In message <200101250230.VAA06726@rtp-msg-core-1.cisco.com>, Jim Duncan writes:

Sean Donelan writes:

...

Microsoft appears to be blaming ICANN for the failure with Microft's domain name servers (all located at the same place at Microsoft).

Microsoft has yet to pin down the cause of the DNS error. "It can be a system or human error, but somebody could also have done this intentionally," De Jonge said. "We don't manage the DNS ourselves, it is a system controlled by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) with worldwide replicas."

http://www.idg.net/ic_386962_1793_1-1681.html

I have read that article many, many time today, trying to see how you came to that conclusion and I don't get it. To reach that conclusion, you've clearly quoted them out of the context of the larger article. Even to reach that conclusion from the small part you quoted requires a logical leap that is inappropriate, if not outright incorrect.

Sorry, Jim; I think it's not that much of a stretch. They said that (a) it's a DNS problem, (b) they don't understand the cause, but (c) they don't manage the DNS, ICANN does. OK -- the problem is therefore in a piece they don't manage, so they're not at fault. But ICANN *does* manage it (or so the direct quote says). There's a decent implication there that the manager is at fault, though not (of course) a direct statement. I would also note that the article quotes De Jonge as saying "The *Internet's* Domain Name System (DNS) does does not return the correct response when it is queried for a Microsoft Web site" [emphasis added]. In other words, it's not *Microsoft's* DNS servers, it's the "Internet's". I know you worked hard on this, and I understand that at the time of this article, very little was understood about the root cause. (And I'm not at all surprised to hear that many different things contributed.) But that paragraph (and the additional sentence I quoted) are, at best, misleading, and can easily be read in the way that Sean read it. Maybe the guy was tired, maybe there was a language barrier, maybe the reporter misunderstood something (though there's a lot less scope for that in direct quotations). I read it the same way that Sean did. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb