Metal Mutton 🤖🐏 @SteelWool@computerfairi.es

For more than four days, a server at the very core of the Internet’s domain name system was out of sync with its 12 root server peers due to an unexplained glitch that could have caused stability and security problems worldwide. This server, maintained by Internet carrier Cogent Communications, is one of the 13 root servers that provision the Internet’s root zone, which sits at the top of the hierarchical distributed database known as the domain name system, or DNS.

Given the crucial role a root server provides in ensuring one device can find any other device on the Internet, there are 13 of root servers geographically dispersed all over the world. Normally, the 13 root servers—each operated by a different entity—march in lockstep. When a change is made to the contents they host, it generally occurs on all of them within a few seconds or minutes at most.
Strange events at the C-root name server

This tight synchronization is crucial for ensuring stability. If one root server directs traffic lookups to one intermediate server and another root server sends lookups to a different intermediate server, the Internet as we know it could collapse. More important still, root servers store the cryptographic keys necessary to authenticate some of intermediate servers under a mechanism known as DNSSEC. If keys aren’t identical across all 13 root servers, there’s an increased risk of attacks such as DNS cache poisoning.

For reasons that remain unclear outside of Cogent—which declined to comment for this post—the c-root it’s responsible for maintaining suddenly stopped updating on Saturday. Stéphane Bortzmeyer, a French engineer who was among the first to flag the problem in a Tuesday post, noted then that the c-root was three days behind the rest of the root servers.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/dns-glitch-that-threatened-internet-stability-fixed-cause-remains-unclear/

@ChrisMayLA6

They... they let it read The Onion 🤣

Inventor of genders

tumblr posts that live in my head rent free

tracker aerobics

Arrakis (Stefan Hendriks, 2000) #DOSGaming

i love that dwarf fortress is over 20 years old now and for ages now it has had a system for simulating the sexuality and romanticism spectrum, with having a separate token value for romantic and sexual feelings

all creatures can be ace, aroace, bisexual, biromantic, homosexual, homoromantic and so forth

blessed 💗

Google promised a better search experience — now it’s telling us to put glue on our pizza https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24162896/google-ai-overview-hallucinations-glue-in-pizza

The Samsung right-to-repair story just got worse https://www.theverge.com/samsung/2024/5/23/24163372/samsung-repair-snitch-aftermarket-parts

If Windows XP was released in 2024

Do you know someone with significant quality-of-life problems due to Long Covid?

Boosts appreciated.

#COVID #LongCovid