blog

Notes, writeups, and failure modes.

blog • dns-aid • 8 min read

The Human Foundation of Open Protocols — Notes From the Domain Summit Keynote

My first keynote, in Berlin: why standards outlive the people who write them, the three schools of thought forming around agentic identity, where domains actually fit, and why the question of who mediates the agentic web is being answered right now.

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Me on stage at Domain Summit 2026 in Berlin, mid-talk, with a slide reading "A quick anecdote about technical standards" over a close-up of railroad track behind me
blog • dns • 12 min read

Agentic Workloads on an Infoblox NIOS-XaaS POP

Bypassing agent registries to individually advertise agentic workloads on existing infrastructure.

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A resolver asks who hosts an agent; the path to a crossed-out walled APP STORE is blocked, while a live path leads straight to the name aid.army, which blooms into a constellation of agent nodes — no store, no gate, just DNS
blog • dns • 11 min read

ICANN's Universal Acceptance From the Receiving End: Three Internationalized Domain Names

I registered three internationalized domains and tried to make them serve web pages and receive mail on a free stack. DNS did its job every time.

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A name flowing through DNS that accepts it, into an application layer that refuses it
blog • dns-aid • 28 min read

Agent Identity Without a New Authority — Digital Wallets and the SAN

Republic of Korea's OpenDID and France's mDL ship a TPM-anchored credential flow. DNS-AID and ANS can ride that substrate without inventing a new registry, central root, or hardware-wallet assumption with some tinkering.

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Three-pane diagram contrasting trust roots — centralized registry / sovereign issuer + hardware wallet / DNS + DNSSEC + DANE + x509_san_dns — with the third pane labelled "the substrate that already exists"
blog • infoblox • 15 min read

Over-Engineering Homelab Syslog Receiving With DNSTAP

Changing per-query DNS telemetry from syslog forwarding to a DNSTAP pipeline, and what the syslog path actually does on the appliance.

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ASCII-art pipeline diagram showing NIOS grid members emitting dnstap protobuf frames over tcp/6000 to dnscollector, which pipes JSON on stdout to bridge.py, which posts GELF to a dedicated Graylog index set
blog • dns-aid • 15 min read

Auditing the Agent Internet — Agents Grading Agents

A read-only auditor for the open agent web. It walks any domain's substrate — DNS-AID, AgentFinder, AI-Catalog, DID Web, TLSA, DNSSEC — and provides a grade based on ease of other agents finding and interacting with it.

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Matrix-styled ASCII-art hero — two pill capsules side-by-side over outstretched cupped palms, with the red pill on the left labelled "score_detail() · after DCV verify · full findings + fix copy" and the blue pill on the right labelled "score() · anyone, free · summary + presence chips"; top text reads "choose your detail level —"; bottom carries the Morpheus quote "what if I told you your right to be discovered on the internet shouldn't depend on your relationship with a third-party host?"
blog • dns-aid • 7 min read

Bookings Goes Real — Cloudflare Workers, Claude Managed Agents, and DNS-AID Glue

The first of the five fake agents now answers real requests. Three protocol surfaces, one Anthropic-managed Claude underneath, and DNS-AID + ANS attesting to all of it end-to-end.

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Terminal screenshot of `npx wrangler secret put ANTHROPIC_API_KEY` uploading the API key for the darknetian-bookings worker — wrangler 3.114.17, secret created successfully on Cloudflare
blog • dns-aid • 5 min read

AgentFinder — Federation, Semantic Search, and the DNS Gesture

AgentFinder adds representativeQueries and a /search federation API on top of ai-catalog. Its DNS-SVCB gesture is exactly what DNS-AID specifies. They should know about each other.

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Diagram of an AgentFinder federated query — a natural-language query box at the top fans out via parallel /search calls to three domains (darknetian.com matches with score 0.92, example.com returns no match, other.org returns a low-score alternative), and the winning candidate resolves through a DNS-AID SVCB record at bookings._agents.darknetian.com to bookings.darknetian.com
blog • easm • 7 min read

Wiring the CTEM Spiderweb

A pipeline that unifies Infoblox CTEM, lookalike-domain monitoring, brand protection, and open-source attack-surface signals into one Graylog dashboard — keyed by finding name, deduped across sources, and tagged with bug-bounty eligibility.

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Three figures in Guy Fawkes masks seated at a curved console of triple monitors lit by green hacker-style UI, framed by an industrial geodesic ceiling structure and red rim lighting (photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels)
blog • dns-aid • 4 min read

ai-catalog — One URL, Many Protocols

A single /.well-known/ai-catalog.json enumerates every protocol surface an agent exposes — A2A, MCP, HTTPS — under one endpoint. The wrapping is the load-bearing idea.

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Header of the AI Catalog Unofficial Draft (30 April 2026) at agent-card.github.io/ai-catalog/, showing the spec title, draft date, latest editor's draft URL, and Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licensing footer
blog • dns • 15 min read

The Thing the Index Points To

DNS-AID's path-2 index leaf names a registry the draft explicitly leaves out of scope. Wiring ANS — a registration authority plus transparency log — to be that registry.

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Terminal screenshot showing a signed C2SP checkpoint emitted by the live ans-tl deployment at ans.darknetian.com, alongside the SVCB record at _index._agents.darknetian.com pointing back at it
blog • dns • 14 min read

Five Fake Agents on a Real Cloudflare Zone

Publishing 5 DNS-AID agent records to darknetian.com — flat primary plus walkable AliasMode, DANE TLSA from throwaway self-signed certs, all DNSSEC-signed end-to-end. No agents actually exist behind any of them.

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Terminal screenshot of dig output showing SVCB ServiceMode, AliasMode, TLSA, and TXT records resolving with DNSSEC AD flag set
blog • dns-aid • 4 min read

Agent Cards — The Well-Known JSON

agent-card.github.io standardizes how an agent describes itself at /.well-known/. DNS-AID resolves names; agent cards describe what answers at those names.

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Rendering of a /.well-known/agent-card/bookings.json document in neon-on-dark monospace, showing the load-bearing fields — id, provider, description, an interfaces[] array of three protocol entries (a2a, mcp, https), capabilities, securitySchemes, version — laid out like an ASCII-art card
blog • dns • 11 min read

EDNS(0) for Agent Discovery — Letting the Client Tell the Resolver What It's Looking For

An experimental EDNS(0) option for DNS-AID that lets a client signal selector filters on the query so any hint-aware hop can narrow the answer or short-circuit with a cached match.

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Cover page of RFC 6891 — "Extension Mechanisms for DNS (EDNS(0))" by Damas, Graff, and Vixie, April 2013 — the foundational standards-track document the agent-hint work builds on
project • dns • 7 min read

REEF — When the Agent Holds the Pen

An agent loop that reads, reasons, and (with your permission) edits Infoblox Threat Defense policy. Runs against any LLM you point it at — including a 4GB GPU in your homelab.

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Terminal output of BEACON summarizing an Infoblox Threat Defense tenant with counts of policies, named lists, and feeds
blog • dns • 7 min read

DCV — Proving an Agent Belongs to a Domain Without a Central Authority

A stateless challenge/response primitive over TXT records that lets a NAT'd agent prove zone control without registering with anyone.

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GitHub view of PR
blog • graylog • 7 min read

Graylog Enrichment, Deepened

Adding MAC→DHCP-hostname lookups, dashboards-as-code, and the long tail of NIOS WAPI and OpenSearch quirks the first pass left behind.

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Top clients widget showing client_ip resolved next to fixedaddress name and DHCP hostname columns, with NIOS-known hosts alongside unenriched ones
project • dns • 13 min read

Creating a New DNS Resource Record Type

Why it may be beneficial to think about DNS in a new way.

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A meme from the 'you wouldn't download a car' ad campaign that says 'you wouldn't add to DNS'
blog • field notes • 3 min read

Zombie Data Came Back to Life to Kill Me 🧟‍♂️

Implications of poor automation cleanup hygiene.

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NIST NVD entry for CVE 2024 1737
blog • field notes • 5 min read

Help! Use Forwarders Only Caused My Outage

Implications of improperly-scoped security policies.

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Cache miss error in google chrome
blog • hot rfc • 4 min read

Encrypted DNS Server Redirection

Discussing the merits of IETF internet draft EDSR.

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Secure DNS configuration menu in Brave browser settings
blog • ops • 12 min read

Adding Observability to the Homelab

Adding Grafana and Prometheus for SNMP data.

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Graylog installation screen
blog • automation • 12 min read

Enriching Graylog with Infoblox

Utilizing an IPAM source to enhance SIEM correlation.

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Graylog enriched dashboard screen
blog • ops • 4 min read

Graylog for Infoblox

Creating a reporting source for Infoblox with Graylog.

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Graylog dashboard screen
blog • ops • 5 min read

Graylog for Homelab (on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS)

Creating a log indexing source with Graylog and Ubuntu 24.04 in 2026.

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Graylog installation screen
blog • compliance • 5 min read

Zero Trust Overlays

Comparison of Zero Trust documents from a US policy perspective.

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Stock market ticker
blog • ops • 3 min read

Build This Website

Notes and lessons learned in deploying darknetian.com.

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Neon planet covered in chains and a padlock underneath reads 'trust is scarce' (AI generated)