The International Subversives

look-up service on the Internet. Whenever someone connects to another site across the Internet, he or she typically types in the site name — say, ariel.unimelb.edu.au at the University of Melbourne. The computer then translates the alphabetical name into a numerical address — the IP address — in this case 128.250.20.3. All the computers on the Internet need this IP address to relay the packets of data onto the final destination computer. NIC decided how Internet computers would trans- late the alphabetical name into an IP address, and vice versa.

If you controlled NIC, you had phenomenal power on the Internet. You could, for example, simply make Australia dis- appear. Or you could turn it into Brazil. By pointing all Internet addresses ending in ‘.au’ — the designation for sites in Aus- tralia — to Brazil, you could cut Australia's part of the Internet off from the rest of the world and send all Australian Internet traffic to Brazil. In fact, by changing the delegation of all the domain names, you could virtually stop the flow of information between all the countries on the Internet.

The only way someone could circumvent this power was by typing in the full numerical IP address instead of a proper alphabetical address. But few people knew the up-to-twelve- digit IP equivalent of their alphabetical addresses, and fewer still actually used them.

Controlling NIC offered other benefits as well. Control NIC, and you owned a virtual pass-key into any computer on the Internet which ‘trusted’ another. And most machines trust at least one other system.

Whenever one computer connects to another across the Net, both machines go through a special meet-and-greet process. The receiving computer looks over the first machine and asks itself a few questions. What's the name of the incoming machine? Is that name allowed to connect to me? In what ways am I pro- grammed to ‘trust’ that machine — to wave my normal security for connections from that system?

The receiving computer answers these questions based in large part on information provided by NIC. All of which means