False information: CEO of Versign facts are wrong

Fri Oct 17 16:47:35 UTC 2003

> This factoid has been proven false multiple times, in multiple forums over
> the last year. Its incredible that a CEO of a company that claims DNS
> expertise wouldn't know this was false. One particular "internet
> security" company was PINGing the root servers, and some of the root
> server operators turned off ping.  The root servers themselves were
> unaffected (except maybe one operated by the US Military).

It might be a matter of interpretation.  According to
http://d.root-servers.org/october21.txt:

   2.1. Some root name servers were unreachable from many parts of the
   global Internet due to congestion from the attack traffic delivered
   upstream/nearby.  While all servers continued to answer all queries they
   received (due to successful overprovisioning of host resources), many
   valid queries were unable to reach some root name servers due to attack-
   related congestion effects, and thus went unanswered.

While I'm not trying to act as Sclavos' apologist, I think you have to
be careful about how you respond to this particular claim of his.  You 
can't dismiss it out-of-hand.  Misleading?  Yes.  Flat out false?  You'd
have to be more convincing.