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When the Internet Nearly Fractured
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.'"
Such a brave, heroic man, to drive his business by committing cache poisoning intercepts.
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.
the crucial juncture in history is always the juncture of the past and the future, because it is the only place where we can ever change history. personally, I think you missed option 3. All of the above. Right now both 1 and 2 are true and they will continue to battle for the foreseeable future.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
Alternate DNS roots exist today.
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?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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 should never have been placed following the death of IANA.
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.
And he totally knew you!
You would sit at the back, never raised your hand, and refused to sign the attendance sheet.
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.
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/ 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.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
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/. 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, and we network old-timers have never forgiven you AOL'ers for ruining our network.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
"When all this is over, we want this guy to get a medal. Then we want him locked up."
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
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.
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.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
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).
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.
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.
Football Odds
Isn't jacking off one of the fundamentals of the internet?
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.
"and we network old-timers have never forgiven you AOL'ers for ruining our network." Amen!
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
I suspect it's 19,045 lines of random advertising domains pointed at 127.0.0.1, plus your own hostname pointing to 127.0.0.1 also. But yes, it's much longer. Much much longer. You win the HOSTS epeen contest, as long as "functional" isn't a criterion.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Strangely enough, things like communicating, banking, finding information, sending messages to others, etc. all used to happen before the internet, and if necessary, could continue happening without the internet.
"But this one goes to 11!"
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.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
Deleted
>>> 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 tiny specialized networks is useful as suggesting we all direct dial the New York Times to have the news read to us each morning.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yes, an authoritative central DNS is counter to the basic premise of the Internet. But, if a centralized naming source does not exist, in order to defend Trademarks, companies would need to spend more money finding all DNS names on all DNS registries to prove in court they were defending their trademark. Far cheaper to use political contributions and power to ensure only a single controllable Domain Name Service exists.
Thus we see the effect of the increasing implementation of business needs over community needs on the Internet.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
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.
> 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 bias or may be factually wrong. Even the most respected houses of publishing have their agendas. In my opinion, Wikipedia is upfront about its "vulnerability" and, therefore, people read it more critically than traditional media.
> Or if your bank account access could be spoofed
> Or your emails could be read by anyone
These cases are solved by digital encryption, specifically, one that is not plagued with backdoors. In the "social control" version of the Internet, we'd either be denied the right to encrypt, or the encryption mechanisms would have backdoors mandated by the governments. It follows that in the "anarchy and freedom" version of the Internet, where there is non-backdoor encryption, spoofings and eavesdropping would not occur.
It is important to note that, right now, we are closer to social control extreme on this subject, seeing as our encryption models rely on authorities supposed honest (the certificate authorities). A sufficiently powerful government could influence CAs on collaborating in spoofings and eavesdropping activities. We cannot observe this signing process - right now, we simply assume CAs are to be trusted, because we feel that governments haven't sunk so low in the social control measure. Should social control show its ugly face in the future, the only way we could achieve real secrecy and authenticity of communications would be having the sender and the receiver directly exchange public keys - preferably in person. By any metric, this is impractical, and could seriously hamper commercial usage of the network.
> Or even a reputable site by a known firm with a reputation to protect would use online tools to deceive
Yes, that indeed is a problem on the "anarchy and freedom" version of Internet. But how, exactly, does the "social control" version address this problem?
> What if lone individuals could topple governments and cause international diplomatic incidents?
So, we should suppress any speech that rats out illegal or inhuman actions to avoid embarassing governments? If a lone individual is aware and has evidence a government is doing something wrong, it is his duty to expose it. It does not matter if there are multiple nations involved. A perfect example of this would be e
extraordinary renditions, waterboarding, Abu Grahib and yes, the cablegate. The more government critters are afraid of being exposed, the better they will behave, and the more the people have control over their leaders.
--
Human societies were built upon the trust of individuals between each other. Problem is, the larger a group of people gets, the less we appreciate the externalities that our actions inflict upon others. We trust governments, far away as they are from our daily reality, to care for problems we are not specialized enough nor able to care. This trust depends on there being good checks and balances; social control of Internet is a weapon too powerful to be satisfactorily checked.
One problem that a lot of people have is that "one somebody" is the same for the world. You don't have a root.hints file broken down per country TLD. And even then, somebody has to maintain the root.hints file.
.com, .edu, .net and .org TLDs. The United States never transitioned away from those domains in favor of its own .us TLD. As a result, the majority of organizations in the United States continue to use them. It wouldn't really be an issue except that organizations from around the world like to use them, too. So, are they de-facto extensions of the .us TLD, or are they extensions of a .world TLD?
.us TLD?
The other major problem is with the use of the
So, if a root.hints file was created with a hint for each TLD, who would control the big four? An entity of (or delegated by) the US government, or an international entity such as the ITU? If it was the latter, how many US companies would rush to move their primary domains under a
I think you missed the joke.
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.
I guess if it is longer than a tweet, it's too long.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
"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.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
And then it was. True story.
tl;dr pls sum.<=140 char
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.
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.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
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?
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
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.
i totally forgot! they were fun ... for two days.
really it was supposed to be a revolution/ riot thing. but i think it was so little of a nucance ot had virtually no impact. nothink like cutting internet for an entire country(a nucance that luckyly backfired spectacularly).
"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 just the first. Point is though, if they're out of sync they're completely useless so saying "if could fragment" is like saying "that server could go down". Uh, yeah, that's a bad thing and needs to be fixed before it's usable.
And in fact the only time the net ever had a collision in TLD-space was when ICANN gave .biz to somebody else, despite it being run 6 years continually and promoted actively by somebody else giving us the irony that the organization charged with keeping the dns "stable" has been the only destabilizing force in the history of dns. You can make up all the reasons why the current .biz poeple should have it, but traditionally when you deploy something on the net it pretty much stays there, it's unusual to some have somebody come along and go "yeah, real nice all this you built here. we're giving it to somebody else" and any excuse the current owners have is imo just bullshit rationalization.
But then this is an industry based on theft, keep in mind Sun was started by the commission of a federal crime when a bunch of gear was pilfered from stanford, and there's always the "gosh what happened to the core servers" in the pre-icann days. So I'm not surprised, but it all does make me throw up in my mouth a little bit.
Disclaimer: i'm the blond in the pic in TFA.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
Need Mercedes parts ?
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.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
"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 company in san jose can't use that domain name even though it's free because of prior ip rights? bzzzzzzzt, you lose gain.
used to be, kids, before "they" were in charge, you'd publish the name and begin using it. look at uucp maps, or usenet newsgroup names or any of the other legacy network lists of names. there's nothing special about dns that needs a (purportedly) "open and transparent" organization using a "multi stakeholder model" (that the fcc recently flat out said just doesn't work and won't use it) to administer names of nodes on the work.
ending on a joke: what wold happen to the network if a nuke took out ICANN and all it's staffers?
nothing. seriously.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Yes, with Cheetos in one hand and Mountain Dew in the oth.. wait....
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
"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.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
It's become so muddled, does it even matter? As a yank I've seen a few recent commercials advertising .co (GoDaddy is one, did it in the SuperBowl) and .tv has always been popular too. Many (American) people don't understand and I had to explain .co wasn't a typo. In addition to your points about global companies, with all these attempts at being clever on country tlds, it's very blurred.
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.
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.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
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 able to get a domain name without providing your True Name and ICBM\\\\Lawsuit Address.
Unlike some people, I didn't mind that the Ad-Hoc Committee's first seven domain names were pretty lame and boring - it's a process the world only gets to do once, so it's a lot better to practice it on namespaces nobody cares much about like .FIRM and .NOM, so they can do the job right for more valuable names like .INC, .GMBH, .LLC, .SA, etc. But the takeover by ICANN prevented even those from happening, so we end up with a flat cluttered .COM namespace instead of a more complex and meaningful one.
ICANN accomplished a few more things for its friends in power along the way - delaying DNSSEC and to some extent IPv6, and making it much harder to do experimentally-structured namespaces (with the exception of .museum, which was interesting.) Some things I'll ascribe mostly to incompetence rather than malice - because they really didn't want new TLDs, they didn't do any research into non-7-bit namespaces, so by the time the international-language crowd put enough pressure on them to Do Something, they adopted the appallingly-broken Punycode stuff (which I think came from NetSol, but I could easily be wrong about that.) I was especially annoyed that they asserted control over the IPv6 namespace, because fundamentally they care about Intellectual Property, not the Internet Protocol, and they made it hard for people to get official space for research purposes by charging a lot for it, as opposed to carving up 1/256th or 1/4096th of it and saying "it's experimental, go play with it, have fun!"
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yeah he's branching out with a few different socks... just can't get rid of his quoting style though.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
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.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
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.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.