ArsTechnica is carrying an interesting article on how the Chrome browser is creating a high load on the global root DNS servers as an accidental consequence of a product feature. In particular, the issue is triggered by the feature where end users can enter search terms in the URL bar.

Chromium's authors didn't want to have to see "did you mean" infobars on every single-word search in those common environments, so they implemented a test: on startup or change of network, Chromium issues DNS lookups for three randomly generated seven-to-15-character top-level "domains." If any two of those requests come back with the same IP address, Chromium assumes the local network is hijacking the NXDOMAIN errors it should be receiving—so it just treats all single-word entries as search attempts until further notice.

Unfortunately, on networks that aren't hijacking DNS query results, those three lookups tend to propagate all the way up to the root nameservers: the local server doesn't know how to resolve qwajuixk, so it bounces that query up to its forwarder, which returns the favor, until eventually a.gtld-servers.net or one of its siblings has to say "Sorry, that's not a domain."

I came across a very interesting visual document showing the source of revenue of the major Big Tech companies that is worth a check. In particular, what drew my attention was the fact that both Google and Facebook appear to have most of their eggs in a single basket, while Microsoft has done an excellent job at diversifying its sources of revenue. Apple and Amazon, on the other hand, are somewhere in the middle, it seems. {link to this entry}

Interesting article on how to quikcly build virtual machine images with the virt-builder command. The list of images you can install this way is limited, of course. For example, you cannot install RHEL or SLES images, since those are commercial distros. However, it will help speed up the configuration of virtual images for free sofwtare products. In the case of Debian stable, the command is installed by the oz package. {link to this entry}