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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Okay, first, the chances of youtube.com, or wikipedia (why?) disappearing tomorrow are approximately 0.

That said, a lot of these "solutions" that people are coming up with just end up getting closer and closer to what the DNS already accomplishes.

The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD. The "doomsday" scenario here is that DNS servers stop trusting the root servers, and don't take updates from them.

This is a gigantic headache for network and system administrators. It is not the end of the internet.

If you guys really really care that much, here: http://www.verisigninc.com/en_US/products-and-services/domai...

Apply for access to the .com zone files, download them, and up your own DNS servers. Don't accept any updates from anybody ever and you'll have a much, much, much more complete, much more "you can query this as a daemon" version of these silly lists.

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> "Okay, first, the chances of youtube.com, or wikipedia (why?) disappearing tomorrow are approximately 0."

Funny, the EFF and Google don't seem to think so.

And have you not noticed Wikipedia's donation campaigns? Do you really think they can afford the legal fees associated with fighting SOPA claims every time some corporate/political entity feels slighted by an article and feels like submitting a takedown?

The donations campaigns propel the growth of Wikimedia Foundation. Less than 50% is really directly dedicated to wikipedia website operation. Quite an overhead IMO. With 117 employees and $30 million budget, they can manage I think. They¡ll whine and do yet another campaign if they can't.

"The worst case scenario here is just a fragmented DNS, and the US losing control of the .com TLD."

That is the best case scenario.

Please explain your alternate worst-case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China\

In other words, a reasonably effective implementation that would effect Joe Sixpack.

The US is already abusing their alleged jurisdiction over the .com TLD and unfortunately there doesn't yet seem to be a real risk of fragmentation.

Sorry, remove that final char to use the link. Not sure how that got on there.

You can edit the original post ...

I cannot. The time limit ran out by the time I noticed.

Correct link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall_of_China

By fragmented DNS, do you just mean distributed? Because DNS is already distributed and consistent. We don't have to trade one to get the other.

I assume he means multiple disagreeing roots under control of different organizations.

No by fragmented DNS he means DNS servers in Europe would route you perfectly fine to Megavideo.com but US servers wouldn't. So all you'd have to do is change your DNS address to a European one and bingo.

It's one thing to pass PATRIOT or SOPA, but try passing legislation to create a multi-billion dollar firewall to effectively block other DNS servers and block offending IP addresses.

Isn't this already the case for sites that have been "seized" by the ICE?

But there's already a DNS "root", so in order to have a split DNS, you'd need to "roots", and two completely separate trees of .com, .org. .us, and .co.uk and everything. There wouldn't be any overlap. You might be able to hack something into some of the DNS zones now to give different answers based on geography, but when DNSSEC or DNS Curve are rolled out, it will break completely.

Off topic, but:

  To be considered for acceptance into the program,
  please print and complete the appropriate applications
  and fax the forms to +1-703-421-5828.

Verisign, a company intimately involved with the Internet at every level, wants faxed forms, in the year 2011? For access to the TLD zone files, something technical enough that a sane person must have been involved at some point? I can't decide if it's funny or sad.

I've always heard that faxes may have some kind of legal status that other electronic communications don't (why?), but this is just getting silly.

Did this prevent you from requesting the zone files?

Would it prevent somebody from requesting them who needed them for their business?

(That's why)

Even more mind-blowing: Apple, one of the most forward-looking companies in the world, requires faxed forms for enrollment in their paid dev programs. They won't accept them via email (even though you know the fax number is a fax-to-email setup) and refused my faxed PDFs (copies of an electronic filing) of my articles of incorporation because they weren't authentic (read: photocopied) enough - despite being the authoritative (PDF) copies from the state.

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