ICANN Considers Using '127.0.53.53' To Tackle DNS Namespace Collisions 164
angry tapir writes "As the number of top-level domains undergoes explosive growth, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is studying ways to reduce the risk of traffic intended for internal network destinations ending up on the Internet via the Domain Name System. Proposals in a report produced on behalf of ICANN include preventing .mail, .home and .corp ever being Internet TLDs; allowing the forcible de-delegation of some second-level domains in emergencies; and returning 127.0.53.53 as an IP address in the hopes that sysadmins will flag and Google it."
Those wondering why 53.53 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obsolete (Score:4, Informative)
See IPv6's capability to have addresses made of letters, and push it a little further?
You mean hex? That's just the way you type it, it has NOTHING to do with the actual packets. For instance, slashdot's IP (216.34.181.45) could just as easily be written as "d8.22.b5.2d", or even "d822:b52d".
We just switched from decimal to hexidecimal for IPv6 notation because the addresses are so much longer now (IPv4 is up to 15 characters in decimal, IPv6 would be up to 63 characters if we used decimal (only 39 in quad-character hex).
Re:Those wondering why 53.53 (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Those wondering why 53.53 (Score:2, Informative)
Money. Next question?
Re:hacky (Score:4, Informative)
Good summary. FWIW, People were using e.g. ".site" for local domain
for a long time. It was in the only draft RFC that addressed the issue,
and lacking any approved RFC people tend to follow the drafts. It was
noted on Wikipedia and many forums as to be used for this
purpose and along with some other TLDs had become a de-facto standard.
Then draft-ietf-dnsind-test-tlds-08 came along and removed it. Reserved
domains names continued to disappear from this draft document until they
were nearly all gone by the time RFC2606 was certified.
Then they started accepting and seriously considering applications for .site as a TLD and it looks like they are set to approve it [icann.org]. Boneheads.
So yes, in addition to unqualified names, there will be lots of problems with
software and configuration written when several TLDs were presumed safe.
RFC2606/RFC6761 have proper domains to use for test setups and documentation.
Unless/until they get suddenly ammended, which at this point, I wouldn't want
to wager on.