Thoughts on addressbook “solutions”
Lots of thought and effort goes into synchronising addressbooks on phones and PDAs and corporate mail servers and the like, and the biggest problem of the lot is that your data goes out of date. Of course, with in a corporation there are often complex X.500/LDAP setups which solve some of this problem, but because these aren't globally accessible additional effort is then spent transfering data to Blackberries and laptops and the like.
So, I thought, how about taking a leaf out of the Hesiod model and just encoding the data into the DNS somehow, e.g.:
senji.livejournal.com IN TXT
"Senji|+441632960123|23 Leinster Gardens,London,UK"
With this you could just hand out the domain name for your details and PIM software could update itself as and when needed.
However this runs into the obvious problem that you might not want the entire world to know your phone number, so my subsequent thought is that you hand out a domain name and a key (or multiple keys) to your correspondants and store the actual data encrypted, possibly with more than one record under each name such that the end user tries to decrypt all of them and integrates any that succesfully decrypt.
So, I thought, how about taking a leaf out of the Hesiod model and just encoding the data into the DNS somehow, e.g.:
senji.livejournal.com IN TXT
"Senji|+441632960123|23 Leinster Gardens,London,UK"
With this you could just hand out the domain name for your details and PIM software could update itself as and when needed.
However this runs into the obvious problem that you might not want the entire world to know your phone number, so my subsequent thought is that you hand out a domain name and a key (or multiple keys) to your correspondants and store the actual data encrypted, possibly with more than one record under each name such that the end user tries to decrypt all of them and integrates any that succesfully decrypt.