YHK - yet another hacker news clone

DNS: A Replacement for Finger

13 points Bender 4 hours ago 13 comments

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

What is this altchan.org place? Looks very new. Where's the reply button?

And why do we want finger to exist?

Bender 1 hour ago | parent

What is this altchan.org place? Looks very new. Where's the reply button?

Its just a private fork of an open source anonymous image board. I had a static blog for it but I got bored and moved all my blog posts to the image board. Probably a rather unorthodox experiment. The reply button is at the bottom right. I might change that.

And why do we want finger to exist?

There were discussions in the past about the finger service and how hardly anyone runs it any more and even less likely to be found on the open internet. DNS seemed like a good replacement for it to me as more and more people have domains now and authoritative DNS servers are likely to be more secure and distributed I think. Maybe one day specific groups of people do something like this in place of sites like X. half kidding

Now instead of having a special purpose client, one need only query a DNS record. In this case I use "dig" as the example but there are other DNS tools people might prefer to use.

GalaxyNova 1 hour ago | parent

Because it allows for an easy interface to see what someone else is up to without needing to load a JS-heavy page.

warkdarrior 1 hour ago | parent

Assuming you have this finger app installed. My Android store does not seem to have one, for example.

Bender 1 hour ago | parent

It's just a shell function so in this case if one had a terminal app that has a shell one could add the function. No idea how feasible that is on a phone.

cowlevel 1 hour ago | parent

A terminal emulator is more heavy than a dedicated app is

Bender 1 hour ago | parent

I will leave writing an app to someone else. I've watched others go through all the challenges of getting into app stores and it's just not for me.

cowlevel 59 minutes ago | parent

Fortunately some phones allow you to install apps, not just get them through the overpriced shit store.

spauldo 30 minutes ago | parent

Finger is a protocol. It's older than IP.

You can read about it in RFC 742.

assimpleaspossi 29 minutes ago | parent

Unix, Linux and BSD have finger built in.

adzm 1 hour ago | parent

> many large TXT records can be abused for DDoS purposes. dig -t txt ebay.com for a DDoS Example used today

What does this mean, I see a bunch in the lookup but I don't understand the ddos part

Bender 1 hour ago | parent

If a site has a large set of TXT records, they can be used by clients that spoof packets to request large volumes of answers by DNS servers. This is called an amplification attack. Many tiny spoofed requests in, many large answers out.

JdeBP 1 hour ago | parent

I don't need it.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44916853

The real challenge is not finding another channel for transmitting personal information. It is finding something else for the FINGER protocol to do. (-: