Re: [tor-dev] User perception of the prop224 domain format

[Alec Muffett <alec.muffett@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 27 September 2017 at 22:25, Ben Laurie <ben@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Your survey is obviously massively biased towards users of Tor. It
would be really interesting to know what non-users think.

 Yes and no; I can totally see that from a user-experience perspective, it would be exciting research to rock up to someone and say:

    "Here's a really long URL, how does it make you feel?"

…and (at least) in this matter, Prop224 Onion addresses are subjectively less intimidating than:

    https://[2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334]/foo.html

…even though both of them are representations of Layer-3/similar machine-readable addresses*

However, there is such a thing as "inviting people to beat you up in such a way as to draw media criticism without plausible likelihood for constructive input", and I feel that this would be onesuch.

Experiential evidence:

1) the number of people who've told me in-past that Email addresses are unusably unmemorable, except somehow 30..40 years later we are still using them, and have developed coping strategies, eg: address books.

2) the number of people who've told me in-past that IPv4 addresses are unusably unmemorable, except for 8.8.8.8 and 192.168.1.1 which somehow are enough for people to bootstrap access to the rest of the internet, and use various coping strategies (eg: DNS, bookmarks)

3) the number of people who've told me in-past that Old-Style Onion addresses are unusably unmemorable, until (as mentioned above) Facebook and a few other good ones got mined, and people started taking Onion networking mildly seriously as a means of more-secure enterprise communication… Oh, and bookmarks as a coping strategy.

4) phone numbers. unusably unmemorable. coping strategies: in-phone address books + address-book synchronisation. etc etc etc.

So: can we do better with Onion UX? Certainly.  

Should we research improvements to user experience? Absolutely.

Should Tor invite opinionated people to come piss all over its equivalent of https://[2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334]/foo.html? Probably not. Just my opinion. I don't feel it would benefit anyone except (a) haters, and (b) academics who research only "what doesn't work" because researching "what /does/ work" is beyond the scope of their funding.

     -a

* explanatory thread: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/802161730591793152 

--

http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/aboutalecm

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