Motivation
The naming system is not relevant to most people. Even in Ethereum, ENS is not that widely used. At the same time, people do recognize a need for something less government-controlled than ICANN. Hence, Namecoin (which failed).
Naming systems are one of those unsexy things that everyone nevertheless needs.
aeternity needs something to generate publicity and relevance to the general public.
A decentralized naming system that can point to IP addresses or IPFS hashes would be a hit with people who share the cypherpunk blockchain spirit - i.e. most of the blockchain population.
aeternity already has a naming system that works.
Proposal
http://node_url/v2/names/wikileaks.ae returns the wikileaks AE donation address, as well as a list of updated IP addresses. The data is stored on the blockchain.
How it works
User
User goes to website, gets Server not found error. He clicks on the Waellet browser extension, which gets an IP address, which can either be automatically entered into the address bar or copy pasted (depending on browser extension permissions). Hopefully it is different from what the DNS server gave him.
System
AENS records, besides pointing to aeternity on-chain objects, should also be able to store a binary blob. JSON blob -> structure to be specified elsewhere.
Site Admin
The site admin can easily update his IP address by running
aecli tx nameupdate --signandbroadcast immediately to prevent error?
aecli account sign $tx
aecli chain broadcast $tx
or running a separate program that does all this, so I don’t have to worry about expanding the CLI interface.
Risks
Site admins don’t update their AENS entries
Of course this only works if site admins update their AENS entries. AE foundation to donate some AE tokens to Wikileaks etc.
Users forget that the ae extension exists and can help them if server not found
ae extension should do something when the browser enconuters a server not found error.
Looking for browser extension developers, help on AENS binary blob storage intricacies