Re: Web expert on his 'catastrophe' key for the internet

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:43:21 PDT, "andrew.wallace" said:
> A British computer expert has been entrusted with part of a digital key, to help 
> restart the internet in the event of a major catastrophe. 

You *do* realize this "news" is like two months old, right?

http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-2-07jun10-en.htm

The DNS root has been signed in production for over 2 weeks now.

That plus the phrase "restarting the Internet" is more than a little bit
misleading.  

One has to wonder if there was a *complete* failure of the Internet,  and it
needed "restarting", whether enough people holding shares would be able to get
to the same place to have another root-signing ceremony. Consider the impact on
plane reservations, etc. 

Those of us who lived through the Morris worm fragmenting the Arpa/Milnet  in
1988 and things like major worm-induced outages remember what a hassle it was
to *really* restart the net. Calling up your upstream on the phone asking if it
was safe to turn up the link again, or looking for help in cleaning your net
before you reconnected, etc...)

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