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Comcast Explains (and Complains About) NASA.gov Blackout

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
January 25, 2012
Filed under ,

Analysis of DNSSEC Validation Failure Comcast – DNS Engineering, Comcast”
“How Did Users Interpret the Failure? The DNSSEC-related misconfiguration of the NASA.GOV domain unfortunately occurred on the same day that some Internet websites such as Wikipedia and Reddit blacked out their sites in protest over the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills in in the U.S. Congress. … Despite this, a website that discusses NASA-related news and information, called NASA Watch (http://www.nasawatch.com) accused Comcast of blocking access to the NASA.GOV domain, seemingly on purpose.”
Keith’s note: Despite multiple tweets by @NASAWatch about this problem on 18 January 2012 – tweets that were responded to by @Comcast employees – no one at Comcast ever bothered to contact NASA Watch about the cause – until this report was issued. Yet they seem to place some importance on the fact that NASAWatch (and MSNBC) gave this issue prominence. We had to figure it out for ourselves. If Comcast wants people to know why things are not working for their customers, then they need to take the initiative to respond to public inquiries promptly – and not complain about things well after the fact.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

6 responses to “Comcast Explains (and Complains About) NASA.gov Blackout”

  1. Oscar_Femur says:
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    Wow, NASAWatch tweeting and Comcast didn’t respond to that.  Unbelievable!  Where are their priorities?

  2. John Thomas says:
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    While Comcast recommends against switching DNS servers when this occurs, I didn’t see any mention as to how users know this was a DNSSEC problem versus a Comcast DNS failure. Seems it would be good to provide some immediate feedback to users should this occur in the future.

  3. motorbikematt says:
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    So this was in the end NASA’s fault. Interesting, they fixed that DNS problem, but not their WWW problem:

    http://nasawatch.com/archiv… 

  4. David Gump says:
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    The Comcast document isn’t correct.  Comcast did not notice the problem and contact NASA.  When I found the problem and contacted Comcast tech support that morning, the Comcast people first attempted to blame it on the SOPA protests (that NASA.gov had shut itself down!), so Comcast new nothing about the issue until after their customers began complaining.  It’s ridiculous that Comcast software can block access to a huge domain like NASA.gov without first setting off an alarm to human supervisors that a major government domain is about to go down.