How to survive ‘Internet Doomsday’
By Will Oremus, Slate
If you want to make sure you’ll still be able to use the Internet when you wake up Monday morning, go to this website right now, click “Detect,” and follow the instructions from there.
That’s the website of the DNS Changer Working Group (DCWG), set up by court order to fix a bunch of servers that had been taken over by an Estonian crime ring. The ring, which was busted last November, had been using the servers to redirect millions of Internet users to rogue websites when they tried to visit normal websites. The FBI took over the servers and cleaned them up, but it doesn’t particularly want to be in the business of running DNS servers permanently—so it’s shutting them down on July 9.
The date has been dubbed “Internet Doomsday” because everyone still using those servers will lose pretty much all access to the Web once the FBI takes them down. The name is a little hyperbolic, given that only a few hundred thousand people are still on the servers. Still, it’s probably best to make sure you aren’t one of them.