From: Sten Drescher <dreschs@mpd.tandem.com>
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 1995 07:54:16 +0800
To: sameer <sameer@c2.org>
Subject: Re: censored? corrected [Steve Pizzo cited in The Spotlight]
In-Reply-To: <199511021624.KAA05751@galil.austnsc.tandem.com.>
Message-ID: <199511022000.OAA09507@galil.austnsc.tandem.com.>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


sameer <sameer@c2.org> said:

>>  Is it?  This is the _one_ thing in the article (is that term giving
>> it too much legitimacy?) that I whought was barely true.  Whoever
>> controls the root level DNS servers effectively controls the
>> Internet.  I postulated a couple of months ago about how the US Govt
>> might attempt to censor the rest of the world: "Remove
>> lurid.porno.site.other-country from your DNS system within 72 hours
>> or we will remove references to your DNS servers from the root level
>> servers.".  (I also speculated that if the US Govt tried doing this,
>> that an 'underground' DNS system would form almost immediately.)
>> 

s> 	The US govt. doesn't run the root nameservers, nor are all the
s> root nameservers within US jurisdiction.

	Granted, the US Govt doesn't run the US-based root servers.
But, if an Internet 'Decency' law was passed, they certainly could try
to threaten the US-based root server maintainers to make the cascading
threats.  And, as I understand the way DNS resolution works, address
requests go down to your root domain then up from the other root domain,
i.e., for me to find out what c2.org's address is, my system requests
from:
NS mpd.tandem.com
NS tandem.com
NS com
NS org

If this is correct, if the com NS has the entry for the org NS, I won't
be able to resolve those names.  Of course, explicit IP addresses and
/etc/hosts entries would still work.

-- 
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