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The "Daily Stormer", a neo-Nazi website that has been having trouble staying online since Charlottesville, has once again been shutdown.
According to The Verge:
The neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer briefly returned to the web today, using a new URL and a string of new hosts to dodge the bans that took it off the internet last week. The site reappeared this morning at the address Punished-stormer.com, apparently using Dreamhost as both a host and DNS provider.
[note: url modified]
Shortly after the new site became public, Anonymous groups began a denial-of-service attack against it, targeting the Dreamhost DNS infrastructure that makes the site accessible to the rest of the web. The result was nearly two hours of intermittent downtime for the countless sites using Dreamhost's DNS infrastructure.
In WWII, things like this were called "collateral damage", where innocent casualties were necessary in order to get at the Nazis themselves. But is this sort of action legitimate on the internet? Especially by non-governmental organizations?
Also reported at https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/08/dreamhost-ddos-attack/
Related story: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/21/16180614/charlottesville-daily-stormer-alt-right-internet-domain
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Saturday August 26 2017, @11:47PM (9 children)
You have only demonstrated that you do not understand the problem. DDoS against DNS is of course a solvable problem. But the central control point of DNS where a site can simply be forbidden to register ANY name isn't fixable unless DNS itself is redesigned from scratch. The current system won't even permit a TLD to be registered, say ".banned" since wrong thinkers are simply not permitted to register any domainname anywhere and the efforts to launch a registrar will fail for the reason those who control the root server simply will not permit it. Still think giving ICANN away to people who reject the idea of a 1st Amendment was a good idea?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 27 2017, @02:58AM (1 child)
I interpreted his comment as a means of creating a DNS system that is not owned by any particular entity or person -- more or less a distributed or peer-to-peer type system where anyone could add domain name (provided it doesn't already exist) and point it at a particular server. It would be tricky figuring out how to handle changes or deletions of a domain but perhaps this could be accomplished with a public/private key pair so that changes could only be made by the private key holder.
The current DNS system could remain intact and an un-owned uncontrolled system could exist in parallel, accessible by a browser plugin or something along those lines. Maybe it already works this way with Tor, though having never fooled around out there, I don't really know.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 31 2017, @09:59PM
Yes, it does work that way with Tor. [torproject.org]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 27 2017, @11:44AM (6 children)
You have only demonstrated that you do not understand what "decentralized, byzantine fault tolerant" actually implies.
Take "decentralized" - how is one able to deny the registration of a "name/IP" pair?
Read about Byzantine fault tolerance [wikipedia.org] then tell me how anyone can be banned once ownership is established?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday August 27 2017, @01:21PM (5 children)
Stop sperging. Math can't fix this problem, stop and rethink until you understand the actual problem. Any attempt along your lines only works if domain names could look like .onion names, (i.e. mostly arbitrary hashes) which defeats the primary purpose of DNS. Short recognizable names requires a centralized registrar to avoid namespace collisions, even if only for the TLDs, and they must be apolitical to be universally accepted. That has now been demonstrated to require a level of civilized behavior beyond our current social tech. All that remains is to enjoy the decline.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 27 2017, @01:29PM (4 children)
Bu the decree of whom?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday August 27 2017, @01:36PM (3 children)
Users. I know, alien concept right?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Sunday August 27 2017, @01:53PM (2 children)
You say the users decreed the namespace collision can only be solved by a central authority?
Stupid users, even more stupid the engineers to listen to their solutions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @07:29AM (1 child)
Namespace collision can be worked-around with money. To prevent people squatting on zillions of names for free, you'd start charging money for them. Then those with enough monero/equivalent will own all the best names. And they'll be happy to lease them to others, subject to Terms & Conditions.
End effect, not a big difference for the 0.1%.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday August 28 2017, @10:31AM
Or ask them to mine a pseudo-crypto-coin - say, about 30 minutes GPU or 6 hours CPU.
The ownership of the coin is synonym with the ownership of the domain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford