Dictators, Libya, and the Unreliable Internet

[ Thanks to James
Maguire for this link. ]

“I am sure there is a story why the University of
Oregon is a name server for Libya (and I am sure that someone
seeing this will post a reason why). This is just one of many such
instances where seemingly random places and people house servers in
the greater good of the overall Internet. Poking around the IANA
name directory I found psg.com as the name server for a few country
domains, whoever they are.

“What this little exercise brings up is how dependent we are on
the kindness of others when it comes to the Internet. In the case
of using Bit.ly, or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or even Twitter to
promote our content or provide links to our own servers, we think
we know whom we are dealing with. But we still trust these
businesses to act responsively and stay in business. Look at how
many times Twitter’s Fail Whale appears, and there have been plenty
of outages with other sites.”

Complete
Story