ShofarDomain’s rootless domain technology makes it practical to develop immutable sites, a site that remains unchanged perpetually.  Examples of this may be a fixed text site like a Bible translation, the works of Shakespeare, government or organizational documents, or industry standards; media files, especially those in the public domain, such as audio or video of historic events, movies, music or speeches; or data files, like pi calculations, weather records, or financial records.

There are several differences between the implementation of immutable sites using ShofarDomain’s rootless technology and an ICANN regulated domain.  Foremost is cost.  A rootless domain is paid for once and owned perpetually.  An ICANN domain requires annual fees which raises the barrier to entry and may make it too expensive to maintain.

Marking a domain as immutable severs the tie to the original owner.  The site now becomes a fixed entity that can be served anywhere.  This allows for the use of regional servers, or when the site is copied to a local machine, to be resolved locally and not requiring access to the Internet.

In the digitally signed domain records are flags indicating a site is immutable and the hash values.  Any party can verify the site’s raw data against the hash to prove it is valid and unchanged.  Sites can be copied in their entirety to other servers or a local machine from any source with confidence that the data is valid.

ShofarDomain optionally allows for unaffiliated mirrors of immutable data.  Any server that obtains a copy of the data can then announce its willingness to serve the data.  For example a given site is published at “Example.own”.  For future reference the original copy will be available at an alternate domain such as “Original.Example.own”.  A copy is made by any party and reported as available to the domain.  The domain then issues a name like “Mirror1.Example.own” that resolves to the mirror.  Another copy is made from either the “Example.own” or “Mirror1.Example.own” site and becomes “Mirror2.Example.own”.

When a request for “Example.own” is made to the DNS resolver, the original or any one of the mirrors can be returned.  If the original site goes down, temporarily or permanently, the mirrors keep the site contents available.

Since there is no longer a perpetual cost to the domain name, and the raw data can be verified, decentralized control and replication of immutable data is possible.

Even if all online copies of a site go offline for a period, any party with a verifiable copy of the data can reappear in the future and announce availability of the data.

Data that builds over time can use the same technology by using subdomains.  For example an annual report could be issued at “2013.Example.own” and mirrored at “Mirror1.2013.Example.own”.  The following year will be at “2014.Example.own” while the previous year remains intact.

ShofarDomain’s rootless technology opens the door to a myriad of new possibilities for reliable decentralized access to data on the Internet.

To find out more visit ShofarDomain.com or ShofarDomain.own.