There are recent reports that Google is working on other
ways of identifying website addresses as well as conventional domain-oriented
URL’s.
Since domains are mapped to IP addresses, often on hosted
servers, and propagated worldwide, it isn’t clear if this refers to that
concept, or the tendency of many sites to add unnecessary qualifiers when
offering popup links to sites, as from emails. This practice facilitates phishing.
The story reminds me of the controversy in the summer of
2008, when a Finnish researcher found a security flaw in the DNS mapping system,
resulting in a big emergency conference at Microsoft near Seattle.
Microsoft offers enterprises a service called Azure,
cloud-hosted, that also seems to break away from URL dependency.
And more and more sites encourage smart phone users to load their
apps rather than use URL’s in browsers.
