
The Duct Tape Holding the Internet Together (2017) - susam
https://medium.com/thisiscala/the-duct-tape-holding-the-internet-together-12118be60ff1
======
dredmorbius
In the events anyone thinks that:

1\. Recent shenanigans of DNS registries are anything new.

2\. The recommendation to "host your services (Web, mail, etc.) on your own
domain" addresses all the sharecropping and homesteading problems of SaaS /
FAANG based solutions.

3\. Any of this scales to the level of more than a minuscule fraction of the
population deploying their own systems on their own domain namespace.

The evidence suggests flaws in this thinking.

I've been revisiting the history, motivations, and assumptions behind the
domain name system as it was first being discussed, in 1973, 46 years ago.
There's a good compendium of relevant RFCs here:

[https://livinginternet.com/i/iw_dns_history.htm](https://livinginternet.com/i/iw_dns_history.htm)

Though strongly recommend going to the source RFCs themselves, starting with
RFC 606:

[http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc606.txt](http://www.rfc-
editor.org/rfc/rfc606.txt)

Also: 608, 623, 625, 805, 810, 811, 819, 830, 881, 882, and 883.

------
dredmorbius
And for a set of recent related stories:

There's the dot-org self-dealing fraud / corruption, with a compilation by
dang (and others) of HN submissions here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21668003](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21668003)

Brian Krebs on obtaining a .gov domain:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21644857](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21644857)

Susam's "Sinkholed" story of having a domain appropriated by Shadowserver:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700139)

And a set of searches for lost, stolen, or hijacked domains:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=domain%20lost&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=domain%20stolen&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=domain%20hijacked&sort=byPopularity&type=story)

"How we nearly lost our domain, and how to prevent this"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322966)

Kissmetrics has either sold or lost control of their domain, with no warning

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17416996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17416996)

"Ask HN: Host Gator Hijacked my domain name. What should I do?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968233](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4968233)

"Domain Hijacking with a Fax"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6535904](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6535904)

"How to get a stolen domain back?"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3873004)

... and many more.

I'd posted a thread to Mastodon a week or so back asking if we're simply doing
DNS wrong for the current era. Though getting it _right_ would be a challenge.

[https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103184864263833546](https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/103184864263833546)

Revisiting the foundations (see the LivingInternet link in my earlier comment)
might be useful. Not because they're correct, necessarily, but to examine them
for flawed or no-longer-valid presumptions.

