Discussion List for Freenum/ITAD Subscriber Number (ISN) Project

["Ben Teitelbaum" <>]

John,

Sure, let's start with explicit queries, as you suggest.  I think we'll soon need a convention for resolving domains into ITADs as well.

Two advantages of the hashing approach I suggested are:

1) It makes the long term direction clearer, since, in a very explicit way, ISNs become numeric aliases for email addresses.

2) Once you've cached the domain-to-ITAD mapping and prefix, you can derive ISNs from email addresses offline.

However, a huge disadvantage of the approach I suggested is the need for a widespread local numbering convention.

-- ben

On 11/29/07, John R Covert <> wrote:

Let's get the directory url that's currently on the administrators' pages
into DNS; I suggest directory.<itad>.info.freenum.org.

This would be an HTML directory, organized in whatever manner the ITAD
owner wants.

Let's add another URL to the administrators' pages, and call it
directorysearch.<itad>.info.freenum.org.

It would be a cgi, accepting either post or get, and would be able to
search by a standard set of fields.  For example, if I put the following
url into my admin page as the directorysearch URL: cgi.covert.org/itad-288

Then searches could be done as follows:

  http://cgi.covert.org/itad-288?ln=covert&fn=john
or
  http://cgi.covert.org/itad-288?

and so on.  We just need to define a standard set of search keys.

The directory.<itad>.info.freenum.org page might have a window that
provides an interface to the directorysearch.<itad>.info.freenum.org
page (or any other search mechanism), but if the directorysearch URL
is provided, it would behave according to our standards.

/john

-- 
-- ben
http://ben.teitelbaum.us/