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Re: anyone remember when the root servers were hi-jacked? (fwd)

2002-11-01 10:17:15
Michael,


Thursday, October 31, 2002, 6:28:08 PM, you wrote:
Michael> http://www.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/icann-body.htm#B170
Michael> tells the story as best I could reconstruct it.  There are footnotes to
Michael> the documents I could find.

Notice that Professor Froomkin's "To his detractors" text does not
attempt any balance by offering any other explanation.

As even Prof. Froomkin notes, things were fragile back then. That
included concern over the possibility that NSI would go rogue. NSI
controlled the master root. The one that all others took their data
from. Jon needed to test the ability to switch to a different master
DNS root, to make sure that there were ways to "route around" this
concern over NSI.

That's all the test was.  Jon was clear about the need for this, weeks
before the test.  All anyone needed to do was ask him, rather than
engage in unfounded, inflammatory speculation.

The other point that folks keep forgetting is that Jon had been
issuing operation directives for the root servers since the inception
of the DNS.  How can one "take over" something that one has been
responsible for over its entire existence?

All of the storm and fury has been from people who have had nothing to
do with the running of the DNS, but instead have focused strictly on
the politics of it. (In fact, it was quite interesting to see that a
year of federal inter-agency task force meetings -- including
Magaziner's participation -- took place with most participants having
almost no understanding of DNS technical basics. We had to arrange a
tutorial for them.)

d/
-- 
 Dave Crocker  <mailto:dave(_at_)tribalwise(_dot_)com>
 TribalWise <http://www.tribalwise.com>
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