That's right, folks. He blames us -- conservatives. Multiple times.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Skinner/396
Yep. It's not his fault for providing false information. It's conservatives' fault.
Heehee!, That link won't work for folks still not being able to view DU proper.
Here's his note in the DU Panic forum at Yahoo.
Tue Mar 1, 2011 1:48 pm (PST)
Here is a longer post from Skinner. (MOST people are back in)
Whenever you type a domain name for a web site into your web browser, you
computer needs to figure out where that website is. So it sends a request to
something called a DNS server, which says something like this: "I'm looking
for
www.democraticunder ground.com, could you please tell me where it is?"
And then the DNS server tells your computer where to find the site. There
are many, many DNS servers in the world that handle these requests.
For 10 years, we haven't had a problem. Your computer asks for
democraticundergrou nd.com, and some DNS server somewhere would point you to
the correct place. Until yesterday, when some of the DNS servers stopped
pointing to the correct place. Here's why.
On January 20 of this year, I received an email from our domain registrar,
indicating that they had received a complaint about our "WHOIS" information
being incorrect. In other words, someone complained that the public contact
information related to the democraticundergrou nd.com domain name was wrong.
I do not know who made the request, or why. I suppose it is possible that it
came from a concerned citizen, but I think it is more likely that it was a
bored person who sent the complaint on a lark to see if they might cause us
some problems. Which they did.
I immediately logged in to our domain registrar and updated our contact
info. Some of you may be aware that Democratic Underground changed our PO
Box last year, and that had not been updated on our domain name contact
info. I changed the PO Box number and the Zip Code and clicked submit.
Received my confirmation email about the successful update of my contact
info. Domain registrar has a record of the fact that I updated our info.
Problem solved.
Except the problem wasn't solved.
What I did not realize -- and what my domain registrar did not tell me -- is
that the complaint was about the Democratic Underground PHONE NUMBER, not
the PO Box. And, indeed, the phone number on our WHOIS information is wrong:
555-555-5555. That is the phone number that has appeared on our account for
ten years, because I don't want some right-wing nut-job crank-calling me
with death threats in the middle of the night.
Put another way: This was the insidious computer glitch commonly referred to
as "human error." I get an email about out-of-date contact info. I remember
that my PO Box recently changed. I log in and change PO Box. I completely
ignore the incorrect phone number.
I did not receive any more correspondence from my domain registrar until
yesterday morning around 11:00 am, when I got an email with the ominous
title "Name Server Update Confirmation ID", which stated that my name server
had been changed. I had not requested the Name Server Update.
So I immediately go to the domain registrar's website and try to log in, but
get a message indicating that an Admin has blocked me out.
My first thought is "Holy S***. Someone's ripped off our password, logged in
to our account, gave themselves admin privileges, changed the name server,
and then blocked us out."
I immediately get on the telephone and call the domain registrar. While I'm
on hold -- for 25 minutes! -- I am frantically changing all the passwords on
all my accounts on every website I can think of.
Finally get through to a human being, start explaining my problem, and then
AT&T drops my call.
Call back, wait another 25 minutes, finally talk to a human being, who
explains that my phone number is wrong. Which is why they changed our DNS.
No "last chance" email. No "I see you changed your info but missed one
thing." They just shut it off.
I changed the phone number, and updated our DNS info. But the damage was
done.
Even thought we had updated our DNS info, it takes a long time for the
updates to spread (or "propagate") to all the DNS servers throughout the
Internet. In fact, well after the time I corrected the DNS info, some DNS
servers had not yet received the earlier INCORRECT DNS information that was
working its way around -- let alone the correction which was way behind and
(even now) still hasn't made it to some of the darker corners of the
Internet.
They say it sometimes takes as long as 72 hours for DNS information to
propagate throughout the Internet.
If you are still experiencing problems, you can get around by setting your
computer to use a public DNS server. Some instructions are available here
<http://theos. in/windows- xp/free-fast- public-dns- server-list> . Google has
not been working for me, but OpenDNS has:
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
If anyone else has any tips, feel free to post them in this thread.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. I apologize for the screw-up.
David Allen
DU Administrator
