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.'"
Re:So then, (Score:3, Interesting)
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: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.
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.