Interesting new dns failures

Douglas Otis dotis at mail-abuse.org
Fri May 25 08:54:49 UTC 2007



On May 24, 2007, at 10:45 PM, John Levine wrote:

>> I ask you: What would you suggest? It's quite hard to craft  
>> technical solutions to policy failures.
>
> Since the registrar business has degenerated into a race to the  
> bottom, I don't see anything better than setting a floor that is  
> the minimal allowable bottom.  Since ICANN has neither the  
> inclination nor the competence to do that, and they have no control  
> over ccTLDs anyway, that means (egad!) regulation.
>
> Yeah, I know the Internet is all over the world, but as a  
> participant in the London Action Plan, an informal talking shop of  
> the bits of governments that deal with online crime, spam, etc., I  
> can report that pretty much all of the countries that matter  
> realize there's a problem, and a lot of them have passed or will  
> pass laws whether we like it or not.  So it behooves us to engage  
> them and help them pass better rather than worse laws.

Agreed, but adding a preview process doesn't cost much and would help  
establish stability.  There are millions of domains churning every  
day.  Just keeping track of which domains are new is costly.  Once it  
becomes common place for providers to withhold DNS information of new  
domains, does it really make sense to permit domain records to change  
frequently and within milliseconds after some holding period?  While  
provisions should be established for granting exceptions, requiring a  
12 hour zone preview before going "live" should lead to significant  
reductions in the amount of criminal activity depending upon this  
insane agility that thwarts tracking and takedowns.

Allow security entities time to correlate upcoming domain changes,  
and this swamp will drain rapidly.

-Doug



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