Cory Doctorow/Little Brother/112
the most important servers on the net under his desk at the a DNS server. By running her code, I was able to pull the video
University of Southern California, back in the paleolithic era. from all those DNS servers, all over the Internet, at incredible
speed. It must have looked bizarre on the network histograms, like
Now, imagine that you hooked up a mailserver to an IM I was looking up the address of every computer in the world.
session. You could send an IM to the server that said "HELO
littlebrother.com.se" and it would reply with "250 But it had two advantages I appreciated at once: I was able to
mail.pirateparty.org.se Hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to get the video with blinding speed as soon as I clicked the first
meet you." In other words, you could have the same conversation link, I started to receive fullscreen pictures, without any jitter or
over IM as you do over SMTP. With the right tweaks, the whole stuttering and I had no idea where it was hosted. It was totally
mailserver business could take place inside of a chat. Or a web anonymous.
session. Or anything else.
At first I didn't even clock the content of the video. I was totally
This is called "tunneling." You put the SMTP inside a chat floored by the cleverness of this hack. Streaming video from
"tunnel." You could then put the chat back into an SMTP tunnel if DNS? That was so smart and weird, it was practically perverted.
you wanted to be really weird, tunneling the tunnel in another
tunnel. Gradually, what I was seeing began to sink in.
In fact, every Internet protocol is susceptible to this process. It's It was a boardroom table in a small room with a mirror down
cool, because it means that if you're on a network with only Web one wall. I knew that room. I'd sat in that room, while Severe
access, you can tunnel your mail over it. You can tunnel your Haircut woman had made me speak my password aloud. There
favorite P2P over it. You can even tunnel Xnet which itself is a were five comfortable chairs around the table, each with a
tunnel for dozens of protocols over it. comfortable person, all in DHS uniform. I recognized Major
General Graeme Sutherland, the DHS Bay Area commander,
Domain Name Service is an interesting and ancient Internet along with Severe Haircut. The others were new to me. They all
protocol, dating back to 1983. It's the way that your computer watched a video screen at the end of the table, on which there was
converts a computer's name like pirateparty.org.se to the IP an infinitely more familiar face.
number that computers actually use to talk to each other over the
net, like 204.11.50.136. It generally works like magic, even though Kurt Rooney was known nationally as the President's chief
it's got millions of moving parts every ISP runs a DNS server, strategist, the man who returned the party for its third term, and
as do most governments and lots of private operators. These DNS who was steaming towards a fourth. They called him "Ruthless"
boxes all talk to each other all the time, making and filling and I'd seen a news report once about how tight a rein he kept his
requests to each other so no matter how obscure the name is you staffers on, calling them, IMing them, watching their every
feed to your computer, it will be able to turn it into a number. motion, controlling every step. He was old, with a lined face and
pale gray eyes and a flat nose with broad, flared nostrils and thin
Before DNS, there was the HOSTS file. Believe it or not, this lips, a man who looked like he was smelling something bad all
was a single document that listed the name and address of every the time.
single computer connected to the Internet. Every computer had a
copy of it. This file was eventually too big to move around, so He was the man on the screen. He was talking, and everyone
DNS was invented, and ran on a server that used to live under Jon else was focused on his screen, everyone taking notes as fast as
Postel's desk. If the cleaners knocked out the plug, the entire they could type, trying to look smart.
Internet lost its ability to find itself. Seriously.
" say that they're angry with authority, but we need to show
The thing about DNS today is that it's everywhere. Every the country that it's terrorists, not the government, that they need
network has a DNS server living on it, and all of those servers are to blame. Do you understand me? The nation does not love that
configured to talk to each other and to random people all over the city. As far as they're concerned, it is a Sodom and Gomorrah of
Internet. fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. The only reason the
country cares what they think in San Francisco is that they had
What Masha had done was figure out a way to tunnel a video the good fortune to have been blown to hell by some Islamic
streaming system over DNS. She was breaking up the video into terrorists.
billions of pieces and hiding each of them in a normal message to
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