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Replying to Avatar Vitor Pamplona

The amount of trust people gave to servers in the early web is bonkers to me.

Here's an e-mail protocol: You can send messages, but any server can change everything in the message. The sender won't see the changes at all and the receiver won't even notice you changed it. What can go wrong?

Here's an HTML page: You can place your code on a server and that server can change your code based on who accesses it. You won't be able to see when servers act funny and neither will users. Win-win.

Here's a DNS protocol: You buy names that point to your IP. Except that any subnet can override your settings so we can please some dictatorships around. Funny thing: users won't even notice when that happens. Boom!

Now let's build the largest, most profitable economic sector in the past 50 years based on that.

7b
eddy 2y ago

The early Internet was a high-trust society created by high-IQ people. They didn't have to worry about deliberate attacks until the low-trust, low-IQ people turned up en masse.

DNS was a huge mistake though. The Internet was designed to be decentralized and then they put a centralized system for mapping names to addresses on top of it.

But they needed a quick hack which was better than manually updating hosts file and probably never imagined it would still be in use decades later.

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