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Net4D
A coherent multi-lingual DNS system and network
IIS Workshop, 16 June 2008
Moscow , Russia
Francis MUGUET
ENSTA ( France )
Focal Point of the Linguistic Diversity Coalition at the
Internet Governance Forum
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V3 corrected 23 June 2008
Legal Notice: Observations and opinions expressed in this presentation, as usual in any scholarly presentation, do not represent the official view of any institution, coalition or entity. |
INTRODUCTION
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Multilinguism is one of the key aspect of the new Information Society.
People have a right to be able to express oneself in their mother tongue. Linguistic diversity is the key to peace, because it teaches understanding of other cultures. Linguistic diversity is the key to creativity, because one thinks in a language, and different languages are leading to a richness of concepts. |
PUNYshment for Domain Names
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For the
Internationalized domain names (IDN),
the
solution proposed
by l'ICANN
is based on a
Puny Code :
For example
académie-française.org gives
xn--acadmie-franaise-npb1a.org.
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and PUNYshed from Mail ?
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In order to send a mail to secrétaire@académie-française.org,
or to иван@русский.рϕ,
the problem becomes more complicated and is still not solved,
because secrétaire and иван
are encoded in
UTF-8 et
académie-française and русский.рϕ are encoded
in Puny Code.
The protocol to try to solve this issue has not been yet
finalized by ICANN.
One may ask the simple question :
Should it be possible to conceive a homogeneous and coherent
UTF-8 system ?
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BIND : the Key Software
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BIND, as a PUBLIC RESSOURCE
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In fact, it is very fortunate that BIND allows to carry different resolving services related to different classes of network. 2.1.3 Resource Records : The data associated with domain names are contained in resource records, or RRs. Records are divided into classes, each of which pertains to a type of network or software. Currently, there are classes for internets (any TCP/IP-based internet), networks based on the Chaosnet protocols, and networks that use Hesiod software. (Chaosnet is an old network of largely historic significance.) The internet class is by far the most popular. (We're not really sure if anyone still uses the Chaosnet class, and use of the Hesiod class is mostly confined to MIT.) This possibility has been moslty ignored except for the proposal made by John C Klensin for a new class that is not limited to ASCII from its initial definitions. This would have allowed to a cleaner Internationalized Domain Name system, instead of relying on the patch that constitutes Punycode. However, the seamless implementation of such a two class system, where records of a new class are used as remedies to the shortcomings of the class "IN" would have created technical difficulties. These problems should not occur when starting with only one class, conceived from the onset for internationaliization. |
Now it is interesting to mention the
RFC 2929
CLASS is a two octet unsigned integer containing one of the RR CLASS
codes. See section 3.2.
DNS CLASSes have been little used but constitute another dimension of
the DNS distributed database. In particular, there is no necessary
relationship between the name space or root servers for one CLASS and
those for another CLASS. The same name can have completely different
meanings in different CLASSes although the label types are the same
and the null label is usable only as root in every CLASS. However,
as global networking and DNS have evolved, the IN, or Internet, CLASS
has dominated DNS use.
There are two subcategories of DNS CLASSes: normal data containing
classes and QCLASSes that are only meaningful in queries or updates.
The current CLASS assignments and considerations for future
assignments are as follows:
Decimal Hexadecimal
0 0x0000 - assignment requires an IETF Standards Action.
1 0x0001 - Internet (IN).
2 0x0002 - available for assignment by IETF Consensus as a data CLASS.
3 0x0003 - Chaos (CH) [Moon 1981].
4 0x0004 - Hesiod (HS) [Dyer 1987].
5 - 127 0x0005 - 0x007F - available for assignment by IETF Consensus as data
CLASSes only.
128 - 253 0x0080 - 0x00FD - available for assignment by IETF Consensus as
QCLASSes only.
254 0x00FE - QCLASS None [RFC 2136].
255 0x00FF - QCLASS Any [RFC 1035].
256 - 32767 0x0100 - 0x7FFF - assigned by IETF Consensus.
32768 - 65280 0x8000 - 0xFEFF - assigned based on Specification Required as defined
in [RFC 2434].
65280 - 65534 0xFF00 - 0xFFFE - Private Use.
65535 0xFFFF - can only be assigned by an IETF Standards Action.
This leaves the possibility of 216= 65536 - 5 ( taken by the IN, CH, HS, None, Any classes ) = 65531 classes ( among which 255 for private use ) that could be used to carry other DNS services, using BIND. |
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ICANN cannot, in good faith, object to the use of yet another class, since ICANN
recommended in May 2001 this
approach :
Moreover, it should be noted that the original design of the DNS provides a facility for future extensions that accommodates the possibility of safely deploying multiple roots on the public Internet for experimental and other purposes. As noted in RFC 1034, the DNS includes a "class" tag on each resource record, which allows resource records of different classes to be distinguished even though they are commingled on the public Internet. For resource records within the standard root-server system, this class tag is set to "IN"; other values have been standardized for particular uses, including 255 possible values designated for "private use" that are particularly suited to experimentation.
Another view it is that the actual subnetwork of DNS servers ( in fact a P2P network, before the term was coined ) should be able carry several DNS systems, in other words to "degroup" the "lines" of this "common carrier" to introduce "competition". |
TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION ASPECTS
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At the present time, only DNS look-up utilities
( such as dig,
host )
associated with BIND
allow to query a DNS server with the field class.
Current browsers do not allow that.
With dig one may query a DNS server while specifying the class field. The default query class (IN for internet) is overridden by the -c option. class is any valid class, such as HS for Hesiod records or CH for Chaosnet records. From the point of view of users : what is of utmost importance, and what differentiates this proposal from the "alternate root servers" of ill repute, is that users do not have to specify a DNS server different from the one provided by his/her ISP.
Another example, the cyrillic domain Москва in the cyrillic gTLD ро in the cyrillic class Сеть , could be written as http://ст%Москва.ро . |
TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION ASPECTS (II)
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One may notice that the problem of homographs and ensuing phishing and litigations are avoided.
For example, it could be possible to ensure
that in the the Cyrillic class Сеть ,
domain names are only written with Cyrillic characters.
Mixing of Latin and Cyrillic is simply not allowed when
registering a domain name in the Cyrillic class Сеть .
A browser may be configured by the user, so that his/her browser use by default, a certain class. corresponding to a certain language to avoid any confusion. In order that the browser ( such as Mozilla ) may query the DNS server with the field class, the modification to the browser is relatively minor, and less complicated that the implementation of the Puny code that is TLD dependent ( Mozilla IDN-enabled TLDs). In its query the browser must include the field class. After this modification, there is no need of plug in or a specific client. For old browsers, users may go through a portal, specific to each class. From the side of a web server such as Apache, in order to enable virtual hosting, modifications are also relatively minor. |
TECHNICAL IMPLEMENTATION ASPECTS (III)
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Features available for the class IN, should be available in principle, in agreement with the RFCs. but RFCs compliance is not yet fully achieved in current version 9 of BIND. For all practical purposes, the difficulty would depend on the way how the BIND 9 code is written. While "parametrization" of existing subroutines should be preferred, a brute force method is to replicate for a new class, obfuscated subroutines that are "hard coded" with the class IN. ISC is in the process of rewriting BIND from scratch for version 10, in a modular way, that would greatly simplify the task. Modifications required in the free software Mozilla et Apache can be written quickly, and most importantly, included easily in the next official release. For proprietary software, this is going to depend on the good will of manufacturers, however considering the domination of Apache among web servers, and the importance of Mozilla among web browsers, one should expect that they are not going to afford to lag behind. Last but not least, each class may use of its own distinct network of root servers. |
Net4D, networks to empower
the second generation of the Web: the Semantic Web
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Empowering the Semantic Web
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Net4D are classes of Next Generation Domain Services that are empowering the Semantic Web. Two main networks/services are for the moment being considered :
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Semantic Web and Linguistic Dialog
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As an example of a SW gTLDs : the Linguistic SWgTLDs or LSWgTLDs. An extension shall be assigned to each language so that sites or sites' versions written in specific languages can be easily found and identified. It would facilitate greatly the task of search engines and would foster linguistic diversity. The main points of the breaktihrough are the following :
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GOVERNANCE
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CONCLUSIONS
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