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Protests, Shutdowns, and Domains

February 19, 2011 11:56:32.551

Looks like people are asking about the impact - of a Libyan shutdown (like the one that happened in Egypt) on services like bit.ly. It looks like the immediate impact would be slight, as the root servers for that domain are located outside of Libya. However, if such a shutdown lasted long enough:

In the case of .LY, the absolute maximum for that is configured for 28 days (SOA expiry TTL is 2419200 seconds). Without external intervention, the availability of .LY domains would be compromised somewhere between 0 and 28 days if the Libyan registry is cut off the Internet.

Another reminder for those who forget - the virtual world is tied to the real one, and events in the real world can have large scale impacts on it. The net as a whole was architected to route around damage, but some kinds of damage can blow noticeable holes in the net.

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posted by James Robertson

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