Seven People Have Been Entrusted With The Keys To The Internet

These smart cards are the actual keys to the Internet. There are seven of them and they hold the power to restarting the world wide web "in the event of a catastrophic event."

The basic idea is that in the event of an Internet catastrophe, the DNSSEC (domain name system security) could be damaged or compromised and we'd be left without a way to verify if a URL is pointing to the correct website. That's when the holders of these smart cards would be called into action:

A minimum of five of the seven keyholders – one each from Britain, the U.S., Burkina Faso, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, China, and the Czech Republic – would have to converge at a U.S. base with their keys to restart the system and connect everything once again.

Seven sages across the land hold the Medallions which can rebuild the world … and no, we’re not referring to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Surprisingly, we’re talking about real life: The BBC reports that Paul Kane, CEO of UK-based domain name sever company CommunityDNS, has been named one of the keepers of the seven magical keys (and by “magical keys,” we mean “non-magical keycards”) scattered around the world that, when used together, can reboot the entire World Wide Web.

Mr. Kane will be the key holder of Western Europe. Moria and Rivendell, we suspect, will also have their respective key bearers.

Originally posted by christianpatrick
Burkina Faso? They couldn't have picked a civilized african country like Ghana or Botswana? They had to pick the arguably poorest country on the continent?
Colour me skeptical for that reason alone.

[edit on 27/7/2010 by christianpatrick]

Originally posted by PuterMan
What a complete load of ##.

Not a lot more to say really. The net can run perfectly well without the Alpha server. The problem only arises for new web sites.

And incidentally with the new IP addressing system it is even less of a problem.

A minimum of five of the seven keyholders – one each from Britain, the U.S., Burkina Faso, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada, China, and the Czech Republic – would have to converge at a U.S. base with their keys to restart the system and connect everything once again.