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Michael Dean of MichaelWDean.com joins us today to discuss the .bit top level domain and how it provides a censorship-resistant alternative to the easily censorable .com, net. and other government-administered top level domains. We talk about what .bit is, how it’s managed through the decentralized Namecoin blockchain, and how the average person can use tools like Meowbit to start surfing the .bit universe.
SHOW NOTES:
Are there any plans to make .bit accessible to any OS other than Windows? This whole thing strikes me as rather pointless so long as Windows is the only OS it works on, because any system that’s internet-connected and running Windows already allows the feds to do anything they want to it, including disabling meowbit, or even tampering with it.
You do not need Windows to browse .bit:
https://wiki.namecoin.org/index.php?title=How_to_browse_.bit_domains
You do need Windows for the Meowbit program the video links to, though. That page does link to one program to let Linux brows .bit domains, but only in Firefox, and it doesn’t work right now because Firefox changed something and they haven’t accounted for it yet (which, again, defeats a lot of the purpose if Firefox can do that). There’s no namecoin wallet, no ability to set up or manage your own .bit domain, no ability to resolve those domains outside of the browser (so you can’t use it for anything other than viewing a webpage), and no ability to retain access if one specific company (Mozilla) decides to break it. The stuff at the link in your comment does seem to address most of the viewer side of that, via the “Local DNS server” section (if you know enough about it to spot that that’s the bit you need, or know it by reading this comment), and I’ve since found the two links below, on the same site, which help with the domain setup and wallet issues, so it’s not nearly as bad as I initially thought, but I stand by my initial stance that creating something like this only for Windows is rather pointless, when it’s useless without an internet connection, and with an internet connection and Windows, the feds have free reign of your system, anyway.
https://wiki.namecoin.org/index.php?title=Install_and_Configure_Namecoin
https://wiki.namecoin.org/index.php?title=Register_and_Configure_.bit_Domains
As a regular interweb noob I didn’t understand a single thing about this interview (completely whoosh) so take my comments into context. I stopped at the part where I’m supposed to go to some kittypics.bit to download something or other and let it download for several hours. Um no. Just no. If I didn’t know anything about this interview and was looking over someone’s shoulder doing this, I’d be going into conniptions!