-distributable dictionaries and lexicons have recently become available on the Internet. However, these freely-distributable databases are not accessible via a uniform interface, and are not accessible from a single site.

The (informal) standard was published in 1997 but has kept a relatively low profile since then. You can understand why it was invented - in an age of low-size disk drives and expensive software, looking up data over a dedicated protocol seems like a nifty² idea.

Then disk size exploded, databases became cheap, and search engines made it easy to look up words.

How it works

You can try it out today!

Run this command in your terminal:

curl dict://dict.org/d:Internet

That will bring back the definition from the server's default dictionary. If you want to look up a word in a specific dictionary - like The Jargon File - you can run:

curl dict://dict.org/d:Internet:jargon

You can even use it for simple translation tasks. For example, to translate English to Japanese:

curl dict://dict.org/d:Internet:fd-eng-jpn

What Else?

Perhaps the easiest way to explore the protocol and server is to use telnet:

telnet dict.org dict

Type the command HELP and help ye shall receive:

113 help text follows
DEFINE database word         -- look up word in database
MATCH database strategy word -- match word in database using strategy
SHOW DB                      -- list all accessible databases
SHOW DATABASES               -- list all accessible databases
SHOW STRAT                   -- list available matching strategies
SHOW STRATEGIES              -- list available matching strategies
SHOW INFO database           -- provide information about the database
SHOW SERVER                  -- provide site-specific information
OPTION MIME                  -- use MIME headers
CLIENT info                  -- identify client to server
AUTH user string             -- provide authentication information
STATUS                       -- display timing information
HELP                         -- display this help information
QUIT                         -- terminate connection

250 ok

That will allow you to see all the dictionaries available - in a variety of languages - and the various commands you can use with them.

Unanswered Questions

Are there any other Dictionary Servers still available on the Internet?
Did the Webster Protocol get specified outside of obscure source code?
Is there something interesting and modern one could do with a DICT server?

v 1: explore natural caves [syn: {cave}, {spelunk}] ↩︎
(/grok/, /grohk/, vt. 1. To understand. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. ↩︎
nifty \nifty\ adj. 1. Very good; excellent; -- an informal term meaning about the same as {groovy}, sense 1. [informal, 1960's] ↩︎

.ss TLD opening for direct registrations

@edent — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 11:34:05 +0000

It looks like South Sudan's Top Level Domain is going to start allowing direct registrations!

Long-time readers of this blog will know that it's possible to register .me.ss domain names - there are various other 3rd level domains you can buy.

But, from the 1st of August 2024, you'll be able to apply for a 2nd level. So you'll be able to grab example.ss.

Here's the official announcement.

As per normal for a new TLD, there will be a period where organisations with Trade Marks can register their domains. Then a period where anyone with sufficient cash can register their cool idea for a domain. Then it opens up to everyone.

So what will they cost? Afriregister provided these prices:

Period	Domain	Registration	Renewal
Sunrise (2 years)	.ss	€1020	€110
	.co.ss	€610	€60
Landrush (1 year)	.ss	€300	€110
	.co.ss	€160	€60
Early Access (1 year)	.ss	€220	€110
	.co.ss	€160	€60
General (1 year)	.ss	€110	€110
	.co.ss	€60	€60

For comparison, their .me.ss domains are only €25.

Registrations will only be allowed in ASCII - which means no IDNs. The majority of the languages officially recognised in South Sudan appear to be written in the Latin script, so that shouldn't be a huge issue.

As is common with all other TLDs, there is a list of words which will not be allowed to be registered.

Applications will not be accepted for domain names appearing on the Second Level Domain (SLD) block list.

When I previously investigated this, there were lots of names which weren't available due to local politics. Although there is an archived version of the list of banned words (PDF), the modern SLD Block List appears to have vanished from the registry. I've asked them for an updated list which I'll link to once I get it.

I think it is fair to say that the .ss TLD has had a tumultuous history. There hasn't been much discussion of this change in policy since the announcement a few weeks ago - but I hope that this opening up will help South Sudanese people & businesses to establish their own distinct presence on the Internet.

Universal Basic Website

@edent — Sat, 27 Apr 2024 11:34:29 +0000

Many years ago - when I was very young and you were even younger - it was standard for an ISP to provide all their users with a small amount of webspace. Both Pipex and Demon offered webspace back in 1996. If my hazy memory is correct, they offered a few megabytes - more than enough for a fledgeling website⁰.

But, over the years, ISPs shut down their bundled web offerings. Even their bundled email services went on the chopping block. This is sad, but understandable. Most people unbundled their email so they didn't need to stick with the same ISP. Why have user@isp.example when you could have a GMail address?

And, indeed, why host data with your ISP when you could just use Facebook?

For most people, Facebook is a pretty good personal website. You can post your photos and have your friends & family see them. You can write long heartfelt rants about your teenage melodrama. You can put up the opening times of your new business. You can even host a discussion board around a specific topic.

Now, don't get me wrong, there are a few problems with Facebook¹. All your faves are problematic. But I think it shows that people want the benefits of personal websites, even if they don't want the hassle of running those websites.

What does the world look like if a country offers its citizens a Universal Basic Website? Similar to Universal Basic Income, a no-questions asked entitlement to a chunk of the Web. Perhaps a generic subdomain, some storage space, and an easy to use interface?

Oh, sure, there are lots of technical issues. You'd probably have to make sure people weren't running unapproved scripts. Moderation of prohibited content would be contentious. Tech support would be a nightmare. Some corrupt company would get billions to run a sub-standard service. A failed backup or a hacker would wipe out your bakery's recipes.

But...

We accept that there are common spaces in the real world² where people can have fun without paying. Anyone can go to a park. Anyone can stick a flyer up on a community notice board. We let kids ride the bus for free.

Can we do the same in cyberspace?

You can read some other peoples' thoughts on this Mastodon thread.

With background MIDI music, as was the fashion of the day. ↩︎
This is an understatement. ↩︎
AKA Meatspace. AKA AFK. ↩︎

Virgin Media preparing to offer symmetrical upload speeds?

@edent — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 12:34:09 +0000

Virgin Media - a UK-based fibre-optic ISP - recently sent me a survey about their potential product offerings. It was desperate to know if I wanted bundled streaming video (no), or Sky Sports (LOL no), or any other digital subscriptions (no, go away), or a landline (what, is this the 1990s?). They even wanted to know if I'd pay extra for priority support.

In amongst all the other offers, they asked whether I would be interested in paying more for symmetric Internet speeds!

Here are some of the offerings they proposed. I must not that these are from a market research exercise. Whether they'll ever launch, and whether the prices are accurate, is something we'll have to wait to see.

As I've mentioned before, I like my 500Mbps down - but the 50Mbps upload is a bit of a drag. So I eagerly answered "yes" to anything that looked like faster upload bandwidth.

I've no idea if this will actually materialise. And I can only hope those prices are realistic.

If you're interested in joining Virgin Media, you can get £50 if you join with my link.

False Friends - HTML Elements which are also Top Level Domains

@edent — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 11:34:25 +0000

In linguistics, a "False Friend" is a word which looks similar in multiple languages, but means something different in each of them. For example the word "gift" in English means "a present", in German means "poison", and in Norwegian it means "married".

The Internet uses Top Level Domains (TLD) to organise information into hierarchies. This website uses .mobi - you may also be familiar with .com for commercial entities, or .de for German pages.

The World Wide Web uses HyperText Markup Language (HTML) to structure web pages. For example

to display a footer, or

There is absolutely no relationship between the two sets of entities. But, just for fun, are there any HTML elements which happen to be false friends of the TLDs?

Before we go any further, have a quick think. How many do you reckon there are? Are there some which spring to mind immediately?

Obviously, the first port of call is AI. Its mastery of all things means that we can get an accurate answer in a nanosecond.

HTML5 element. Please note that this information is based on the state of TLDs as of September 2021. There might have been updates or changes after that date, so it's always a good idea to check official sources or domain registrars for the most current information." width="932" height="473" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-46824">

Oh.

Right, let's compare the Element Reference with the Root Zone Database.

There are fifteen current HTML elements which have a match with a TLD. And a couple which are deprecated. Here they are:

	HTML	TLD
🔊		.audio
🇧🇷		.br
🗂		.data
🇭🇷		.hr
🇱🇮		.li
🔗		.link
🗺		.map
☰		.menu
🔎		.search
👉		.select
🧥