Sorry, Jim; I think it's not that much of a stretch. They said that
(a) it's a DNS problem, (b) they don't understand the cause, but (c)
they don't manage the DNS, ICANN does. OK -- the problem is therefore
in a piece they don't manage, so they're not at fault. But ICANN
*does* manage it (or so the direct quote says). There's a decent
implication there that the manager is at fault, though not (of course)
a direct statement. I would also note that the article quotes De Jonge
as saying "The *Internet's* Domain Name System (DNS) does does not return
the correct response when it is queried for a Microsoft Web site"
[emphasis added]. In other words, it's not *Microsoft's* DNS servers,
it's the "Internet's".
I know you worked hard on this, and I understand that at the time of
this article, very little was understood about the root cause. (And
I'm not at all surprised to hear that many different things
contributed.) But that paragraph (and the additional sentence I
quoted) are, at best, misleading, and can easily be read in the way
that Sean read it. Maybe the guy was tired, maybe there was a language
barrier, maybe the reporter misunderstood something (though there's a
lot less scope for that in direct quotations). I read it the same way
that Sean did.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb