There's now a museum for DNS, the internet's phone book, and it's as nerdy as it sounds

DNS is the internet’s phone book, the thing that turns a name into an address, and somebody built it a museum. The DNS Museum holds 49 entries, each one an odd or inventive thing people have done with DNS that it was never meant for. Peter Lowe made it, and its About page says it grew out of his talk on bizarre and unusual uses of DNS.

He gave that talk at FOSDEM in 2023, under a rule I now love: if you can think of it, someone’s done it in the DNS. The museum proves it. One traceroute spells out a Star Wars story, one hop at a time, in the names of the routers along the way. Somebody built DNS over the phone, so you can ask a resolver a question by calling it. One record publishes the approximate location of the International Space Station, updated every 15 minutes, and somebody played an MP3 by pulling it out of DNS in tiny pieces. That one is described, lovingly, as an intentionally inefficient media transport.

Some of it you can still try. DNS Toys, one of the entries, answers ordinary lookups with weather, currency conversions, dice rolls and coin flips if you send it the right name. Lowe jokes that many of the things in his talk are no longer online, which is why he calls it a museum. He’s also not a hobbyist poking at this for laughs; FOSDEM’s page lists him as principal security researcher at DNSFilter.

If you’ve got a terminal handy, I’d try one of the DNS Toys lookups for the weather where you live. It takes ten seconds and you’ll never look at a domain name the same way.

The phone book has a sense of humor.