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.

> 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").

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

My old late friend Dan Kaminsky famously wrote the Perl module "Ozyman DNS", which allowed you to tunnel ssh session over the DNS, thus evading certain firewalls such as those controlling access to public WiFi. Modern public WiFi setups filter the DNS too, rendering this technique moot, but I remember using "Ozyman DNS" to get WiFi access on the Caltrain and that was highly satisfying.

https://boingboing.net/2004/06/21/tunneling-ssh-over-d.html

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

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?

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.

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

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.

Finally, a DOOM download that bypasses captive portals

There's a writeup here:

https://blog.rice.is/post/doom-over-dns/

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

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.

>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.

That's plain wrong. DNS was specifically designed to store arbitrary data, cf. the Hesiod name class.

Tangent, harder drives by suckerpinch

Another fake Doom run, like the predictor one. This doesn't actually run Doom. Sorry. Meanwhile, other esoteric platforms actually runthe software.

There's the Infocom ZMachine with Zork I-III, Tristam Island, Calypso (Z machine v3 games) and many more which can be run starting from a PostScript file to a pen, a simple FPGA machine, an Amiga, the original Game Boy and who knows what.

If you can port a libre interpreter, you can run it. Old PDA's, Smartphones, JS browsers, Windows 95 machines with Winfrotz, DOS, Raspberry Pies with GNU/Linux, Riscos... There are emulators even written in Perl, Python, Lua, tons of them. It's text based output and the Z machine format it's documented.

I think some Activision games had the the Zork game embedded on their engine as an Easter Egg. As it's an 'easy' task for any programmer embedding it under a fake ingame computer woudn't have been a daunting task.

Maybe I can adapt the PostScript one to Eforth under the Subleq VM, PS' syntax maps slightly ok to EForth...

With Asterisks and some old modules you can even play it over a VOIP client and listen to the output with Flite/Festival/Espeak-nG or any compatible TTS software, such as PicoTTS. The voice input it's done with CMU Sphinx.

Something Doom can't do at all.

Perhaps one day in the future, DOOM will become one of the symbols of human civilization—both in contrast to robots and in contrast to extraterrestrials.

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

What is the serialization format? Base64?

This feels so unnecessary but very cool.

blech...too much windows. bring me the Linux version and i might care ;)

that SVG wow how?!

any of you did doom inside meta glasses?

You might enjoy reading through the original Google FS papers. I forget what they’re called but it addresses the durability problems.

Ah, I couldn’t remember the name because it’s literally named Google File System. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...

I seem to remember bigtable also being interesting.

More than that, you might enjoy MIT’s distributed systems course. It’s all freely available online. I went through it for fun a decade ago or so, and it’s worthwhile for reasoning through hard problems like this.

People have definitely (ab)used YouTube as a filesystem though. And that’s probably your best bet for durability and performance.

I had the same idea!

Another silly (compression-based) idea I had was to:

- Index say google images, or something else with a large amount of URL -> data

- Find patterns in the indexed data that match patterns in your data, such that storing the URL and an offset into the data (or something more complex) would be smaller than the data chunk you are trying to compress

- Repeat for all chunks

- After you're done you can run it again and again. Infinite compression!

Yes the user has to download WAY more data that what they are trying to extract, and you'd need an insanely large index to be able to compress, but hey it was an idea.

I've had this exact idea. Would need to be error encoded to account for chubks disappearing. There would be a rot rate as sites die or change.

You could write some custom backends for https://irmin.org/ I guess.

> Irmin is an OCaml library for building mergeable, branchable distributed data stores.

lol now I wanna build this. It's like the dark web but without user or in this case, site consent. This could be a fun few weekend project