on the comcast dns failure

The Day The Internet Died — But Not Really | Hubbub | Blogs | WBUR:

So what is DNS? When you open a Web browser and type in google.com, a domain name server figures out that google.com points to 74.125.53.100, an IP address. Humans use domain names because they are much easier to remember than IP addresses. During the outage, you could still type 74.125.53.100 into a browser and get to Google — if you knew that.

A tricky but far easier solution was to switch to a publicly available DNS server such as one provided by Google or OpenDNS.

New York Times tech columnist David Pogue extolled the virtues of Open DNS in August:

Unfortunately, from time to time, your Internet provider’s D.N.S. computer goes down. To you, it seems that the Web itself has gone out, because you can’t pull up any sites at all. In December 2008, for example, 1.2 million Los Angeles citizens thought that the entire Web had gone offline, because of a crashed Time Warner D.N.S. computer.

That story was gleefully provided by OpenDNS, the one-of-a-kind company with a killer idea: to provide a free, alternative D.N.S. service that works better than your Internet provider’s. Faster, more reliably and with more features. You don’t pay anything, sign up for anything or install anything.

It’s a good explainer and worth the read. Soleyn also suggested specifying different providers as your primary and secondary DNS servers, in case one goes out. I set Google as my primary and OpenDNS as my secondary.

Now, I won’t get into the apparently widespread contempt of Comcast, or last night’s competing hashtags, #comcastic and #comcastrophe, or the fact that NPR host Bob Garfield channeled his Comcast rage into a website called comcastmustdie.com.

Funny, no one seemed to care when Verizon telephone service went out last month.

sympathy where it belongs, i guess...

not always true, but often enough...

WikiLeaks: The revolution has begun – and it will be digitised | Heather Brooke | Comment is free | The Guardian:

What we have seen from disclosures like MPs' expenses or revelations about the complicity of government in torture is that when politicians speak of a threat to "national security", often what they mean is that the security of their own position is threatened.

as for when "national security" also aligns with "illegal actions", well then yes there's a problem and the libertarian in me would rather the leak than the silence.

on the other hand, the american public has shown itself to be utterly unethical in its lack of regard for the illegal actions of the past administration, as well as the apathy in dealing with it by the current.

it has always been the case: if you don't want the public to find out about your illegal or unethical behaviour, then the solution is simple: never do anything illegal or unethical.

one would think such a "Christian" nation would know such a basic fact.

but then there's the counter: if you don't do anything illegal or unethical, the media will make it up for you.  Johnny Depp recently did a film with Angelina Jolie, and in interviews he said he intentionally stayed as far away from her as possible when the film's cameras were off, just to avoid one paparazzi with one picture creating a tabloid rumor headline from hell, like "Depp says he can be a better father to Jolie's kids than Pitt", which we all know would have been inevitable.

guess we can't win, no matter what...especially in this land of the allegedly free and the home of the cowardly double standard:

Ironically, the US state department has been one of the biggest cheerleaders for technical innovation as a means of bringing democracy to places like Iran and China. President Obama has urged repressive regimes to stop censoring the internet, yet a bill before Congress would allow the attorney general to create a blacklist of websites. Is robust democracy only good when it's not at home?

such bills are really bad precedent. as soon as we give the government authority to remove a website because of alleged copyright violations, we give them the right to remove a website for any other reason...especially because they can just assert that the "leak" being talked about is under copyright. the church of scientology is a wonderful example of this...