Tom Paseka works for CloudFlare, the content delivery network that handles more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, and Apple combined, delivering more than two billion pageviews per employee. The company knows a few things about the Internet.

What Paseka knew last night, apparently before any Google employees noticed, was that Google’s services appeared to be offline. Tracing the problem, he noticed an Indonesian Internet service provider in the path to Google — odd by any standard.

Particularly when CloudFlare is just a few miles from Google, not an ocean away.

It turns out, Paseka learned, that the Indonesian ISP Moratel was giving its users an incorrect route to Google. And because Moratel was trusted by other networks upstream, the incorrect route was propagating around the globe. As Paseka writes:

And, quickly, the bad routes spread. It is unlikely this was malicious, but rather a misconfiguration or an error evidencing some of the failings in the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Trust model.

The fix was simply notifying Moratel about the issue, which Paseka did. Three minutes later, the problem was fixed and Google’s services were back online. Of course … they had never gone down. But they had been inaccessible.

You may not have noticed unless you were in Hong Kong. Paseka estimated that the entire outage affected only about 3-5 percent of the Internet population.

No word on whether Google engineers sent their CloudFlare colleagues a box of donuts or a Google hoodie in thanks.

photo credit: GustavoG via photopin cc

Just a few weeks after tooting its horn about being a profitable bootstrapped company, DNS and enterprise email delivery service Dyn has raised its first-ever funding round: $38 million from North Bridge.

That’s a surprisingly huge series A round these days, when companies can get started and reach millions of users on just a few million.

Dyn provides managed DNS and email delivery services for companies including Twitter, Zappos, and Jive. Its services cover more than 450,000 e-commerce clients and 2,000 enterprise clients, which total up to more than four million active users worldwide.

“We are doubling down on our commitment to being the world leader in Infrastructure as a Service and are delighted to partner with North Bridge, one of the leading technology and infrastructure investors in the country,” said Dyn CEO and co-founder Jeremy Hitchcock in a statement. “This investment better positions us to cement our leadership position within a rapidly growing multibillion dollar IaaS opportunity.”

Along with its funding, Dyn has also established a board of directors that includes Dyn’s co-founders, two general partners at North Bridge, and angel investor Jason Calacanis, the CEO of Mahalo and former CEO of Weblogs Inc.

Manchester, N.H.-based Dyn was founded in 2001 and has about 160 employees.

Businessman using email photo FrameAngel/Shutterstock

When Paul Mockapetris invented the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS), he had no idea his creation would come to shape parts of the web for many years to come. But because he started simple and had a future-looking plan, his concept worked. He thinks startups should follow the same principles.

Mockapetris spoke today to a crowd of startup founders and employees at Montreal’s International Startup Festival, espousing three lessons he’s learned since he tinkered with and wrote the first implementation of DNS in 1983.

Lesson 1: Simplicity is key

Mockapetris said startups need to focus on simplicity and an easy-to-convey concept. In this search for simple, “complexity is your enemy,” he said.

“Don’t be clever if you don’t need to be,” Mockapetris said. “The customer needs to understand the interface, not the inner workings.”

Even as you develop a simple concept, Mockapetris noted, there will ultimately be flaws you encounter.

Lesson 2: Have a plan you can actually explain

Planning is especially important, Mockapetris said. But the first step is to develop a plan that can be easily explained to all kinds of people (including grandmas).

He said people have asked him many times about why the original implementation of DNS didn’t include security, but he said that he was starting simple to execute the idea. The original DNS took three years to launch, while completing the vision of DNSSEC has been happening for 25 years and counting.

“The Wright brothers didn’t have a bathroom or drink cart on the original airplane,” Mockapetris said. “You can add features later.”

Lesson 3: Plan for extension

Mockapetris’ final advice for startups was to have a plan for the future and a way to expand their system or product. He said that you shouldn’t design a system where every possible use is specified because that limits your creation.

He showed the following slide to explain how your simple idea can evolve and add more features as the power of technology increases over time.

But as you come up with ways to extend your product’s use, other people will take what you create and do “wonderful and awful” things you never imagined.

“The future will extend and desecrate your baby,” Mockapetris said. There’s always the possibility of misuse.”

While Mockapetris did not mention the DNSChanger virus, which infected millions of PCs during the past few years by changing a computer’s DNS entries to point toward rogue servers, it easily applies to his lesson.

Paul Mockapetris photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

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Hundreds of thousands of people will likely be kicked off the Internet next week when the FBI shuts down servers hosting the “DNSChanger” virus.

The group behind the DNSChanger virus, which affected some 4 million computers around the world, was shut down in November by the FBI, but the virus still persists on many PCs. In the last stage of the FBI’s Operation Ghost Click, it will shut down temporary DNS servers on Monday, July 9. When those servers are shut down, it will kick off anyone who still has the DNSChanger virus on his or her machine.

There are still an estimated 275,000 infections around the world, a considerable drop from the 650,000 machines that were still infected in November. The drop can be attributed to efforts by the FBI and computer security companies, which have prompted people to check for the virus and remove it.

If you are concerned about your computer having the virus, Trend Micro has instructions for both PC and Mac users to check for it.

Image credit: John David Bigl III/Shutterstock

To summarize the proposed piece of legislation, SOPA gives both the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against websites associated with infringing, pirating and/or counterfeiting intellectual property. If it becomes law, it could drastically change the way the Internet operates. For example, if a website is accused of containing copyright-infringing content (like a song, picture, video clip etc.), the site could be blocked by ISPs (like Comcast), de-indexed from search engines and even prevented from doing business online with services like PayPal.

The DNSSEC technology Comcast has implemented across its network is intended to add an extra layer of security to websites by checking for a special DNS signature to prove that the site is actually what it claims to be, according to a TechDirt report.

The humor in all of this is that Comcast is a big supporter of SOPA. But now it’s not only made its network incompatible with SOPA, it’s also undercut the need for SOPA somewhat by putting in place technology that  helps legitimize the identity of websites to improve accountability and security.

I’m sure this will be brought up in detail when web security experts and tech business leaders testify about SOPA and PIPA to a congressional committee next week.

For more information about the proposed legislation, check out VentureBeat’s ongoing SOPA coverage.

With the new standard, it will be easier to fetch something like a YouTube video for any given user. That’s because of the alliance among companies such as OpenDNS, Google, Verisign, Comodo and major content delivery networks such as Bit Gravity, CD Networks, Cloudflare, and EdgeCast to create the faster internet. It could also speed up the delivery of other frequently-used data as well.

The companies can do this because they can make changes to the domain name service (DNS), or the address book for the internet, which takes the name of a web site you have typed into your browser and converts that into an internet protocol (IP) address. That routes the request to the proper web site, which sends the web page or video back to the user.

When you make a request to see a YouTube video, you don’t just go to the web site. Google, the owner of YouTube, has already set up a bunch of different caches of the videos around the internet. Your request goes to any one of those caches to fetch the video you want. This kind of network is called a content delivery network. It reduces traffic jams on the web caused by long distances traveled to get data.

Currently, CDNs direct a user to the nearest content server based on the location of the user’s DNS server, rather than the location of the user themselves. This may result in slower web page load times and decreased internet performance if a user is not located near their DNS server.

Under the new initiative, an alliance partner like OpenDNS, which has 30 million internet users, would make more intelligent routing decisions based on the location of the user. The DNS server would receive the request and route it automatically to the nearest cache of video or other content being requested. That video is then served to the user so that it gets to the user as fast as possible. It’s also a safer way to get the data on top of being faster, said David Ulevitch, chief executive of OpenDNS, in an interview.

“If there are 20 places you can go to get your oil changed, you want to go to the nearest place,” said Ulevitch. “This is putting end users first. Starting today, tens of millions of internet users will benefit from fairly dramatic speed increases.”

To do this, a bunch of companies need to cooperate on open standards about how to handle the routing of traffic. OpenDNS alone has about 2 percent of the internet users, while Google also has a huge chunk through its Google Public DNS service. Comodo also offers a free DNS resolution service, Secure DNS. The draft for the standard was created a year ago and OpenDNS began implementing it in code about six months ago.

“It’s a nice win for users and it shows that collaboration works when it is based on open standards,” Ulevitch said.

OpenDNS has 60 employees and its investors include Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners.

[photo credit: Mark Fischer, Flickr]

Kaminsky calls his invention Nooter (a contraction of the phrase “neutral router”). It is a sort of lie-detector test for internet service providers (ISPs). Nooter will be able to send traffic along different paths and determine whether or not your ISP is deliberately slowing some of your internet traffic, such as data from file-sharing web sites.

Kaminsky (pictured with his 88-year-old grandmother, who bakes cookies for the people who attend Kaminsky’s talks) said in two separate talks at the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas that he has figured out how to make the hidden traffic policies of ISPs more transparent to everyday internet users. ISPs generally say they don’t slow down certain traffic because that would make them run afoul of the principle of net neutrality, where the companies that are the backbone of the internet adopt a neutral position on content. Like the old common carrier telephone companies, these ISPs aren’t liable for the content traveling through their broadband networks if they treat it all equally.

Yet the motivations of ISPs are complex, and for the most part net neutrality is not a legal requirement. If law enforcers say that child pornographers are shipping illegal pictures through their networks, the ISPs are obliged to shut them down. Some ISPs are surreptitiously redirecting some traffic, such as search queries, to merchant sites that may pay them for the referrals. And some ISPs, such as cable companies that own movie content (i.e. Comcast) are motivated to slow traffic related to Bittorrent services and other sites that let you download pirated movies. They’re routinely accused of secretly setting policies that slow down the delivery of content that they don’t like, while keeping other content moving fast.

This is where Nooter comes in. Kaminsky says that it will test the speed of the delivery when the web destination is clearly visible to the ISP and the speed of the delivery of the same content when the web destination is hidden from the ISP. The result will be a clear indication of what the ISP is doing to your traffic.

“What happens if my ISP is messing with me?” Kaminsky said. “I can tunnel around it. What if it is subtle? We will always be able to know if an ISP is changing your traffic.”

As an example, he said, you will be able to find out if your ISP cares whether you use Microsoft’s Xbox Live online gaming service or Sony’s PlayStation Network. Nooter would be able to discover whether an ISP is slowing down traffic to either site for any reason, Kaminsky said.

Nooter could be available in a couple of weeks or so.

This kind of technology is what Kaminsky is known for. In 2008, he found a flaw in the DNS (the domain name system, which serves as the internet’s address book) that threatened the integrity of the whole internet. Last year, he was part of a team that was so trusted that he got a key to reboot the internet if a catastrophic failure shuts it down.

Kaminsky admitted he was making big claims but he tried to explain how Nooter works, using both software and some hardware that he pulled together. He warned that any ISPs who have set policies to throttle traffic to web sites should stop doing so now, unless they want to be discovered and “be on the front page of a newspaper.”

Normally, internet traffic requests go from the user’s machine through a network router to the internet service provider, which then fetches the requested web site from the rest of the internet. Kaminsky says everyone fears “a magic box” exists within the ISP that contains policies such as, “if the user goes to a torrent site, then slow the transfer of bits to a crawl until the user decides not to do that.”

“Policies can be anything,” Kaminsky said. “They can alter content and you won’t know. If Bing is 50 milliseconds slower than Google at searching, you won’t know why. Maybe it is because Google uses better hosting or routers or servers.”

Since many things can affect the speed of internet traffic, it’s hard to pinpoint an ISP’s role in slowing it down. That gives ISPs “plausible deniability” when they are accused of violating Net Neutrality principles.

But if Nooter determines that traffic to one particular web site is faster one way than another, based on whether the ISP knows about the destination site or not, then “you found a biased network,” Kaminsky said.

The use of encryption is how the Nooter device can see inside what is going on with an ISP. If you send encrypted requests for a web site, the ISP can’t where it’s going and it just passes it through at normal data rates. If the speed of unencrypted requests are slower, then you have to wonder why. When Kaminsky told that to the crowd in the huge Penn & Teller theater at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas at Defcon, he got a roar of applause. Kaminsky said he can even identify which leg, or hop, of an internet request is the part where the policy is put into effect and the traffic is slowed down.

“Either way, Nooter wins,” he said. “Biased policies might as well be transparent because I am going to find them. That is the end game.”

The WikiLeaks site has been under constant cyber attack since it published 251,000 secret U.S. diplomatic cables. CNET reported that the site has quietly shifted its infrastructure outside of the U.S. to a web provider in Toronto. It also uses 14 companies to direct users to the WikiLeaks.ch site, so that it has redundancy in case attackers take down one of the companies. U.S. companies from Amazon to MasterCard have been pressured to drop WikiLeaks because it posts “stolen content.”

WikiLeaks has also faced distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks, which is the reason it was dropped by EveryDNS.net domain name service provider. WikiLeaks has turned to the Swedish Pirate Party for DNS service for server help. The number of mirror sites, which replicate WikiLeaks content, is now more than 1,000. With these measures, some say WikiLeaks may be immune to takedown.

The reinforcements arrived as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces extradition on sex charges in Sweden. He was arrested yesterday in London and denies that he did anything wrong. He says a hearing is set for Dec. 14. Politicians are putting more pressure on businesses to sever ties with WikiLeaks, which some members of Congress want to designate a “terrorist” organization. Meanwhile, hackers associated with the 4chan image site have attacked sites belonging to those who have cut off WikiLeaks.

PayPal executive Osama Bedier said today that PayPal blocked WikiLeaks payments and froze its account because it complied with a governmental request to deny service to WikiLeaks. That request was not sent directly to PayPal. Rather, the State Department sent a letter directly to WikiLeaks.

The odds favor WikiLeaks at this point. The internet was designed to withstand nuclear attack, with many communications routes in case one went down. WikiLeaks is now set up in the same way.

New Hampshire-based EveryDNS.net (which should be renamed Almost EveryDNS.net) shut down its domain hosting for Wikileaks after it came under a massive cyber attack that also threatened to take down its 500,000 other web sites. That forced WikiLeaks to find a new host, the Swiss Pirate Party, and rename its web site WikiLeaks.ch, as WikiLeaks.org no longer works. A day earlier, Amazon booted WikiLeaks from its web hosting service because of concerns about how WikiLeaks displays “stolen content.”

WikiLeaks has had quite a year. First, it unveiled thousands of classified documents about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Now it has released 251,000 diplomatic cables from U.S. diplomats around the world. The latest breach has brought a lot of political heat on WikiLeaks as well as a police hunt for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who is wanted on a rape charge in Sweden, a charge he claims is no more than an attempt to damage his credibility.

As we noted before, it will be interesting to watch if this organization can flee the governments and hackers who are pursuing it, particularly if it has to continue to maintain a public web site in order to share its leaked documents. To operate a web site, WikiLeaks needs a domain name system (DNS) host so that the internet can direct a user to a web site when the user types in the site’s name. It also needs a web host to store its site and to serve pages as users request them.

The Swiss Pirate Part is WikiLeaks’ new DNS provider. The entity is a political group formed two years ago to campaign for freedom of information and better tech policy. The move shows that, despite all of the controversy, WikiLeaks still has friends who can help it hide from the authorities and survive efforts to shut it down. It’s not clear if WikiLeaks.ch will work in the face of more cyber attacks, as the site isn’t up at the moment. Web hosting has now moved from Amazon to Sweden’s Bahnhof.

WikiLeaks’ next moves may be to publish secret documents from corporations such as BP and Bank of America.

Assange is reportedly hiding in Britain. The New York Times has said he lives on the run, dyes his hair, and  checks into hotels under false names. Government officials in France have made moves to ban WikiLeaks from using servers in France to host its site. The whole episode seems like a George Orwell story. Where will it lead?