Anonymous to shut down The Internet on Saturday to protest SOPA | Hacker News Reader

Anonymous to shut down The Internet on Saturday to protest SOPA

pastebin.com

23 pointsMRonney22 comments

I am a DNS and network engineer. DDoSing the DNS root servers is extremely unlikely to succeed, for multiple reasons:

1. The "root servers" are not 13 physical servers attached to the Internet. Each IP is anycasted from multiple locations around the world. You can validate this by tracerouting to one of the IP's from different points on the Internet. Almost certainly, each of those locations has multiple high-power physical servers handling requests (either with a hardware load balancer or anycast).

2. The people who run the root servers have thought about this already and taken appropriate countermeasures.

3. What many folks do not understand is the root servers do a very very small amount of work. They do not contain records for second-level domains (example.com). Their sole purpose is to hold the NS records that delegate the "." zone to the nameservers of the various TLD's -- .com, .us, .uk, etc. Each of those TLD's has its own set of nameservers that then delegate to other name servers. If you were to configure your NS records in Godaddy or Netsol, those records are served from the TLD's nameservers, not the root nameservers. The root nameservers have zero knowledge of, say, example.com itself. What they do "know" is that the .com nameservers (a.gtld-servers.net through l.gtld-servers.net) do "know" how to resolve the name.

4. As others have said, there is extensive caching in the global DNS system. For example, records for the delegation from "." to "com." have a TTL of 6 days. This means that, theoretically, the root servers can all go totally offline for up to 6 days before the ISPs' caches would start to expire. Even if those caches expire, smarter ISP's will NOT simply drop those records from their cache and starting throwing errors -- they will retain the "stale" cached records until the authoritative nameservers come back online.

Ugh. What purpose is this supposed to serve? Are we supposed to get annoyed and coerced into siding with this group? Let's not kid ourselves - these aren't activists. They're 4chan basement dwellers using the guise of a cause to wreak senseless damage.

Although I don't think they've actually done anything over the last 7 months so this is probably just another empty threat. Wasn't Facebook supposed to go down like a hundred different times?

That title feels almost like it's out of an Onion article. Is this actually plausible?

Not even a little bit, the whole thing was written by someone who has no idea how the internet works. Even if they somehow managed to get all 13 DNS root servers offline at once, most people would never notice since there are several layers of caching between you and the root DNS servers. The vast majority of DNS queries never hit the root servers.

The whole time I was reading this article I was thinking exactly that: with the amount of caching present, no one would even notice.

Considering the fact that they don't understand this basic principle, I doubt they'll come close to taking down 13 DNS servers at once. You can't easily DDoS them (I'm guessing its the only tool they have in their toolbelts).

If they were to actually manage to take down the root DNS servers, then DNS lookups would fail, so for the average user who doesn't know what an IP address is, let alone what one to use or how to enter it, the internet would be taken down. There are a large number of cavets to this exercise though. Firstly, none of those nameservers are actually servers. The IPs point to dozens and dozens and dozens of machines each (keep in mind all of these are queried for most internet traffic in the world.) Billions upon billons of lookups preformed regularly. To overwhelm something of this magnitude would take a lot of effort. Secondly, there is DNS caching done locally, at the local network level, and the ISP level.ISPs generally only cache for a few hours at most, usually much much less. They would have to have a sustained attack to outlive this caching in order to be effective. Thirdly, if this even comes close to happening, some of the smartest people in the networking world will step forward to fix it (remember Slammer, or the network issues when the middle east cables were cut?)

Possible? Yep. Plausible? It just depends on how much force they are putting behind it.

Is anyone else worried about how meticulous this write up is written? I tend to think Anonymous is both good and bad. Good for the citizens, but bad for the government of which citizens rely on. A double edged sword so to speak.

If they do decide to go along with the plan, I support them in their protest. I think Mr. Ben Franklin was right. We should not be bowing to the politicians of the day and should not be giving up our freedom for a little bit more security.

"Good for the citizens"

Fighting for what you believe in is good. Doing so by throwing digital temper tantrums isn't.

If they were able to do this, which I doubt they can, at least it makes this weakness more evident and maybe even force a solution to prevent this from happening.

I still think that they can't pull this off. Additionally I don't understand how this works as a protest. And what message is this sending, really ?

Even if they could do this, I find it difficult to take them seriously as a positive force for change.

The 31st is a day before aprils fools day... perhaps it is just a prank. Over and above, the writing style does not match that of the usual Anonymous letters. It almost sounds like some kid that has never read a book.

That brings up an interesting question: how do you verify Anonymous' identity?

It's more likely that the author's first language is not English, than a child wrote it.

Based on the recent Wikileaks and previous reporting on the Anons, it seems a good portion are not Americans.

I'm glad people are finally starting to realize that Anonymous is merely just a group of adult script kiddies. I was using these tactics when I was 15.

They could only succeed in delaying the propagation of changes to DNS records; ISPs have their own copies.

Well if they can DDOS sites for a few hours, who's to say they couldn't take down the internet?

/sarcasm

Yawn.

Anonymous to [verb] the [noun] on [insert random date] to protest [nothing].

They are really getting old now. There is a proper way to handle protesting SOPA and it was done already. News outlets covered it and a lot of new people were informed about it. Have another blackout day if you want, but be respectful of those who may not totally agree with you.

Tactics like this get no one on your side. You're disrupting people's lives in a negative way by doing something like this.

If they are so mad at bankers and businesses why the hell aren't they doing it on a weekday?

"The greatest enemy of freedom is a happy slave."

They want to make us unhappy.

As a regular Internet user, I can verify that I am not a slave to HN and Wikipedia. I just find them interesting :)

"The greatest enemy of freedom is a happy slave."

...you know, it doesn't follow that making slaves unhappy will net more freedom.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com