Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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" -
Isn't jacking off one of the fundamentals of the internet?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!