> Cloudflare will serve them globally, for free, cached at the edge, to anyone who asks. They are not a file storage system. They were not designed to be a file storage system. Nobody at the IETF was thinking about them being used as a file storage system when they wrote RFC 1035. And yet here we are.
Yeah these types of hacker stories kind of bug me. They are sort of in the same vein as "you can eat for free by going to McDonald's and eating a pint of ketchup without ordering anything" or "How I drank and showered for a year using public water fountains" . Or put another way "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Trustless societies kind of suck and forcing society to lower trust by abusing trust kind of makes things incrementally suckier ("trust" here being "it's on the honor system to not abuse DNS to serve static content").
Look, if this was a project on using DNS to replace Dropbox or something, I'd agree with you.
But the Doom demo really isn't that large, this isn't going to use or cost anyone substantial bandwidth. Cloudflare will gladly host significantly larger files for free the "normal" way using Cloudflare Pages/Workers. It's clearly just a fun proof of concept.
I’ve heard rumors that DNS records are also sometimes used in some steganography-type communications. Great way of passing small messages in a ubiquitous and innocuous system, unlikely to be blocked or raise eyebrows by accessing.
To clarify, a good title would be "Loading Doom entirely from DNS records"
Neither one plays Doom over DNS nor is the first paragraph in the README correct, because DNS is only abused for storage, not for computing/processing/executing instructions:
> At some point, a reasonable person asked "DNS resolves names to IP addresses, what else can it do?" The answer, apparently, is run DOOM.
Harder Drives is such a great watch. It's also the source of a personal epiphany over the idea that you can store data in the space between you and a reflective surface or retransmittor or whatnot.
I once had this silly idea to create distributed storage of arbitrary data by exploiting a range of completely unrelated sites. Say, when you want to upload your file to the System, it may store one encrypted chunk as an image on a free image hosting site, another chunk as an encoded blog post on a random forum about farming (or in the user profile?), another chunk as a youtube video, etc. Imagine having something like hundreds or thousands of such "backends". Every chunk would be stored in 3 places for high durability of course. Free storage, hidden in plain sight :) Although, I didn't think through how to store the index reliably, and, because a moderator on a random farmers' site may delete our record(s), there needs to be a system which continously validates the integrity and reuploads the chunks.
I never stop being impressed by these "<something-crazy> running Doom" posts. AFAIC, whenever we get to Mars, we won't truly have arrived until someone is playing Doom on Mars, and without wasting valuable resources by doing so. Running Doom, the canonical measurement of truly mastering a thing's capabilities.
very cool, i did something similar but turning the doom frame running on a server into ascii (with colour) and then a small shim to give inputs via subdomains
(1) A DNS file drop: Split small files into TXT records and rebuild them client-side. Useless for big files, perfect for config blobs, tiny payloads, and cursed demos. Also someone can write an S3-compatible client.
(2) Redis DNS:
- GET foo.cache.example.com -> TXT record returns value chunks
- TTL is the eviction policy
- Cache invalidation becomes even more of a hate crime.
I read this title, did a double-take, then had to go look at the git hub because it still didn't click for me. Because this sounds absolutely amazing, and absurd, and weird, all at the same time. Like..... Wow? Talk about turning protocols into pretzels...
> had to go look at the git hub because it still didn't click for me
Obviously it still didn't click for you or you're lying about looking at the GitHub, because if you did, you'd have learned that it's not using DNS to run DOOM, only to store it. Which...shouldn't really be a surprise to anybody who knows that DNS TXT records exist.
And obviously your forgetting that doing this is from my perspective a very novel idea and I didn't consider a TXT record as a data storage system. Good grief.
Yeah these types of hacker stories kind of bug me. They are sort of in the same vein as "you can eat for free by going to McDonald's and eating a pint of ketchup without ordering anything" or "How I drank and showered for a year using public water fountains" . Or put another way "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Trustless societies kind of suck and forcing society to lower trust by abusing trust kind of makes things incrementally suckier ("trust" here being "it's on the honor system to not abuse DNS to serve static content").
But the Doom demo really isn't that large, this isn't going to use or cost anyone substantial bandwidth. Cloudflare will gladly host significantly larger files for free the "normal" way using Cloudflare Pages/Workers. It's clearly just a fun proof of concept.
Neither one plays Doom over DNS nor is the first paragraph in the README correct, because DNS is only abused for storage, not for computing/processing/executing instructions:
> At some point, a reasonable person asked "DNS resolves names to IP addresses, what else can it do?" The answer, apparently, is run DOOM.
(Or AAAA, or CNAME, or…)
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/dns-filesystem-true-cloud-st...
Of course, I imagine it would be incredibly slow.
all you need is to rapidly push off one foot and land on the other, and you have running.
Thanks for the share!
Maybe such a silly project already exists?
At this point I am wondering if people will somehow port DOOM over to the MONIAC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_Machine (MONIAC)
I'd say both are looking increasingly doable.
DNS … cannot, and that's why the person upthread is criticizing the use of the word "run" here. DNS ran nothing.
https://blog.rice.is/post/doom-over-dns/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoPWuJR6Npc
without the colour i did it in a worse way for bad apple
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJ2Q12vYojY
Now let's do
(1) A DNS file drop: Split small files into TXT records and rebuild them client-side. Useless for big files, perfect for config blobs, tiny payloads, and cursed demos. Also someone can write an S3-compatible client.
(2) Redis DNS:
- GET foo.cache.example.com -> TXT record returns value chunks
- TTL is the eviction policy
- Cache invalidation becomes even more of a hate crime.
Why does everything get turned into an LLM discussion?
Obviously it still didn't click for you or you're lying about looking at the GitHub, because if you did, you'd have learned that it's not using DNS to run DOOM, only to store it. Which...shouldn't really be a surprise to anybody who knows that DNS TXT records exist.