With concern mounting over the potential impact of the Stop Online Piracy Act and claims that it could make the Domain Name Service more vulnerable, one group is looking to circumvent the threat of domain name blocking and censorship by essentially creating a new Internet top-level domain outside of ICANN control. Called Dot-BIT, the effort currently uses proxies, cryptography, and a small collection of DNS servers to create a section of the Internet's domain address space where domains can be provisioned, moved, and traded anonymously.
So far, over 4,000 domains have been registered within Dot-BIT's .bit virtual top level domain (TLD). Those domains are visible only to people who use a proxy service that draws address information from the project's distributed database, or to those using one of the project's two public DNS servers.
While it's not exactly a "darknet" like the Tor anonymizing network's .onion domain, .bit isn't exactly part of the open Internet, either—call it a "dimnet." Just how effective a virtual top-level domain will be in preventing censorship by ISPs and governments—or even handling a rapidly growing set of registered domains—is unclear at best.
How it works
Dot-BIT is derived from a peer-to-peer network technology called Namecoin, derived from the Bitcoin digital currency technology. Just as with Bitcoin, the system is driven by cryptographic tokens, called namecoins. To buy an address in that space, you either have to "mine" namecoins by providing compute time (running client software that uses the computer's CPU or graphics processing unit) to handle the processing of transactions within the network, or buy them through an exchange with cash or Bitcoins. All of those approaches essentially provide support to the Namecoin distributed name system's infrastructure.
You can also get an initial payout of free namecoins from a "faucet" site designed to help bootstrap the network. The cost of entry is pretty low: currently, registering a new domain costs about 1.6 namecoins, which can be had for about five cents.
Your registration isn't associated with your name, address, and phone number—instead, it's linked to your cryptographic identity, preserving anonymity. Once you've registered a domain, you can assign it by sending out a JSON-formatted update request, mapping the domain to a DNS or providing IP addresses and host names to be distributed through Dot-BIT's proxies and public DNS servers. That information is then spread across all of the network's peer systems.
Simple, right?
Namecoin's approach heavily favors early adopters, since once you've registered a domain, you can transfer it to someone else—or squat on it until someone pays you for it. That seems to be what a lot of early .bit adopters are counting on. For example, using Firefox and the FoxyProxy add-on to surf .bit-land to audi.bit lands you on a "this domain for sale" page.
But while Dot-BIT may allow for an anonymous and relatively secure exchange of DNS information, it won't necessarily prevent censorship by ISPs. If the .bit top-level domain becomes the target of laws like SOPA, it can be shut down pretty quickly by cutting off the head—its own internal DNS—either through port blocking or other filtering. And since it lacks the anonymizing routing abilities of "hidden" networks like Tor's .onion domain, it won't protect the identities of publishers and users who visit sites that use a .bit name.
At the moment, then, it's not certain what purpose .bit will actually serve, other than as an experiment in novel ways to create a DNS—or someplace for hackers to spend their illicitly earned Bitcoins.
Listing image by Photograph by Christopher Thompson
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