Re: [ga] Disinformation about DNS attacks

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi again,

--- George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> ICANN has posted a *cough* "factsheet" *cough* on the recent DNS
> attacks, see:
> 
> http://blog.icann.org/?p=37

Oh, ICANN sure knows how to respond to criticism....when I tried to
respond to Kieren's comment about some "conspiracy" on their blog, I
get:

"Sorry, but your comment has been flagged by the spam filter running on
this blog: this might be an error, in which case all apologies. Your
comment will be presented to the blog admin who will be able to restore
it immediately. 
You may want to contact the blog admin via e-mail to notify him."

haha Pathetic. I suppose if I wrote a glowing "ICANN is great, keep up
the good work", it would not be labelled "spam".

My "censored" comments were:

--- start of comments ----
What are you talking about, Kieren? I talked about coming price
increases. "Ill defined conspiracy about control of the root zone" is
indeed VERY ill-defined -- it is UNDEFINED, sheesh. I've never disputed
ICANN's control of the root zone.

As to scaremongering to justify price increases or other things people
want, if you've not seen it before, you've not been watching closely
enough. I gave the example of WLS earlier. Let's see, you actually
wrote an article about this in The Register in 2002:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/07/18/internet_monopoly_alert/

where in an aside you wrote "And, that VeriSign is still under
investigation for using underhand <b>scare tactics</b> to force people
to renew domains with itself over competitors." That's your example of
VeriSign's use of scare tactics (my emphasis was added). Scare tactics
are common in this industry, from suggesting people need "Domain
Privacy", to the games played by those higher in the food chain.

Don't be so naive to think that these "attacks" aren't going to be used
at some later date (sooner, rather than later) to attempt to justify
more money, ultimately from consumers, while those employing the scare
tactics laugh all the way to the bank. Scare tactics were used by
registries to justify "presumptive renewal", i.e. essentially permanent
ownership of their TLDs. How many billions of dollars did consumers
lose due to that scare mongering, that somehow the world would explode
if we didn't have competitive tendering of the gTLD operations?

When the 7% .com and 10% .net/info/biz/org price increases come along, 
"higher registry costs due to DDOS attacks" will most certainly be
their main argument.

If you want to write another factsheet, why don't you focus on
providing some data as to the frequency and nature of root zone file
changes, as mentioned in other comments? Or, heaven forbid, try to get
some dollar figures to see how much DDOS attacks are costing --
webhosting companies get DDOS attacks everyday, yet I see the price of
webhosting FALLING, not rising, unlike domain names. I'm sure GoDaddy
or other registrars who offer webhosting can educate you. Indeed, many
webhosts offer DDOS protection at very low if not as a free add-on
these days, due to the economies of scale and rapidly falling
technology costs they've seen for anti-DDOS solutions. 
----- end of comments -----

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
http://www.kirikos.com/