DNS Registrar - What is...

so the question is is what are DNS registrar's and why do they matter so it's important understand with how networking technology functions is that theoretically you do not need anybody from the outside world to allow you to build your own network so if you want to build your own internal network whether it's in your house or whether it's for a corporation or some kind of military organization or something like that you can build that out without needing any authorizations from anybody outside of your corporation so you can set up your own switches your own routers your own DNS and DHCP servers even your own internal websites and if all you're trying to do is connect your local computers to other local computers and servers you can do that without any type of outside authority the issue happens is that when you try to connect your computers in your network to the internet so this is the network of all of the computers and all the different networks spread throughout the world you need some type of authority to make sure nobody does anything stupid so we're talking about things such as allocating IP addresses so there's only so many ipv4 IP addresses that exist and so to allocate who gets those IP addresses you need some type of authority to do that also if you're going to be doing a global DNS so if you want to deal with domain names so it's the domain name service what that does is that associates domain names with IP addresses so fail normal com is associated with a particular IP address in order to do that on a global scale you need some type of authority to say what is legitimate and what is not and that's where something called ICANN comes in so I can it's called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and numbers they're a nonprofit organization that has overall responsibility for who gets assigned IP addresses and overall how the DNS system works but they are rather a small nonprofit organization and for many functions they don't want to have to actually do the functions themselves and so they farm out particular components of the the IP address scheme and the DNS services out to other companies so that these other companies and handle it this is where DNS registrar's come in so if you want to have a domain name you would not go to ICANN itself to purchase a domain name you would go to a registrar so a rageous drawer would be somebody like a GoDaddy or Hostgator or even Google as a registrar CloudFlare as a registrar basically these are private or public companies that you're able to purchase DNS services through and then they maintain and make sure that the information that you give them is correct so there's something called a Whois database so the Whois database says that when you buy a domain name you have to give accurate information on how somebody can contact you give a company name give an address give a phone number that type of thing so if there's a trademark issue with a domain name then that is the information a public record so somebody could contact you about your domain name and you could figure out the trademark issues and so this type of thing is dealt with with the registrar's so whenever you go to bio domain name such as failed normal com or geek field notes com you would go to GoDaddy you would go to Hostgator you would go to possibly Google or one of these other registrar's and you would purchase the domain name from them and then they would do the administrative upkeep on the domain name so when you go in to configure things like the cname record or the MX record or any of the other DNS records you would go through their platform to configure that information and then they are then able to tell ICANN what is going on for the overall be an ASUS system and so this is worked very well and has been very seamless for a long time now DNS DNS is kind of like the water of the Internet world you may be able to buy DNS services from different registrar's but most people never really thought about it a lot some registrar's are more expensive so they're able to get the domain names for a specific price and then they add their own markup on that so some some registrar's I think CloudFlare is now selling domain names for the exact price they get it for some other registrar's gone a little bit of profit margin on there so they make money off of it and so some people when they look at who they go to for registrar's they look at things like what is the price they're selling domain names for what are the other services so if you go to CloudFlare and you buy a domain name from CloudFlare because they are a registrar that's more or less all they do so you got your domain name and you're able to appoint that domain name to different IP addresses for MX records and c names and that type of thing but they don't provide hosting services they don't provide email services they don't provide the other Suites of services that folks may need so if you're an enterprise company come customer you're running your own Microsoft Exchange server you're running your own web servers you're running your your own infrastructure then you may go to CloudFlare buy a domain name from CloudFlare for the minimum price and then point all the dns configurations to your own servers and that may make a lot of sense on the other hand if you're a small business client or if you're just an individual person who wants to have an email address with your own domain name and have a little website you may go to someplace like GoDaddy or Hostgator or someplace else where they may charge a little bit more for the domain name they do make a profit off of it but you can then also in the same in the same panel be able to buy hosting services be able to buy email services and that type of thing and so basically that's what we've been looking at for for using dns registrar's everybody has their own opinion on who was best realistically most of them they're the same you guess you get better customer support with some you get better prices with some you get different type of dns services that get kind of specific with others but with a lot of people they pick their DNS provider you know 20 years ago and then they stick with it they don't think about it again it's much like water you may open by different types of water but you just turn on the tap and it just runs and you don't really think about it why this is becoming significant now is because these registrar's are their own individual company so it's an important understand with ICANN the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and numbers that they're a nonprofit organization that many times gets put under the microscope by governments and countries to make sure that they're doing things legitimately so there's a lot of questions with how they do things in regards to free speech issues especially since they're in the United States and so basically if I can does something weird the government can come in and bad things can happen well one of the curious things is is since they are essentially outsourcing the services for doing the DNS registration these DNS registrar's are their own private companies for the most part if you look at GoDaddy if you look at Google if you look at CloudFlare if you look at Hostgator so on and so forth these are companies that these are corporations they're not nonprofits and so they have their own rules for doing business and their rules for doing business are usually stipulated in what's called a Terms of Service and so it's Terms of Service is essentially an internet type contract where they say as long as you follow these rules we will continue to provide services and again for the most part nobody ever really thought too much about it you know you figure you know you don't you don't try to try to use your DNS in order to do Pirate Disney movies you don't use your DNS in order to promote al-qaeda or Isis and for the most part the DNS DNS question it really hasn't been a lot of question in the past domain names have been revoked and domain names have been forcibly acquired by the government so you're talking about law enforcement actions so if the FBI or if a police department is going after where they consider a criminal organization they can go to the court to get an order to be able to revoke these domain names or again company is going after people who own domain names that are violating intellectual property so you know all all Disney movies for free dot-com pointing to the torrents of Disney movies Disney would go they would sue they would be able to acquire that domain name and again there can be some questions with for him from the anti-authoritarian folks yes some people out there may say why why am I not allowed to own all Disney movies for free come and that's a look at that that's an argument that's an argument but I would argue I would say that most people would side with the yeah if we want this whole internet system to work it makes sense that this this type of action can happen what's getting interesting now though is that these private corporations have these terms of services that most of us have never read and never really cared about and now they're starting to use them against people who use their DNS services so you may have heard this from the daily stormer so the daily stormer was to be clear a horrible neo-nazi probably still around horrible neo-nazi website I did not support daily stormer at all to be clear basically neo-nazi website lots of bad stuff and so people had tried to beat the platform them in the past in many ways get Twitter accounts rivo to get PayPal accounts revoked that type of thing but they were able to stay online as long as they could figure out how to get money from somewhere whether it's checks or whether it's cash or whatever else the idea is as long as you have your DNS name you can point that that domain name to anything you can point that domain tame to another hosting provider you appoint that domain name literally to a server running in your own basement if as necessary the platforming something like daily stormer may may make the quality of their services inferior but theoretically they could still stay online well what happened is GoDaddy decided that they violated their hate speech policies and therefore GoDaddy then said we will no longer be at your registrar so theoretically this is not revoking their domain name but again the registrar is what documents all the information that makes the DNS system work so if your registrar is no longer willing to host your domain name for you that becomes a problem and so the idea with a lot of people is that they could then transfer the domain name somewhere else so if GoDaddy doesn't want to be a registrar you can transfer that to Hostgator or you could transfer that to any of a thousand different registrar's one of the questions that comes up though is if somebody as significant as GoDaddy says we're if you refuse to to be the registrar for your DNS name then it's very likely that Hostgator will also refuse to be a registrar and the next person will fuse to be registrar and the next person will refuse to be a registrar and so by going after the DNS registrar's this can be a significant way to literally try to take sites entire organizations off the internet we're now seeing that with a company called gab comso Capcom created an alternative to Twitter a lot of people say there's a lot of hate speech on there but that's what also happened with GoDaddy is there was recently an attack at a sinigang the person before they went and attacked the synagogue they put a lot of nasty stuff on the gab calm now people are stating that gab calm is facilitating hate speech so PayPal revoked access to gab calm but then not only did PayPal revoke access but then GoDaddy also stated that they do not want to be the registrar for gab comm and now they're being forced to go and find another registrar which which becomes a very curious issue what happens when we have I can so I can is under the microscope again whether whether or not it has to completely abide by by free speech and First Amendment maybe a little bit of a question mark but more or less they have to abide by the rules and and what's required in the United States but I can basically what they're doing is they're subcontracting out there they're handing off these services to allow other corporations other companies to provide the services and those corporations are public for private companies or for-profit companies that have their own reasons for doing whatever they're doing and so they don't have to work under the same rules as I can specifically and that is where things get to be curious get to be curious so that's what DNS registrar's are really all they are is they're the place that you go to buy your domain name they collect your information for what's it called the Whois database so that if somebody needs to get in touch with you with your domain name for some reason they have the information to do that they also allow you to go in and change all the configuration they're gonna change your MX records we're gonna be changing what's called your cname records any of these records you will go to your registrar to do that all of that gets synced up with a global DNS servers domain name system servers which associate your domain name with the IP address and that's how it works why this is coming up now is to be clear for decades this has been a rather seamless it just kind of works it's like turning on your tap it's water nobody thinks twice about it and all of a sudden in the past few years with what's going on with a free-speech debates this is now becoming an attack vector and it's a very curious one to think about

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 22,119

Keywords: Eli, the, Computer, Guy, Repair, Networking, Tech, IT, Startup, dns, domain names, url, godaddy, depltaform

Id: MIgFfV-prpA

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 01 2018