

Anonymous to shut down The Internet on Saturday to protest SOPA  - MRonney
http://pastebin.com/GFkQnf6e

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tedchs
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.

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naeem
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?

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

~~~
dagw
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.

~~~
green7ea
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).

------
spoiledtechie
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.

~~~
paulhauggis
"Good for the citizens"

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

------
aespinoza
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 ?

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

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razzaj
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.

~~~
tbeseda
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.

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paulhauggis
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.

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

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

/sarcasm

------
jstalin
Yawn.

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stevejabs
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.

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J3L2404
If they are so mad at bankers and businesses why the hell aren't they doing it
on a weekday?

~~~
username3
_"The greatest enemy of freedom is a happy slave."_

They want to make us unhappy.

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

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

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

