(no subject)
So I've been TRYING to write a blog post about IRC and how people tend to misunderstand it as a medium, but once I found the words, my machine locked up and I lost them forever. Instead, I'm going to talk about IRC and how I'm trying to reinvent it, securely and more-distributed than before. Before I get to actually specifying a new protocol, though, I need to make some infrastructure - more specifically, I need a way to map outgoing connections to IRC onto a user (specifically, a user's public key, as I want the protocol to be mutually authenticated between client and server.)
On UNIX, the question of 'what user made this connection' is traditionally answered by identd, and I see nothing basically wrong with that protocol. However, it isn't quite useful for my purpose, because I don't want to identify users, I want to identify identities. The traditional UNIX "identity" protocol is 'finger', which runs on port 79 (amusingly, this is one less than 80, which is what the Web runs on).
And then I found this Urbit thing. It's like someone read my nascent post here and blew it out of the water. I don't think I've got anything left to say on infrastructure, at least until I've climbed into Urbit.
On UNIX, the question of 'what user made this connection' is traditionally answered by identd, and I see nothing basically wrong with that protocol. However, it isn't quite useful for my purpose, because I don't want to identify users, I want to identify identities. The traditional UNIX "identity" protocol is 'finger', which runs on port 79 (amusingly, this is one less than 80, which is what the Web runs on).
And then I found this Urbit thing. It's like someone read my nascent post here and blew it out of the water. I don't think I've got anything left to say on infrastructure, at least until I've climbed into Urbit.