(Get Fuzzy via GoComics.com)
Even in a murderous oligarchy, you just can’t get error-free tech minions:
(Reuters) – Human error likely caused a glitch in China’s Great Firewall that saw millions of Internet users ironically rerouted to the homepage of a U.S.-based company which helps people evade Beijing’s web censorship, sources told Reuters.
Hundreds of millions of people attempting to visit China’s most popular websites on Tuesday afternoon found themselves redirected to Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT), a company that sells anti-censorship web services tailored for Chinese users.
The official Xinhua news agency on Tuesday quoted experts as saying that the malfunction could have been the result of a hacking attack, and domestic media was full of speculation along those lines…
However, sources familiar with the Chinese government’s web management operations told Reuters that a hacking attack was not to blame for the malfunction. They declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter.
They said the incident may have been the result of an engineering mistake made while making changes to the “Great Firewall” system the Communist Party uses to block websites it deems undesirable – such as the DIT site.
The state-run China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said in a microblog post that the outage, which lasted for several hours, was due to a malfunction in China’s top-level domain name root servers.
These servers administrate the country’s Domain Name Service (DNS), which matches alphabetic domain names with a database of numeric IP addresses of computers hosting different websites, a sort of reference directory for the entire internet.
Instead of matching the names of popular Chinese websites with their proper IP addresses, Chinese DNS servers instead redirected users trying to access websites not ending with the “.cn” suffix to the IP address associated with DIT’s homepage…
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Apart from lamenting the universality of imperfection, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Wetware FailurePost + Comments (83)