logoalt Hacker News

Doom entirely from DNS records

105 pointsby Venn1last Monday at 3:17 PM25 commentsview on HN

Comments

ktpsnstoday at 6:00 PM

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.

show 3 replies
kgeisttoday at 7:54 PM

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.

Maybe such a silly project already exists?

LetsGetTechnicltoday at 6:00 PM

This novel form of data storage reminds of me of this classic YouTube video, Harder Drive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio

thestackfoxtoday at 7:40 PM

Respect. But also ... WHY????

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.

kaitaritoday at 6:45 PM

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.

nasretdinovtoday at 6:22 PM

Waiting for Doom over https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs next

show 1 reply
hhhtoday at 6:56 PM

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

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

tomberttoday at 5:56 PM

Gotta admit that it didn't occur to me that "can it run DOOM?" would stretch all the way to DNS.

At this point I am wondering if people will somehow port DOOM over to the MONIAC.

show 4 replies
nullbyte808today at 7:13 PM

Malware could still use DNS records for storage and access to bootstrapped payloads correct?

show 2 replies
lxgrtoday at 7:09 PM

A database storing data? Now I’ve seen everything!

hun3today at 6:56 PM

Finally, a DOOM download that bypasses captive portals

cat-turnertoday at 6:39 PM

Super cool. Never thought of this. Would this be useful for seeding LLMs?

show 1 reply
ethintoday at 8:00 PM

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...