Before the DNS: how yours truly upstaged the NIC's official HOSTS.TXT (2004)

Re:Before the DNS: how yours truly upstaged the NIC's offici... by gmiller123456 on Thursday February 06, 2020 @03:01PM (#22259717)

>I would then telnet or ftp to these nameless hosts and see what host name the operating system login prompt gave me or what host name the ftp server announced in its greeting. I would then plug this information into my systems host table.

So, you removed what little security there was at the time to make sure that the machine pointed to by a host name actually had some connection to what the hostname implied. This is just one step below making the HOST.TXT file world editable. The NIC had a good reason for not adopting your method.

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Re:Before the DNS: how yours truly upstaged the NIC's offici... by fanf2 on Thursday February 06, 2020 @08:04PM (#22262230)

Remember at the time this was a closed network of less than a thousand computers, and there was no secrecy about what was connected to the network. For example, knowledgable users were able to identify where a computer was from its name, because sites had distinctive naming schemes https://elists.isoc.org/pipermail/internet-history/2020-Febr...

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Re:Before the DNS: how yours truly upstaged the NIC's offici... by flomo on Friday February 07, 2020 @12:07AM (#22263391)

Keep in mind these hostnames were generally quite descriptive of their network location, and people could vouch for that. There was no typo squatting or fishing going on.

This guy's host file became popular mostly because local sysadmins were too lazy to add their own hosts.

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Re:Before the DNS: how yours truly upstaged the NIC's offici... by flingo on Thursday February 06, 2020 @04:21PM (#22260471)

What're you implying? That someone would change their hostname to take over someone else's site?

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Re:Before the DNS: how yours truly upstaged the NIC's offici... by gmiller123456 on Friday February 07, 2020 @10:29PM (#22273618)

Not really "taking over", more like password harvesting. You just report a hostname at login that you don't own, the maintainer will update the hosts file to point to your system. People will gladly connect to your system and type in their usernames and passwords.

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Re:Before the DNS: how yours truly upstaged the NIC's offici... by Ayesh on Friday February 07, 2020 @02:48AM (#22263983)

Yes.

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Re:Before the DNS: how yours truly upstaged the NIC's offici... by Ayesh on Friday February 07, 2020 @02:50AM (#22263990)

Author clearly says it was for their own use, and the rest of the Net just decided to prefer it.

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