7 ms·

In a weird sneaker-net way we have implemented a human DNS

77 points by davewiner 16y ago

wwortiz 16y ago
I think there is some lack of technical knowledge with the people who are running wikileaks as they are still using the same free dns service with a new domain rather than switching to another dns that might be able to handle their traffic (DDOS) with a known domain name. (everydns.net is the dns service they are using)
- qjz 16y ago
  Since moving a host to another IP address practically requires temporarily setting a low TTL (which may have been what actually caused the DDoS), creating an entirely new domain with a high TTL is a reasonable (albeit desperate) attempt to reduce the load on the authoritative nameserver. I doubt it's a lack of technical knowledge as much as it is lack of resources in what amounts to a perfect storm (hot potato content, inherent DNS weakness, scalability during surge of popularity, etc.).
  - wwortiz 16y ago
    I was coupling it with the fact that they used the same dns service that previously dropped them.
commieneko 16y ago
In Soviet Russia ... no wait, seriously ... in Soviet Russia, when they tried to control copy machines and fax machines, people used typewriters, pen and ink, and good old sneaker net to create and distribute their samizdat.
- eru 16y ago
  They also cut musical records into X-Ray plates.
- bonaldi 16y ago
  This works both ways. When everyone can see the communiques, the communiques go offline.
  - sedachv 16y ago
    That's exactly what Assange wants to do - make it more inconvenient for people in power to collude in secret. What's really working both ways here is the samizdat analogy. Wikileaks is the next logical step after samizdat in the fight against tyranny.
    - bonaldi 16y ago
      Depends on how much you trust them, really. What you call collusion is, for them, co-operation. There were a lot of powerful internal voices in the security industry against the kind of online information-sharing that makes a leak like this possible. The reason they were overruled was because 9/11 in particular showed how badly joined up the information services were. Now the pendulum will swing the other way again, inevitably. I'm not yet convinced this a great outcome. Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits? The "taking on tyranny" rhetoric surrounding wikileaks is overheated, too. Assange is taking on the softest Western governments; the ones who will go after him with arrest warrants. Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning.
      - sedachv 16y ago
        "Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits?" Why do you think Wikileaks is only about the US? Right now the cables leaked out are from the US, but the point is to do this to every government. Everyone opposed to statism and nationalism benefits. "Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning." Except Litvinenko wasn't interested in revealing state secrets, but in making schemes with Russian oligarchs. Which is probably why he's the only Soviet or Russian defector to have died under suspicious circumstances since 1959.
- stevenbedrick 16y ago
  I'm reminded of the scene in "The Lives of Others" where the Stasi typewriter guy is giving a presentation in which he details exactly what model and make of typewriter every writer and journalist in East Berlin uses.
Abid 16y ago
"Amazon cuts them off, then says the Lieberman call had nothing to do with it. We have no reason to doubt Amazon. It's consistent with their philosophy of not taking sides in political battles." Seriously? Is there some memo addressing this self-evident truth that I missed? What Amazon did was politically expedient. That doesn't mean they didn't take sides.
- Estragon 16y ago
  From the rest of the essay, I got the impression that he is giving them the benefit of the doubt, but finds it implausible, given all the other friction wikileaks is experiencing.
- jerf 16y ago
  "We have no reason to doubt Amazon" != "It is clearly obvious that their stated motivation is true." It's a claim that there isn't a lot of evidence for the claim that Amazon has bowed to politics in the past, which is not the same as saying that they didn't this time. I do not have enough evidence to judge the claim myself, I'm just observing what you're reading the text as is not what it says. I would also point out that large service hosts also have a vested interest in resisting government intrusions, because it's bad for Amazon to have a reputation of trashing your service every time some government somewhere burbles something to them. Exactly how "expedient" this is overall is actually a tricky thing to judge and the evidence isn't all one-sided. Again, I don't have enough information to judge.
- StrawberryFrog 16y ago
  Sarcasm.
Estragon 16y ago
At the end a respondant mentions a torrent offering the wikileaks information. Anyone got a link to it? I am having trouble finding it.
- Estragon 16y ago
  Found it: http://www.alivetorrents.com/torrent/9087183/wikileaks-cablegate-20101203-mirror http://www.alivetorrents.com/torrent/9087183/wikileaks-cable...
  - Groxx 16y ago
    size: 8.50mb I doubt that's all of it.
    - Estragon 16y ago
      No, it's about 0.25% of it by number of cables released, to be precise.
  - ghostDancer 16y ago
    It's only a small part of all of it. In TPB you can find like 30 now and going up : http://thepiratebay.org/search/cablegate/0/99/0 http://thepiratebay.org/search/cablegate/0/99/0
- il 16y ago
  The "insurance" torrent contains all of the (unredacted) cables and other damaging information in encrypted form. If Wikileaks can't keep their site up, they just might release the password.
- andrewcooke 16y ago
  There are daily, updated releases of the cables available to date. There is not, as far as I know, a torrent of the entire dataset (it is being released piecewise). These torrents are trivial to find on google, etc. https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=wikileaks+cable+torrent https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=wikileaks+cable+torren... There is also a torrent of the "insurance" file, but no-one (publicly) knows what that contains.
sudont 16y ago
Well, they can always just twitter their current IP... And if their servers are shut down, create checksummed files released into the bittorrent cloud. Eventually this will either end sanely, or in another Great Firewall.
- eldenbishop 16y ago
  Twitter would make a fine DNS actually.
  - wmf 16y ago
    History of unreliability, check. Centralized, check. Business model that has nothing to do with replacing DNS, check. Will probably give in to the US government without a fight, ?
pyre 16y ago
Saying that a torrent can't be DDoS'd is wrong. The tracker can be DDoS's and DHT doesn't seem (at least to me) to be as good at distribution as using a tracker.
- cryptoz 16y ago
  I'm sure that there are at least 10 - 20 different trackers, though, that are tracking this torrent. If they all disappear, more will pop up.
  - borism 16y ago
    the problem with official cablegate torrents is that there are very few trackers in them and DHT is reportedly disabled. Not sure why they did it this way.
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  Aren't central trackers a bit out of style by now? I thought all the cool kids were using magnet links these days.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- ZoFreX 16y ago
  DHT and Peer Exchange are just about good enough to download a torrent in the absence of a tracker, albeit with a much longer "spin up" time than usual. If tens of thousands of people were all on one torrent, and most of them had DHT / PE enabled, it should work pretty well. And of course as cryptoz pointed out, there's no shortage of trackers to use. If more are needed, it would be cheap and easy to make a few yourself, opentracker should use almost no resources.
guelo 16y ago
What I don't understand is EveryDNS's claim that the DDoS was affecting them. Why would the bots be making repeated DNS requests? It seems like an efficient bot would cache the IP in order to speed up the flood.
- wmf 16y ago
  Is the DoS targeted against WikiLeaks or EveryDNS? Attackers have been known to target DNS servers instead of HTTP servers if that's the weakest point.
known 16y ago
http://goo.gl/fGrjo http://goo.gl/fGrjo
known 16y ago
http://bit.ly/WiKiLeaks http://bit.ly/WiKiLeaks

77 points by davewiner 16y ago

I think there is some lack of technical knowledge with the people who are running wikileaks as they are still using the same free dns service with a new domain rather than switching to another dns that might be able to handle their traffic (DDOS) with a known domain name. (everydns.net is the dns service they are using)

qjz 16y ago
Since moving a host to another IP address practically requires temporarily setting a low TTL (which may have been what actually caused the DDoS), creating an entirely new domain with a high TTL is a reasonable (albeit desperate) attempt to reduce the load on the authoritative nameserver. I doubt it's a lack of technical knowledge as much as it is lack of resources in what amounts to a perfect storm (hot potato content, inherent DNS weakness, scalability during surge of popularity, etc.).
- wwortiz 16y ago
  I was coupling it with the fact that they used the same dns service that previously dropped them.

commieneko 16y ago

In Soviet Russia ... no wait, seriously ... in Soviet Russia, when they tried to control copy machines and fax machines, people used typewriters, pen and ink, and good old sneaker net to create and distribute their samizdat.

eru 16y ago
They also cut musical records into X-Ray plates.
bonaldi 16y ago
This works both ways. When everyone can see the communiques, the communiques go offline.
- sedachv 16y ago
  That's exactly what Assange wants to do - make it more inconvenient for people in power to collude in secret. What's really working both ways here is the samizdat analogy. Wikileaks is the next logical step after samizdat in the fight against tyranny.
  - bonaldi 16y ago
    Depends on how much you trust them, really. What you call collusion is, for them, co-operation. There were a lot of powerful internal voices in the security industry against the kind of online information-sharing that makes a leak like this possible. The reason they were overruled was because 9/11 in particular showed how badly joined up the information services were. Now the pendulum will swing the other way again, inevitably. I'm not yet convinced this a great outcome. Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits? The "taking on tyranny" rhetoric surrounding wikileaks is overheated, too. Assange is taking on the softest Western governments; the ones who will go after him with arrest warrants. Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning.
    - sedachv 16y ago
      "Shouldn't diplomatic staff be able to send back accurate assessments of political figures in countries where the US has interests? If internal comms are sanitised for potential public exposure, who benefits?" Why do you think Wikileaks is only about the US? Right now the cables leaked out are from the US, but the point is to do this to every government. Everyone opposed to statism and nationalism benefits. "Were he actually to take on tyranny he knows he'd end up in a London clinic with radiation poisoning." Except Litvinenko wasn't interested in revealing state secrets, but in making schemes with Russian oligarchs. Which is probably why he's the only Soviet or Russian defector to have died under suspicious circumstances since 1959.
stevenbedrick 16y ago
I'm reminded of the scene in "The Lives of Others" where the Stasi typewriter guy is giving a presentation in which he details exactly what model and make of typewriter every writer and journalist in East Berlin uses.

Abid 16y ago

"Amazon cuts them off, then says the Lieberman call had nothing to do with it. We have no reason to doubt Amazon. It's consistent with their philosophy of not taking sides in political battles." Seriously? Is there some memo addressing this self-evident truth that I missed? What Amazon did was politically expedient. That doesn't mean they didn't take sides.

Estragon 16y ago
From the rest of the essay, I got the impression that he is giving them the benefit of the doubt, but finds it implausible, given all the other friction wikileaks is experiencing.
jerf 16y ago
"We have no reason to doubt Amazon" != "It is clearly obvious that their stated motivation is true." It's a claim that there isn't a lot of evidence for the claim that Amazon has bowed to politics in the past, which is not the same as saying that they didn't this time. I do not have enough evidence to judge the claim myself, I'm just observing what you're reading the text as is not what it says. I would also point out that large service hosts also have a vested interest in resisting government intrusions, because it's bad for Amazon to have a reputation of trashing your service every time some government somewhere burbles something to them. Exactly how "expedient" this is overall is actually a tricky thing to judge and the evidence isn't all one-sided. Again, I don't have enough information to judge.
StrawberryFrog 16y ago
Sarcasm.

Estragon 16y ago

At the end a respondant mentions a torrent offering the wikileaks information. Anyone got a link to it? I am having trouble finding it.

Estragon 16y ago
Found it: http://www.alivetorrents.com/torrent/9087183/wikileaks-cablegate-20101203-mirror http://www.alivetorrents.com/torrent/9087183/wikileaks-cable...
- Groxx 16y ago
  size: 8.50mb I doubt that's all of it.
  - Estragon 16y ago
    No, it's about 0.25% of it by number of cables released, to be precise.
- ghostDancer 16y ago
  It's only a small part of all of it. In TPB you can find like 30 now and going up : http://thepiratebay.org/search/cablegate/0/99/0 http://thepiratebay.org/search/cablegate/0/99/0
il 16y ago
The "insurance" torrent contains all of the (unredacted) cables and other damaging information in encrypted form. If Wikileaks can't keep their site up, they just might release the password.
andrewcooke 16y ago
There are daily, updated releases of the cables available to date. There is not, as far as I know, a torrent of the entire dataset (it is being released piecewise). These torrents are trivial to find on google, etc. https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=wikileaks+cable+torrent https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=wikileaks+cable+torren... There is also a torrent of the "insurance" file, but no-one (publicly) knows what that contains.

sudont 16y ago

Well, they can always just twitter their current IP... And if their servers are shut down, create checksummed files released into the bittorrent cloud. Eventually this will either end sanely, or in another Great Firewall.

eldenbishop 16y ago
Twitter would make a fine DNS actually.
- wmf 16y ago
  History of unreliability, check. Centralized, check. Business model that has nothing to do with replacing DNS, check. Will probably give in to the US government without a fight, ?

pyre 16y ago

Saying that a torrent can't be DDoS'd is wrong. The tracker can be DDoS's and DHT doesn't seem (at least to me) to be as good at distribution as using a tracker.

cryptoz 16y ago
I'm sure that there are at least 10 - 20 different trackers, though, that are tracking this torrent. If they all disappear, more will pop up.
- borism 16y ago
  the problem with official cablegate torrents is that there are very few trackers in them and DHT is reportedly disabled. Not sure why they did it this way.
steveklabnik 16y ago
Aren't central trackers a bit out of style by now? I thought all the cool kids were using magnet links these days.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
ZoFreX 16y ago
DHT and Peer Exchange are just about good enough to download a torrent in the absence of a tracker, albeit with a much longer "spin up" time than usual. If tens of thousands of people were all on one torrent, and most of them had DHT / PE enabled, it should work pretty well. And of course as cryptoz pointed out, there's no shortage of trackers to use. If more are needed, it would be cheap and easy to make a few yourself, opentracker should use almost no resources.

guelo 16y ago

What I don't understand is EveryDNS's claim that the DDoS was affecting them. Why would the bots be making repeated DNS requests? It seems like an efficient bot would cache the IP in order to speed up the flood.

wmf 16y ago
Is the DoS targeted against WikiLeaks or EveryDNS? Attackers have been known to target DNS servers instead of HTTP servers if that's the weakest point.

known 16y ago

http://goo.gl/fGrjo http://goo.gl/fGrjo

known 16y ago

http://bit.ly/WiKiLeaks http://bit.ly/WiKiLeaks