U.S. keeps control of Internet computers
 

One of the more interesting parts.

The computers in question serve as the Internet's master directories and tell Web browsers and e-mail programs how to direct traffic. Internet users around the world interact with them every day, likely without knowing it. Policy decisions could at a stroke make all Web sites ending in a specific suffix essentially unreachable.



http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/interne....ap/index.html

eeek... here we go again

I tried to tell people this months ago.
no one seemed to get the message.

This really isn't that big of a deal. There are root servers outside of the US now. Plus if they actually tried to blackhole a whole TLD I'd be willing to bet that netowrk admins would work around it. You could probably set things so packets being sent to one of the US roots get forwarded to a root outside the US or new ones that people would setup. Thats the beauty of the internet, fuckwit governments really can't get an iron grip on it.

thanks for that cnn article link you posted man.

YEP. I can't agree with you more. 100% concurrence, man. :thumbsup

Would you care to post details on how that would be done? As far as I know the root servers control the Internet. You can attack them and bring them down ( at great risk to your personal freedom), but put up your own???? You'd have to have the "keys" at one or more of the major corporations that handle Internet traffic.

You could set up a second network of maybe even other TLDs? But control of .com etc. - That is under tight control. Attack yes (this is NOT a recomendation to try), control nope.

Ok, first realize that regardless of what the article says all the root servers are not in the US. If you look on www.root-servers.org you will see that there are root servers in multiple countries. Secondly there are multiple copies of netsol's .com database out there. I would imagine more than a few foreign countries have it ligitimately.

If the US blackholes .com in such a way that it just redirects all .com addresses to a bogus address it can be fixed. The first step would be for a TLD DNS server to be setup with the .com database outside of the US. Then the root DNS servers outside the US can start redirecting all .com traffic to the new .com server. Inside the US ISPs can start dropping all packets for any of the US based root server IPs. This will cause all DNS queries to goto the ones outside the US which would have the correct .com information.

It is by no means perfect, and would need the cooperation of sysadmins inside the US. I think that is a reasonable assumtion though, they generally hate uncle sam screwing them in the ass as well.