I often wonder what would happen if a group of nerds..like ourselves.. decided to start our own root DNS.. I would suspect that it would be shut down by the FCC in short order under some new or trumped up mangled misinterpretation of some law.
Alternative root servers have existed for years. The largest is probaby OpenNIC.
I'm not an expert on crypto, but it seems to me that, for instance, SHA-512/256 would not produce the same digest from the same input as SHA-256. I just conducted the following test on the linux command line:
$ echo hello | sha512sum
e7c22b994c59d9cf2b4 8e549b1e24666636045 930d3da7c1acb299d1 c3b7f931f94aae41edd a2c2b207a36e10f8bcb 8d45223e54878f5b316e 7ce3b6bc019629 -
$ echo hello | sha256sum
5891b5b522d5df086d0ff 0b110fbd9d21bb4fc716 3af34d08286a2e846f6be03 -
The first is the SHA-512 hash of the word "hello" (with spaces inserted to defeat the slashdot lameness filter) and the second is the hash for SHA-256. I don't see any way to truncate the the 512-bit output and get one that matches the 256-bit output. Therefore SHA-512/256 would not be compatible with plain SHA-256.
I don't see much utility in these new algorithms. Since we would already be calculating the 512-bit hash, why not just use it instead of truncating it? I suppose there are a few situations where for externally imposed reasons you just need a value of a certain length, but that's about it.
Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem in relation to a bigger problem. -- P.D. Ouspensky