Photo Op: You too can have your picture taken with a.root-servers.net

Wed Nov 14 20:48:10 UTC 2001

These is something singularly unnerving about the following statement:

"What cheers us about this kind of visit is the fact that the kind of
security measures we have in place are getting better and better known,"
VeriSign Director of Public Policy Michael Aisenberg told Newsbytes.

Not "the kind of security measures we have in place increasingly assure our
customers of integrity..." but advertising your security measures for their
own sake can only have negative security ramifications.

Deepak Jain
AiNET

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
Daniel Golding
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 11:04 AM
To: Sean Donelan; nanog at merit.edu
Subject: RE: Photo Op: You too can have your picture taken with
a.root-servers.net

Interestingly, this revolving photo op with the A root name server has been
going on for several years. To those who are not very technical, there is
something uniquely reassuring about the idea that the internet has a
"center" or a "brain". It is difficult to say why, but I speculate that the
idea that the internet is easier to cripple or destroy helps government
officials sleep at night, because it maintains the illusion of control.
Distributed systems are much harder to control, and are disconcerting to
those who's task is control of systems rather than their perpetuation.

- Daniel Golding

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu]On Behalf Of
> Sean Donelan
> Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2001 1:03 AM
> To: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Photo Op: You too can have your picture taken with
> a.root-servers.net
>
>
>
>
> I don't whether to laugh or cry.  Its just a computer.
>
> http://www.washtech.com/news/netarch/13672-1.html
>
> If you destroyed the copy of the US Constitution in the National Archives
> in Washington DC, would that mean the end of the US Government? If someone
> broke into NARA and scribbled a new amendment on the tail of the
> parchment, would the US Government be bound to follow what ever he wrote
> on the Constitution?  No, of course not.
>
> The Root Zone files aren't unique historical documents, and there is
> nothing special about the copy on a.root-servers.net.  If a tornado blew
> through Verisign's offices tomorrow, would it mean the end of the
> Internet?  No. If someone corrupted Verisign's files, would that mean we
> have to follow the bogus records? No, we'd clean them up.  Or more likely,
> the other operators would rollback their zone files to the previous known
> good copy.
>
> Would it disrupt our operations. Yes.  Would it be irrecoverable? No.
> The root files are important business records, and I expect the custodian
> to take reasonable precautions appropriate for their value.  Do I expect
> to see machine-gun nests outside Verisign's office?  No.
> a.root-servers.net is just a piece of hardware.  If it was destroyed,
> we've got more.
>
>
> http://www.sms800.com/
> http://www.dtc.org/
>
>