Slashdot Mirror
Libyan Internet Flatlined
dnsdude told us about the latest developments regarding rumored Libyan Internet censorship. It appears that massive censorship is occuring with two of the five .ly root name servers being unreachable. It's difficult to tell if this is because of intentionally bad routes, or the result of actual infrastructure damage.
are belong to me. The people love me. I am not a leader, I have no position. I cannot step down.
But you have voluntarily given all your base to me. I am divine protector of your base.
I will never leave. Your base is safe with me.
Some young people have taken drugs which caused them to make poor decisions about their base.
The correct decision is to give all your base to me. I will never leave you. The people's councils honor me with their base.
I am forever.
When I trace to bit.ly it stops in San Jose, CA. They probably have mirrors in several countries and this one happens to be closets for us.
Loading...
Root servers for the ly TLD:
All of these would have to inoperable before all .ly domains would stop resolving, and there's still the matter of caching at intermediate DNS servers until the TTL expires for records. Additionally, bit.ly isn't hosted within Libya. In short, I don't expect bit.ly to be going down over this.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
If you look at the graph on the google page linked in the summary, and expand it to the left, it turns out that Libya's traffic was about 50% lower a few weeks ago, when the revolution started. It's been improving. The "flatline" is suspicious, especially since 3 of the 5 .ly root servers are still up. It also falls in the area of data that's still being collected by Google, so it might be specious.
I posted what I know here :
http://forum.americafree.tv/showthread.php?p=45045
It looks like the undersea cable is fine and BGP is up, but there is no reachability past the landing site. This indicates that there is probably not physical damage, at least to the landing site and the first hop routers, but a cut somewhere after that. If I had to guess, I would guess that Gaddafi or his minions just told the ISPs to shut it down.
As the only Libyan landing site I know of is in Tripoli, this may also cut off the liberated areas in Cyrenaica.
Redundancy in routing is good - an overland link between Benghazi and Alexandria could be very useful right now.
Bit.ly is 168.143.172.53
Can you shorten that IP address for us?
It's not really abusing DNS, but it seems really foolish to found a business that relies upon a (at the time) potentially unstable (and now definitely unstable) foreign country's ccTLD.
Google's shortener, goo.gl, uses Greenland's ccTLD, which is quite stable. Austria (.at), Iceland (.is), and other clever-sounding ccTLDs are in stable countries with good infrastructure. Libya...not so much.
Get a life.
Took you 200 words to fall into that irony.
They should put Quadaffi on "Two and a Half Men" and make Charlie Sheen dictator of Libya.
That'd be cool.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Closest, not closets....
Dude, I'm not the parent.
When I see these pedantic corrections on an internet discussion site, it just hits a nerve with me -
Dude: he was correcting HIS OWN ERROR.
LEARN to read before you try posting.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.