When the Internet Nearly Fractured 119
An anonymous reader writes "The Atlantic has a fascinating, if lengthy, story about a man named Eugene Kashpureff who 'ignited a battle over the future of the global network' by launching a rogue DNS registry in the late '90s. Here's an excerpt: 'He opted to go a step beyond simply registering sites on alternative top-level domains, and hijacked traffic intended for InterNIC.net. He pointed the domain to his own site, where he lodged a note of protest over how the domain name space was being controlled, and then offered visitors the option of continuing on to Network Solution's site. This was, you'll recall, at about the same moment that the federal government was attempting to make the case to the business community, to the world, that this Internet thing was no digital Wild West.'"
So then, (Score:1)
we need more Kashpureffs on this planet. many, many more.
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Such a brave, heroic man, to drive his business by committing cache poisoning intercepts.
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Yes, all of our modern heroes gained their importance through the liberal interpretation of regulations combined with a healthy disrespect for the existence of other people.
Re:So then, (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article: "Splintering DNS forks the Internet so that Internet users might never know where to go to get domains, or what they might get. If they connected to some DNS directories, they might enter Coke.com and get Pepsi. Chaos could ensue. All for what Vixie sees as not a noble question to uphold the free spirit of the Internet but instead a self-serving marketing stunt intended to promote Kashpureff's own business. Some things, writes Vixie, should just work, and DNS is one of them."
I'm with Vixie on this one. You shouldn't jack with one of the fundamentals of the internet.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
Alternate DNS roots exist today.
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I'm with Vixie on this one. You shouldn't jack with one of the fundamentals of the internet.
One of the fundamentals of the Internet is its distributed, peer-based nature. Merely a method of exchanging packets. Surely, having a centralized authoritarian DNS system falls afoul of this basic premise?
Re:So then, (Score:5, Insightful)
Aaah, kids.
DNS was a convenience tacked onto the robust, distributed, multi-path peer-based nature of IP. If we were willing to fall back to hand-wrangling 4,000-line HOSTS files like I used to back in 1983, I'm sure we could all be the rugged individualists.
DNS is a trade-off: network-wide consistency for autonomy. With DNS, you have to ask somebody how to get to http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org]. That somebody should be someone you trust. But for now, there's only one "someone". If there were multiple "someone"s, the net would fragment, and that's inconvenient. So there'd be a meta-somebody who can bring all the fragmented parts together, like a super-DNS that points to all the individual DNS roots. But that just recreates the "authoritarian DNS system" problem, one level higher.
The broader Internet became less about "distributed, peer-based", robust communication and more about convenient and seamless communication at just about the dawn of Eternal September [wikipedia.org], and we network old-timers have never forgiven you AOL'ers for ruining our network.
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DNS is a trade-off: network-wide consistency for autonomy. With DNS, you have to ask somebody how to get to http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org]. That somebody should be someone you trust. But for now, there's only one "someone". If there were multiple "someone"s, the net would fragment, and that's inconvenient. So there'd be a meta-somebody who can bring all the fragmented parts together, like a super-DNS that points to all the individual DNS roots. But that just recreates the "authoritarian DNS system" problem, one level higher.
It is not either or. Theoretically you could resolve addresses by asking a number of different independent name servers and go with the majority opinion. Similar to how ntp works. It would make name resolving a much more complicated process, but is is a logical solution if (or rather when) governments starts interfering with the root dns server.
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That would slow down DNS queries significantly having to run multiple checks against nameservers. That would be a great way to slow down the Internet.
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I doubt that it would have a significant effect most of the time ; a higher priority would be assigned within browsers to pre-fetching DNS data as a page was being downloaded and rendered. The user would barely see anything. (Yes, I do know that the Internet =/= the WWW ; but for the large majority of users that false equation is believed true.)
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"and we network old-timers have never forgiven you AOL'ers for ruining our network."
Amen!
Feh. I still haven't forgiven the tcp/ip assholes from wrecking the nice uucp administration and routes we'd got. It just worked (really) and nobody had to pay $x/yr to so-and-so to make it work. We made it work please and thank you very much.
Also, " If there were multiple "someone"s, the net would fragment, and that's inconvenient." - Ah! Fear, uncertainty and doubt.
This is actually factually incorrect, in the day there were a dozen root server networks, not just the legacy US government one. Alternic was
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"So there'd be a meta-somebody who can bring all the fragmented parts together, like a super-DNS that points to all the individual DNS roots. But that just recreates the "authoritarian DNS system" problem, one level higher."
It's just Turtles all the way up.
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no, in an n-way mesh each node can verify against each other. in the degenerate case where they're all wrong, you'll know pretty fast, trust me. btdt. works fine.
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and we network old-timers have never forgiven you AOL'ers for ruining our network.
Oh how I wish we could go back to the days where AOL'ers were subject to being banned for being to dumb to connect rather than thinking it is their right to have the internet.
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Ahh... the dawn of Eternal September, when I lost my virginity, matriculated into college and used Mosaic for the first time. Life was certainly never the same afterwards.
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>>> 4,000-line HOSTS files like I used to back in 1983,
Size Matters
Mine is 19,046 long.
Right, and any reasonably useful hosts file would several orders of magnitude larger and take several seconds to parse on the fastest of machines.
The assumption that we could do without DNS is ludicrous in this day and age. That the GP would suggest this on the same site that has been singing the praises of IPV6 after the exhaustion of IPV4 is totally asinine.
Yes there can be (and there are) alternative DNS roots, you could choose to use. But the suggestion we revert to hosts files for anything but the ti
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Right, and any reasonably useful hosts file would several orders of magnitude larger and take several seconds to parse on the fastest of machines.
Has anyone else considered that to be the problem with ldd--the dynamically linked library index system?
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"Right, and any reasonably useful hosts file would several orders of magnitude larger and take several seconds to parse on the fastest of machines."
I dunno, once you remove the spam, the seo sites, the scraper farms, and the virus hosts, I bet there's only a few hundred sites that anyone would actually *want* to go to...
A.
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There is however almost certainly a lot more than 100 email domains that people want to send emails to. The internet is more than just the www.
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No offense, but you're wrong.
The Internet is a collection of smaller networks with addressing assigned from a central authority to prevent address conflicts.
Note, that was referring to IP address assignments, but DNS is a natural extension of that.
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"No offense, but you're wrong.
The Internet is a collection of smaller networks with addressing assigned from a central authority to prevent address conflicts.
Note, that was referring to IP address assignments, but DNS is a natural extension of that."
Sure, lets bet the network and billions of dollars on this idea. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, what's that you say, an Iranian cleric doesn't like the domain name you picked? sorry, bzzzzzt. or what's that? A fijian company has a trademark on something and a
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Thus we see the effect of the increasing implementation of business needs over communi
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You should be allowed to do it as long as you don't step on anyone else's TLDs.
The only problem it causes then is that DNS gets less efficient as servers below the TLDs now have to process a lot more information to find out where to send a request for "www.domain.h4xxx0rr3a1m" and the like.
But there's no way that's less efficient overall than the ridiculous bureaucratic and petty-political process needed to get a new tld erected.
And it would, indeed, free the network from the clutches of ICANN, where it sho
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Isn't jacking off one of the fundamentals of the internet?
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From the article: "Splintering DNS forks the Internet so that Internet users might never know where to go to get domains, or what they might get. If they connected to some DNS directories, they might enter Coke.com and get Pepsi. Chaos could ensue. All for what Vixie sees as not a noble question to uphold the free spirit of the Internet but instead a self-serving marketing stunt intended to promote Kashpureff's own business. Some things, writes Vixie, should just work, and DNS is one of them."
I'm with Vixie on this one. You shouldn't jack with one of the fundamentals of the internet.
What you should or shouldn't do is all fine and dandy. Gentlemen do not read other Gentlemen's mail, and all that.
The fact that it could be done and was done so easily is something only a fool would ignore and hand waive away.
Self serving stunt? Was there any clear and viable intent to profit? No. He knew the powers that be would have
to act. His was an act of digital civil disobedience, which resulted (after far too long) in measures to prevent
the hijacking.
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Yeah we need more loud-mouth self serving businessmen doing asshole tactics to just make a buck. Oh, you thought he was trying to start a charity? How cute.
Summarizing the Internet communities' reaction (Score:2)
.
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No, we don't. He's not a good or nice person. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I had the dubious honor of learning DNS from him many moons ago. He's an opportunist who doesn't care who he runs over in the pursuit of his own agenda.
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And he totally knew you!
You would sit at the back, never raised your hand, and refused to sign the attendance sheet.
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There's really no such thing as freedom or anarchy, but control is real and needs to be dealt with harshly when it becomes onerous.
Re:no digital Wild West (Score:5, Funny)
If it were the ultimate tool for "freedom and anarchy" would that be a good thing for society?
Imagine if you couldn't trust the data on wikipedia
Or if your bank account access could be spoofed
Or your emails could be read by anyone
Or even a reputable site by a known firm with a reputation to protect would use online tools to deceive
What if lone individuals could topple governments and cause international diplomatic incidents?
How much worse a place would the world be then? I think you'd have serious problems in that scenario. No I think that for any one faction in this to win would be to the detriment of us all.
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> If it were the ultimate tool for "freedom and anarchy" would that be a good thing for society?
In my opinion: fuck yeah.
> Imagine if you couldn't trust the data on wikipedia
Do you trust it right now? Would you use it for mission-critical tasks?
The very premise of wikipedia is write-openness. Everyone using it should have that in mind and exercise common sense when reading informations there. If anything, it should remind us that every piece of written information published in our society may have bia
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Well, I've seen so many otherwise knowledgeable people endorse government control over the internet that is kinda hard to notice jokes on this subject.
DNS not inherent (Score:5, Informative)
I must admit that I haven't RTFA. But the summary quotation seems to imply that DNS is somehow part of the Internet.
Just to clarify, it's not. The internet sure would be hard to use without the DNS, absolutely. But it's not unthinkable - we'd just be stuck with IP addresses for everything, and there could be no virtual hosting (multiple domains per IP, disambiguated by the Host: field).
But the DNS is really more of a universal agreement. Everybody agrees on who the roots are, and that's that. But there's no technical reason that the roots have to be who they are - hence the altroots described.
But he didn't "fracture" the Internet. That's a stupid statement. The Internet doesn't concern itself with domain names, just routing IPs - the DNS is built on top of that and maps back down to IPs. Were he successful, he would've fractured the DNS. Pain in the ass? Sure. Coke.com could go to Pepsi's site, but http://216.64.210.28/ [216.64.210.28] would still get me to the Coca-Cola website.
The difference matters, because fracturing the Internet is technical (routing), while fracturing the DNS is more of an administrative-bureaucratic-sociopolitical type of thing. Peering disputes can of course be about non-technical things like money, but it breaks at a technical level.
Re:DNS not inherent (Score:4, Interesting)
+1 Right on the Money
I commented upthread, so my marvelous modpoints go unused here. Alas.
If you want to talk about fracturing teh intarwebs, these scenarios [networkworld.com], and this incident [bgpmon.net], and this routing-based DDOS [newscientist.com], are the ones to discuss. Not multiple DNS roots.
Re:DNS not inherent (Score:5, Funny)
Funny mods deserved, but... (Score:2)
The funny mods seem deserved, but this seems like the little detail you'd look up specifically for purposes of giving it as an example.
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Whoooooosh
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I think search (i.e google) would adapt. Everyone would just bookmark 66.102.7.99 (or whatevs) and use that... let google do the rest.
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Actually, you make a very good point. One point though, for all intent and purposes, people bookmark the title of a page, not the domain name, so their bookmarks would be just as usable as they are now, including the ability to change the name of the bookmark. In that scenario, Yahoo and others might have had a stranglehold on search before Google was even started, and Microsoft *might* have gotten serious earlier in the game. Or not at all in time. We would be looking at a completely different scene in
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Building on that,...... search could actually resolve (in a DNS way) IVP6 when segments of the network dont support it. Think of google being the 'portal' that IPV4 users use to access the IPV6 internet.....
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I think you're forgetting things like browser hostname headers and so forth. Knowing the IP of the server a website is hosted on it *not* even close to a guarantee that you'll be able to get to that website. This is especially true with CDNs like Akamai.
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"But the summary quotation seems to imply that DNS is somehow part of the Internet."
You are of course, missing the entire point. Just because you've defined the "Internet" as the global IP network doesn't mean that that is anything but a purely *technical* definition. No one else uses that technical definition. For most of us, DNS *is* an essential part of how the Internet works. A non-standard DNS system if widely successful (unlike existing alt DNSs) would be a serious problem in terms of people using
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I didn't dismiss virtual hosts, quite the contrary. My point was that you can serve websites without it (as the two comments mentioning /etc/hosts point out).
Perhaps you've missed the point, or perhaps I wasn't clear enough about the thrust of my post. I wasn't saying "we don't need the DNS", or that for all but the most technical of reasons it *is* part of the Internet. But breaking or otherwise fussing with the DNS is not a technical issue, and can't be fixed with a technical solution. It's, as I think we
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How would an alternative DNS becoming more commonplace necessarily, or likely, be a "serious problem"? I just do not see it. To note, I disagree with how the distribution of domain names is determined with regards to ICANN-linked registrars (it's not "first come, first served", by the way, or else PETA would not have peta.org*), so on that ground alone I support and use alternative DNS.**
I don't see this demand that one not use an alternative DNS much different from the demand that one use only a standards
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Well, it would fracture the "Internet" as we know it.
If it were commonly accepted to decide that you wanted your own NIC, and could go make your own, that would make things very difficult for the common users.
Consider this. I, owner of JWSmytheNIC, inc, llc, gmbh, ei, ei, o, would obviously use my own NIC, and ignore all those other silly ones, even that one that seems fairly popular, headed by some group known as ICANN. Users of AOL and CompuServe can only r
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Well, the Host: HTTP header came long after the DNS. You can define per-machine, sure, and it'll probably work - but that's not the point. The point is that it's automatic. If I already know that these several names map to one IP, everybody might as well just use a subdirectory. It was for sake of argument, I didn't mix them up.
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The analogy would be the ability to run an arbitrary number of "Internets" over the same copper and fiber, just as you can run multiple DNS over an IP network. But that would require cooperation from everybody involved, whereas I can tell my laptop to be a root and convince people to point to it without any third-party involvement.
So they're not comparable.
Which is worse? (Score:1)
Splintering DNS forks the Internet so that Internet users might never know where to go to get domains, or what they might get.
Which is worse: Injecting forged data into the DNS, or eliminating data that you don't like?
Kashpureff was guilty of the former. Now the US government is doing the latter - seizing domain names [arstechnica.com] on behalf of commercial interests.
Governments will cause the future split in DNS. (Score:1)
With corporate interests pushing governments to use domain name forfeitures to punish people/groups it finds threatening to their interests, it will cause people to create new name services.
He hacked people's servers (Score:2)
He hacked people's servers (including some belonging to the DOD) and went to jail for it. When I pointed out that my non-hacked DNS servers couldn't see the Alternic domains, he hacked those too.
For some reason, top level domains have the ability to bring out the crazies. It happened in the late 1990's, and it's happening again (e.g., with .music).
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"He hacked people's servers (including some belonging to the DOD) and went to jail for it. When I pointed out that my non-hacked DNS servers couldn't see the Alternic domains, he hacked those too."
Rubbish. He just exploited a bug in BIND where it believed anythng anyone told it. The trick was, he sent you mail. If you sent him mail back your system would do an mx record lookip for alternic.net, and his system would return not only the mx you asked for but an A record for internic.net (pointing to alternic.n
DNS is broken (Score:4, Interesting)
We outgrew hosts files.
We've outgrown DNS as well.
Take a look at .COM for example. DNS is now basically flat, despite the original intent. .COM is a great big flat hosts table.
DNS is an attempt to categorise networks, companies, services etc. .COM for commercial, .US for American, .ORG for non profit organisations, .PRO for professionals (LOL). The problem is it's hierarchical, and categorising all the people, services, networks companies in the world doesn't work in a hierarchy. I need to be in .DE, .PRO, .NAME, .CO.UK etc. Duplication of information. People have just decided to use .COM instead and include some keywords in the name. It's simpler.
Naming, classification is relational rather than hierarchical. We need a replacement name resolution service. DNS will continue to creak under the inappropriate uses we put it to day.
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.mil .gov and .edu do still seem to work probably because they are controlled The .US .UK seem to be marginal. Here is a question are the national tags assumed? So that there can be a Yahoo.com in say the US and the UK? If you are in the US and type Yahoo.com it goes to Yahoo.com.US and if you are in the UK it goes to Yahoo.com.UK?
Just wondering because I take DNS for granted.
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that was what I thought. Too bad really but you could have a huge mess otherwise.
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Take a look at .COM for example. DNS is now basically flat, despite the original intent
Well, being Amercan you're missing half the web :)
All the different native language sites out there are hiding under .no, .sp, .de etc, and there really is quite a lot of them. About half the websites I visit are from .no, so I think it's more a matter of saying what language they use and where they do business. Basically, I think the American companies messed up, while the rest are behaving themselves... but given your view of the world that's hardly surprising (ever considered inviting other countries t
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I'm a Scot living in Germany.
And .DE is broken in exactly the same way as .COM for the same reason. .DE is simply the flat German national hosts file... Everything German.
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Which was the intended way? Are you suggesting, it should have .com.de, org.de, etc...? That's fine with me, but the County TLDs are exactly used as intended: to be a set of hosts associated with Germany, which is as you bluntly put it a "flat German national hosts file". However, Germany does have the power to say "enough is enough, companies go under .com.de, non-profits under .org.de, healthcare under .medizin.de, personal people under .person.de, etc, etc, etc..." Nobody stops them from doing such a
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(ever considered inviting other countries to the world series of baseball?)
No.
Canada occasionally crashes the party, but they bring Labatt's with them, so it's ok.
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Naming, classification is relational rather than hierarchical. We need a replacement name resolution service. DNS will continue to creak under the inappropriate uses we put it to day.
And, of course, DNS was never envisioned as something masses of end users would deal with. Something like Google is more in line with the original thinking.
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"And, of course, DNS was never envisioned as something masses of end users would deal with. Something like Google is more in line with the original thinking."
Define "user".
BIND got its start when Brian Reid a the Digitial Western Research Center in Palo Alto (DECWRL) paid Paul Vixie to take the Berkely b-tree code and make it into a "professional product" which he did.
In 1997 Brian said to me "I feel like a dork paying for my domain names but I don't know what to do about it".
So, it sorta depends on the "us
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Yeah, it's really annoying when existing companies, with existing domains, register new domains for new products, instead of just creating sub-domains.
Do we really need a separate website for each movie that comes out? Why not just .movies.com?
Do we really need a new website each year for athletics? Why not just ..?
Sure, eventually, you could end up with super-long FQDNs, but it would certainly be nicer to work with on the back-end.
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Grrr, stupid slashdot removing everything between angle brackets.
The should read (moviename).movies.com.
And (year).(event).(whatever).
A little perspective (Score:5, Informative)
It's important to remember that when he did this, he was essentially fighting against the mandated monopoly on domain registration held by Network Solutions. At that time, the domain registration process had all the speed efficiency, charm, and conscientiousness as the DMV on a bad day. Meanwhile, we had several prominant cases where exceptions were made to the first come first served policy to give privately held domain names to corporations that want them even when their trademark was newer than the original registration.
At the height of that Kashpureff partially hijacked DNS for a little bit to raise awareness of alternatives.
The issues from then were partially addressed by opening up competition in domain registration and further by regulating the dirtier practices of registrars.
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Contrast that to $8 today, and same-day propagation.
Demonstrating that an alternate DNS system was even possible was important. If NetSol had continued with their monopoly, we'd probably be paying $500 a domain today.
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At the height of that Kashpureff partially hijacked DNS for a little bit to raise awareness of alternatives.
The issues from then were partially addressed by opening up competition in domain registration and further by regulating the dirtier practices of registrars.
Kashpureff is an asshole. He didn't "partially hijack" DNS "for a little bit" to raise anything other than his bank balance.
I wrote about the transition to what eventually became ICANN [starkrealities.com] in 1997 (see paragraph 6 for Kashpureff's "contribution" to this process). Charging a fee for registrations in the bogus TLDs he "owned" was not the act of a revolutionary - it is the scheme of a buccaneer, pure and simple.
Nor was he the only malefactor. Karl Denninger of MCSNet, who asserted ownership of .BIZ and Christopher
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Once again Tom Starck writes about something he was tangentially aware of and gets it wrong. I could make a career of following you around and correcting you Thom and to one extent I have. We meet again.
The way the domain thing played out, Network Solutions was directed by the NSF to begin charging as the NSF was sick of subsidizing domain squatters who were registering gazillions of names after Josh Quittners article in Wired about the domain gold rush (that didn't really exist).
The discussion broke of on
ICANN power-grab caused lots of damage. (Score:2)
As far as I could tell from the outside, the big objective of ICANN was to give the Trademark Gods more control over the domain-name process than they were going to get through the IAHC, and to prevent new top-level domains from happening, and I was already annoyed at the IAHC for being too subservient to the Trademark Gods. The big issues for me were getting more gTLDs created and making sure that the domain name process could preserve privacy, while the IAHC had pretty much agreed that you wouldn't be ab
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Some here today may not remember, but there are good reasons they are sometimes called ICAN'T. The one thing they DO seem good at is junkets to Geneva. If they would have held their meetings at the HoJo somewhere they wouldn't need to charge the fees they do.
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Once again Tom Starck writes about something he was tangentially aware of and gets it wrong
Once again, "Dick" Sexton manages to spell my name wrong.
I think that's all that needs to be said about HIS attention to detail.
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Nobody claims that he didn't hope to make some money, a lot of people do, that's no crime. If he wanted to charge money to register domains on his alternate DNS, that's no crime either. He didn't claim it was anything other than what it was. I'm pretty sure he's never been accused of being a diplomat.
Hacking the root servers WAS a crime and he paid for that. However, it wasn't JUST about making a profit, he was well justified in being upset with the way NetSol got the special treatment while doing such a mi
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It's important to remember that when he did this, he was essentially fighting against the mandated monopoly on domain registration held by Network Solutions. At that time, the domain registration process had all the speed efficiency, charm, and conscientiousness as the DMV on a bad day.
Still does, if you get your domains from Network Solutions.
TL;DR Generation (Score:3)
I guess if it is longer than a tweet, it's too long.
@xdroop (Score:2)
tl;dr pls sum.<=140 char
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I'm also pissed off about that, when various forum people freak out about me posting a few hundred to a couple thousand words, about something remotely complex - it's not a doctoral dissertation, for Christ's sake!
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Heh, on a related note: I just picked up a book called "Cultures of War" by John Dower, a historian who's most famous for a book about the occupation of postwar Japan. Apparently all the comparisons people made to Japan and Germany during the start of the Iraq war made him look into the Iraq war and the planning that went into it.
"Researchers accustomed to sifting through the old-fashioned typescript and carbon-copy documents of World War II era encounter a conspicuous time warp when it comes to the fragmen
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yeah, some things can't and shouldn't be super-condensed; that sure seems like one of 'em.
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Blame /. Articles have become so prolific and quality so rare that it's no longer worthwhile to read most of it.
I wondered if this was going to be about AlterNic (Score:1)
This is a duplicate! (Score:1)
Old news, slashdot. Very old news! [slashdot.org]
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Troll? C'mon, seriously. Slashdot was here when this story happened. It's interesting to look at the historical comments. Sorry I didn't spell that out.
Bullshit (Score:2)
a "fractured internet" is bad for the network, so if it ever came to that it would just mean typing:
tech.slashdot.org.internic
if you wanted to ensure you were being unambiguous. It really would not have been the end of the world.
What Fractured Really Meant (Score:2)
There was a short period of time that almost 1% of the Internet's users could use Kashpureff's root in addition to the real one, but nobody serious was going to pay significant money to only be in Alter-space and not real space. Sure, you might pay $10 to register example.xxx, if example.com had already been bought, but it was obviously a losing deal.
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> a "fractured internet" is bad for the network, so if it ever
> came to that it would just mean typing:
> tech.slashdot.org.internic
Not even that. Simply point /etc/resolv.conf at a DNS server you trust, which is part of a group you trust. That's already happening today. effing greedy big ISPs are hijacking NXDOMAIN results, and people are switching their DNS to OpenDNS or Google
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Yep - all of my devices use OpenDNS, after a local ISP hijacked both Google searches from browser toolbars and dead domains.
I remember alternative dns roots! (Score:1)