US Telco Fined $3 Million in Domain Renewal Blunder (bleepingcomputer.com) 42
Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Sorenson Communications, a Utah-based telecommunications provider, received a whopping $3 million fine from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week for failing to renew a crucial domain name used by a part of the local 911 emergency service. The affected service was the Video Relay System (VRS), a video calling service that telecommunication firms must provide to deaf people and others people with vocal disabilities so they can make video calls to 911 services and use sign language to notify operators of an emergency or crime. According to the FCC, on June 6, Sorenson failed to notice that the domain name on which the VRS 911 service ran had expired, leading to the entire system collapsing shortly after. Utah residents with disabilities were unable to reach 911 operators for almost three days, the FCC discovered. Sorensen noticed its blunder and renewed the domain three days later, on June 8.
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It wasn't an unintended screw up. They have a responsibility to keep the service running. Not only did they fail to renew the domain registration, they failed to notice that the system was down for three days. Gross negligence is deliberate.
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At this level of incompetence, whether or not it was deliberate becomes irrelevant, because the party at fault had a legal duty to be aware of what was going on. The legal boilerplate for this situation is "defendant knew or should have known"
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A) You've confused registrants with registrars. It's the registrant, Sorenson Communications, that's being held liable here, not a registrar like Google, so your comparisons to Google's situation fall apart right from the get-go.
B) Companies that provide 911 service agree to certain legal obligations. Failure to uphold those obligations results in hefty fines because lives are literally at risk. Registrars like Google are under no such obligations to IANA.
C) Speaking of IANA, it, rather than the US governme
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The subject of the thread still lists hosters (of services) in addition to registrars.
"Hosters" (which I think is your incorrect way of referring to hosts) aren't being held liable either, so whether we're talking about registrars or hosts makes no difference. You're still conflating businesses with their clients and your comparison still falls apart right from the get-go. Same as before.
Whatever it is ostensibly, the governance of the Internet is still very much controlled by the US government [...] Many of the root DNS-servers are US-owned...
None of which matters to what you were claiming.
You were trying to argue that Google is obligated to uphold a higher standard because it derives its authority from the USG. That argument only holds water if
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You are hairsplitting. Had this been about the speech of anybody else — including Communists — you would've been as outraged as I am...
Nominally, there is no government on the Internet — indeed, ICANN is a private entity. Are you really comfortable with domain-registrars being in a position to decide, who gets to s
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You are hairsplitting.
If you’re making an argument that Google derives its authority from the USG, it’s not hairsplitting to point out that the USG doesn’t have that authority to delegate in the first place.
Are you really comfortable with domain-registrars being in a position to decide, who gets to speak?
Nope, but I recognize that what I’m comfortable with is thankfully not the basis for law in this country. You’d do well to realize the same.
I'd like you to confirm or deny this stance...
You set up a false dichotomy, so I won’t be taking either of your canned responses, but I will answer the underlying questions.
1) If a domain registrar
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In other words, you want government control over private enterprise, and you don't believe in contracts. Either that, or you're just a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.
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Word up, go find sources that aren't so biased.
Back at you.
All of that was what for a city with a population of just under 400,000. She was making a point that what was getting thru was paltry compared to the need, and that further help was needed.
Her standing in front of the pallets of aid was EXACTLY what she should have done. She was being trans
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-NPR [npr.org]
They can't count, either. (Score:3)
Uh, want to try that arithmetic again?
Re:They can't count, either. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, 8 - 6 = 2, but we can assume that if the issue began on the 6th and was resolved on the 8th, then service was affected for three business days. I'm sure that point (business days of outage) has been made multiple times. I can imagine the author overlooking their error due to thinking, "If service was affected for three days, then the issue must not have been fixed until three days later." This is an especially easy error to make if you're leaving date or numeric placeholders in an article as you're writing it.
Anyway, I think we should be less hard on summary and article authors for simple arithmetic errors like this (that doesn't mean editors shouldn't be doing their due diligence, though).
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Person A: Hey, our domain renew is good until 2017.
Person B: Great, I'll put a reminder on the calendar for 3 years from now.
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Maybe it was only 2.5 days later but they rounded up.
so, these are emergency services? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is there no standardization? why does every telco has its own names registered for services like these? It is like allowing each telco to setup its own emergency number instead of the standardized 911.
Why not a single name, the same everywhere, that the telco can then maintain in there local DNS, and there DNS only?
It is a critical emergency service, right? Then it is worth doing it properly.
Wow - a reasonable fine for a serious offence (Score:3)
Compare and contrast the slaps on the wrist that BIG companies get. The EU's approach of basing fines on a percentage of international turnover gets the attention of the monopolies of Silicon Valley...
I use to work for them (Score:2)
and for 3 days of non service for this one thing the fine is pretty high for a company their size. Of course they could have grown more but not with the way the FCC was scaling back..
Also, with most of their devel app guys I'm surprised it only took them 3 days to realize and fix it. "What do you mean you're having performance issues on the server, it worked fine on my laptop"
This should be criminal (Score:3)
The designer and their managers who allowed a critical emergency service to be dependent on an internet domain registration should be jailed for gross negligence.
When failure of a service would mean lives are at risk DO NOT make that service dependent upon resources from 3rd parties that can be terminated at will or that are subject to natural disruptions with no consequences for the 3rd parties (Or agreement with them that the services are used for functions critical to life).
A DNS domain registration can be terminated or suspended at will at the decision of a domain registrar or registry for any number of potential reasons
(although it is rare; a domain can even be terminated by mistake or hijacked by a malicious adversary in some cases), or DNS servers connected to the internet can be nuked by evil folks in a DDoS attack, or temporarily suspended by various service providers for network maintenance; Or various situations on the internet under 3rd party control and no SLA can cause temporary outages of access to the DNS.