@trwnh The point is, you can build something on top where some resources say something about actors, and others say other things, and they can all be linked in an RDF-y way.

It's the underneath I'm more concerned with: you have a reason to communicate, and that reason is represented by some identifier which represents a resource. You can read and write from/to the resource, and so can anyone who shares in the group that forms around this resource.

That needs to be managed at protocol...

@trwnh ... layers in some way, both for transport and access control reasons.

What you share in such a resource is sufficiently unimportant to the shape of those layers that I don't deeply care about it.

But I do think an AP like thing could be done on top, sure.

@jens >identifiers of sorts

ids can be locations or names, generally; although locations are *also* names in a roundabout way. by my understanding, this is why semweb people use http: or https: in rdf statements -- they want to make statements about things, and they also want to ideally be able to use the Web to get more statements about that thing. given a choice between "name" and "name that can be looked up", they choose the latter.

@jens which is why i propose / am toying with "RNS" as a generic, scheme-independent way to look up resources

@jens ah, i think i get what you're saying -- is it that you separate "protocol" from "thing shared over protocol"?

if so, then i weakly disagree, at least insofar as we currently use the protocol to confer some level of identity to the Thing

one thing that came about in a subthread is the idea of further separating "resources" from "identifiers", in what i interpret as similar to the distinction between a "resource" and a "resource descriptor"

for example, the concept of a "user" as something other than a "resource", but still living on a "host" machine.

something like xmpp lets you identify xmpp://a@trwnh.com while something like http(s) instead uses the userpart for HTTP Basic Authentication

i guess the distinction really is whether you view the "userpart" or "localpart" as something different than a resource

like imagine if https://trwnh@mastodon.social identified not "HTTP Basic Authentication", but instead identified "the user `trwnh` on the host `mastodon.social` as accessed over HTTPS"

if HTTP(S) allowed it, you could directly type your handle into a web browser and get back some kind of representation, like a descriptor document with details about that user

at least with URIs, when identifying resources, identifiers generally can be categorized as either "names" or "locations"

but "locations" are actually just "names but with a specific way to look them up"

so i guess you can think of the "RNS" (resource name system) as a way to look up information about resources independent of the protocol used to access them

part of the reason we can't just use host-based identifiers directly is that hosts can serve different resources via different protocols

@trwnh So this name resolution thing I think needs to die, and the sooner, the better. At least in the way these things work currently.

Hmm, where to start? The web, I guess. There's a reason that there are URLs and later that got changed to URIs, and it's because they wanted to have a identifier-to-locator resolution service of sorts, and that just never materialized.

Meanwhile, DNS is full of hacks to make naming things *safe*, and to make it perform halfway. The key thing here is that...

so https://host/thing is not the same as http://host/thing -- at best, the http redirects to https

another interesting tangent is that per RFC 4501 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4501 you can refer to dns://1.1.1.1/trwnh.com as "what Cloudflare DNS returns when queried for the name `trwnh.com`"

but there's no way to authoritatively refer to "thing on host" without specifying an access method and protocol, which is to say that there's no way to know ahead-of-time that //host/thing is the same thing across.

@trwnh ... DNS tries to use DNSSEC to bring some layer of security to name delegation, but it all hangs off a trust anchor in the root zone. Global sources of truth are rarely a good idea, historically speaking, but that's how DNS is built.

But once you've resolved a name with DNS, you then contact that IP address (a locator), and in a TLS handshake negotiate a new security session of sorts. You're trust anchor for the certificates here is not a single source of truth, but a selection of a...

@trwnh ... handful if them. Arguably better.

But that is for the certificate by which the IP address claims that it belongs to the name that DNSSEC provided. But there's no real cryptographic linkage here!

Because DNSSEC effectively only makes a statement about someone having associated a name with a set of IP addresses in one place, and TLS certs make a statement about someone having associated a name with an IP address in another place.

Nobody can verify that these claims are both what...

@trwnh ... is intended by the person who should be making claims about this name and IP address set being linked.

And this is after several decades of using a name to locator resolution system.

There are DNS records for saying more about an endpoint, such as saying that it can speak e.g. https with a particular cert. That finally provides some cryptographic linkage between the two claims (though it still doesn't say much about intent; at least an attacker would have to convince two parties).

@trwnh and in all this, this is about reaching a service, not a resource; we can't know anything about whether a resource is reachable from all of this, or whether it is the resource we want to reach. All we have is yet another name (URL) that could point to anything.

Which is to say that some URL of https://example.com/my-fancy-stuff could simultaneously be a text file and an image to different clients.

So the only way to be sure that a resource is *what* it should be is independent of any naming or...

@jens i thought TLS had nothing to do with IP, and the TLS cert just asserts that you are contacting a certain name (as vouched for by other entities who have their own certs)

so DNS (secured by DNSSEC let's say) gives you a claim that 8.8.8.8 is dns.google

and then TLS gives you a claim that you are handshaking with dns.google

is this wrong?

@trwnh ... locator scheme. The resource itself has to contain the information to verify it. Which in crypto terms means a signature and an identifier of the entity signing it (which needs to be a public key or point to one).

At that point, two rather interesting things happen, namely a) the external name given to the resource via a URI/URL is irrelevant to the resource contents, and b) the location of the resource is irrelevant.

Which makes RNS or whatever a very optional thing. By which...

@trwnh ... I mean your RNS could point you to machine A with a URL, and mine could point me to machine B with some tuple of IP and port (single purpose server only producing that resource), and we'd still be reaching the same resource.

The same, cryptographically certifiable, by the magic of copies.

So names are all well and good, but what we really need are identifiers. People love hashes for those, which for a bunch of reasons I like less, but let's go with that.

The point is that this...

@trwnh ... notion of starting with some kind of name, while intuitive to think about, actually has all kinds of problems that we've been trying to solve for a long time by layering solutions on top of each other, and we're still not talking about the thing that'd actually make a difference (signed resources) *and* that'd make all of these layers rather unnecessary.

I hope that makes sense? I feel like my train of thought might not have been too straight a line

@jens thank you!! i think i disagree with usage of “irrelevant” and “unnecessary” but otherwise understand what you are saying about cryptographic identity.

my conception is you use the name to get to a resource whose contents include some key(s) — kind of like a DID resolver returning a DID document which contains keys. but the identifier is still did:example:whatever so you can’t refer to it without going through the whole DID resolution thing

@trwnh The linkage to the IP comes via the sender address in the IP packet. Yes, that could be spoofed, which is yet another issue. I tried to leave that out

But in principle a cert's name could also be an IP address.

It doesn't really matter for my rant, because that's more about there not being any connection to the resource or its "owner" for lack of a better term.