I see no reason for people to put up with an “Internet kill switch” no matter whose hands are on it. The computers that comprise the Internet are our own.

“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from it’s government”. Thomas Paine

I just read a new thriller that’s about revolution coming to America. It’s a must read cause it’s so true as we see our govt. taking down websites (maybe this one soon) and Wisconsin politicians hiding in another state.
http://www.booksbyoliver.com

“Whoa, hey! That’s not what I was looking for!”

While doing so is fairly rare in the physical world, it’s so common on the internet as to be universal. For example, the website we’re posting on, http://www.theagitator.com is the name of the “house”, while a traceroute to the name of the site yields a final address of 64.49.221.11 which is the actual address of the machine the website is on.

Just a thought: “Never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity”

Sure, I’m pretty sure this was just stupidity. But if *I* broadcast to the world that somebody was into child pornography for a few days, then came back and said “oops, I was wrong”, I’d still be in big trouble.

The “dotted decimal” is one form of the numerical address that every device on the internet has, similar to a home address. DNS is “domain name service,” which is software that is run everywhere in order to provide readable names for these numerical address.

I have a computer next to me here that is on my DSL line serving my personal website out to the world, so it has one of these public numerical addresses, for instance 123.231.21.5 (there are rules about what the numbers are, but it’s not germane here). However, when I hand out my business card it says “http://www.eh.com/” and DNS is what connects the “www.eh.com,” a name that you can remember, to the machine’s IP address (123.231.21.5). Computers use the numbers, people use the letters and words, and DNS is a peer-to-peer directory for all of this stuff.

I run my own DNS for my own handful of domains, and hosting companies typically run large DNS services for all of the websites they serve. It’s the domain-registrant’s choice and my closet DNS is just as authoritative for my domains as Comcast’s is for theirs.

What happened here was that one of these large directories was taken down.

I feel so dumb… how would I know the ‘dotted decimal ip address’ and what’s ‘DNS’- domain name search?

Not sure that British Courts would recognize the immunity of the DHS.

Maybe it’s time to start caching prior DNS results … say the last five changes … and if a page returns an unexpected result, you can choose from one of the other cached IP addresses.

I’m sure there have been many discussions with the politicians in the recent rioting countries, especially Egypt, to learn from what they did wrong to shut down communication.

Seems to ME to be part of another pattern; aggressive cluelessness about computers on the part of the government. Not to say you aren’t right too.