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Businesses Oracle

Oracle Buys Dyn DNS Provider (techcrunch.com) 117

Posted by msmash from the big-shark,-small-shark dept.
Oracle announced today it is buying DNS provider Dyn, a company that was in the press lately after it was hit by a large-scale DDoS attack in October that resulted in many popular websites becoming inaccessible. From a TechCrunch report:Oracle plans to add Dyn's DNS solution to its bigger cloud computing platform, which already sells/provides a variety of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) products. Oracle and Dyn didn't disclose the price of the deal but we are trying to find out. Dan Primack reports that it's around $600 million. We've also asked for a comment from Oracle about Dyn's recent breach, and whether the wheels were set in motion for this deal before or after the Mirai botnet attack in October.
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Oracle Buys Dyn DNS Provider More

Oracle Buys Dyn DNS Provider

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  • /. Headline 6 months from now (Score:5, Funny)

    by udachny ( 2454394 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @09:48AM (#53331497) Journal

    Expect lawsuits related to your free use of DNS. Now everybody who uses DNS owes Oracle 1 dollar per DNS lookup.

  • So right after their value gets depressed? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tlambert ( 566799 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @09:50AM (#53331515)

    So right after their value gets depressed?

    Not suspicious at all...

    • Seems extreme quick unless it was already underway (Score:5, Insightful)

      by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @09:57AM (#53331555) Journal

      When I've sold even the tiniest companies, with just two or three employees, it took a few months from initial discussion to a public announcement. I'd be very surprised if a deal this size was done in a month or two. I'd think they probably had a memorandum of understanding, setting a price subject to due diligence, six months ago.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Do you have some experience with this? I've sold a couple businesses and the problem has always been how to solicit bids without a) encouraging silly rumors to start and b) revealing too much about the financials of my privately-held company to competitors or potential competitors, who may or may not have a genuine interest in buying my company.

        • 6 months ago the price was set.

          And with a stroke of a pen, the price can be changed.

          And they are not exclusive.

          Lots of acquisition deals have an agreement of exclusivity during the negotiation period. Personally, I don't think that it is likely to be a good deal for the selling company, but it happens.

    • Why would their value get depressed? They didn't do anything wrong. I don't know why TFS calls it a breech even though nothing was breeched.

      • Why would their value get depressed? They didn't do anything wrong.

        Actually, they did. They hosted their primary and secondary DNS on the same groups of servers, all belonging to them.

        BCP is to host the primaries, and then do in-exchange-for-like hosting of other people's secondaries, while they host yours.

        That way, if someone attacks one of you, all your DNS services stay up, and the biggest annoyances are going to be your data bill at the end of the month, and the customers of the attacked party being unable to make changes to their DNS configuration data while the atta

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hsmith ( 818216 )
      You do realize M&A usually takes months, at times a year+ to complete? This was in the works long before the DDoS attack.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rekoil ( 168689 )

        I'm wondering if there had been negotiations that had previously fallen apart over the price. After the DDoS caused Dyn's customers to flee in droves (my own employer included), suddenly Oracle's last best offer became much more appealing. Something very similar happened at a company I used to work for - we had been talking to a potential acquisition but we were still far apart on price. That company's largest customer files Chapter 11, and *bam* they called back and agreed to our last offer within days. De

  • CDOS? (Score:5, Funny)

    by swm ( 171547 ) <swmcd@world.std.com> on Monday November 21, 2016 @09:52AM (#53331521) Homepage

    If Oracle buys a DNS provider, does that constitute a centralized denial-of-service attack?

    • Re:CDOS? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Big Hairy Ian ( 1155547 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @10:21AM (#53331719)
      No but I do expect the quality of DNS to slip drastically as Oracle downgrade it to the same level as the rest of their products

      • Re:CDOS? (Score:4, Funny)

        by Curunir_wolf ( 588405 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @11:33AM (#53332207) Homepage Journal

        No but I do expect the quality of DNS to slip drastically as Oracle downgrade it to the same level as the rest of their products

        Don't forget that down the line, if you're using an Oracle product, you're going to need to use the Oracle DNS service because that's the only one they support. DNS connection problems with your Oracle product? Yea, you're not using OracleDNS, so your whole stack is unsupported.

  • Looking for alternatives (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BDeblier ( 155691 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @09:54AM (#53331533) Homepage

    As a Dyn customer, who refuses to give even one lousy cent to Oracle, I'll be on the lookout for alternatives. Suggestions are welcome.

  • Oracle likely made their calculations, and have determined they can extract plenty of money from the Dyn customers to make the acquisition worth it.
    I, for one, will be moving away from Dyn ASAP, after being a satisfied customer for ~15 years.
    Does anyone have any suggestions for a reliable and secure DNS?

    Discussion at new.ycombinator:
    https://news.ycombinator.com/i... [ycombinator.com]

  • They keep using that word. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Osiris Ani ( 230116 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @10:08AM (#53331627)

    “We've also asked for a comment from Oracle about Dyn's recent breach”

    Since when does a DDoS qualify as a “breach?”

  • Sigh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ledow ( 319597 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @10:10AM (#53331633) Homepage

    Ba-da dum-dum-dum. Another one bites the dust...

    Sorry Dyn. I was a customer of yours. But everything that Oracle touches is to eliminate competition and kill the products that existed.

    It was nice knowing you.

    Anyone know of a way to set up your own Dyn-compatible dynamic DNS system? I have a remote server, and a way to change the dyndns.org URLs in use but I think the protocol is undocumented or certain without available SERVER software (client software is another matter).

    And most of the things I want to change that use it are hardcoded into the Dyn protocols, so I can't just "use something else", even if the devices allow the end-address to be changed to my own server.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @10:20AM (#53331709)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      no-ip

      You're welcome.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Full disclosure: I'm a contributor to this project and I wrote the code that supports DynDNS.

      If you're willing to run your own DNS server, you can take a look at PowerDNS-Admin, it's a user interface for PowerDNS that eases management of DNS zones but also supports the DynDNS protocol, so you can use DynDNS clients (like ddclient).

      https://github.com/ngoduykhanh/PowerDNS-Admin

  • Solution to stop acquisitions? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Monday November 21, 2016 @10:17AM (#53331687) Homepage

    I wish there were some solution to stop acquisitions like this: a small company with a decent product is consumed by some multinational giant. The product may live on for a few years, but ultimately it gets transmogrified into something unrecognizable and - as often as not - useless. But the multinational now has the patents needed to prevent competition.

    Look at what Oracle is trying to do with Java: suing Google for using the fricking APIs. Microsoft is renowned for this as well: "extend, embrace, extinguish".

    While I'm no fan of government regulation, I have the feeling that this is part-and-parcel of "too big to fail", and requires government intervention. Companies should not be allowed to grow beyond a certain size. If a company reaches that size, it must divest or split itself into smaller, independent entities.

    • I wish there were some solution to stop acquisitions like this...Companies should not be allowed to grow beyond a certain size. If a company reaches that size, it must divest or split itself into smaller, independent entities.

      We do (or at least did) have such protections in place, in the form of anti-monopoly laws.

      They are blatantly ignored today with 55-gallon drums of palm grease, brought forth by the very monopolies who maintain lobbyist armies.

      Capitalism used to be king. Corruption is now, because those who could do something about it don't give a shit.

      • We do (or at least did) have such protections in place, in the form of anti-monopoly laws.

        Not even remotely relevant in the situations being discussed. Anti-monopoly does not prevent a large company from acquiring a small company even if it's the last company. It is only relevant in a common market, or a converging market.

        So unless Oracle is a DynDNS provider and starts gobbling up all DynDNS providers it's irrelevant.

        • We do (or at least did) have such protections in place, in the form of anti-monopoly laws.

          Not even remotely relevant in the situations being discussed. Anti-monopoly does not prevent a large company from acquiring a small company even if it's the last company. It is only relevant in a common market, or a converging market.

          So unless Oracle is a DynDNS provider and starts gobbling up all DynDNS providers it's irrelevant.

          The impact of the botnet attack against the DynDNS provider wasn't insignificant, but hey let's keep jumping through the legal minutiae that allow oligopolies and monopolies to continue to grow today.

          Ironically, because Oracle isn't a DynDNS provider by trade, there's not a damn thing stopping them from "gobbling up all DynDNS providers". Gotta love those bullshit loopholes.

          • There's nothing bullshit or loophole about it. It's the damn title of the law. You can't apply laws intended to prevent unchecked accumulation of power by a monopoly using anti-trust legislation when the actual target isn't a monopoly.

            Just because someone is huge doesn't make them a monopoly. If Google opened a coffee shop tomorrow would they be a monopoly on coffee? No. If they bought Starbucks would they be? No. Is competition in any way reduced by one company not in a business acquiring another company t

            • There's nothing bullshit or loophole about it. It's the damn title of the law. You can't apply laws intended to prevent unchecked accumulation of power by a monopoly using anti-trust legislation when the actual target isn't a monopoly.

              So, in the example I provided, Oracle is not in the primary business of DynDNS, so today they are legally entitled buy up and control the entire market of DynDNS services if they wanted to, to include pricing collusion to essentially destroy future competition.

              And yet current law magically prevents the "unchecked accumulation of power" in this scenario. Nope, no loophole to see here, move along.

              No, they are not a monopoly per se today, but there's not a damn thing preventing them from becoming one.

              • Nope, no loophole to see here, move along.

                Do you really not understand that a law not applying at all, not even in it's title, is not the same thing as a loophole?

                • Nope, no loophole to see here, move along.

                  Do you really not understand that a law not applying at all, not even in it's title, is not the same thing as a loophole?

                  Do you not understand the fact that it is essentially a loophole that allows the law to not apply at all in order to effectively prevent the unchecked accumulation of power? My example still stands to demonstrate the obvious ridiculousness of "anti" monopoly laws, which appear to be essentially forged in swiss cheese to allow monopolies and oligopolies to be created and perpetuate today.

                  Forgive me. You are correct. Perhaps I should have defined this as bullshit semantics instead.

                  • Do you not understand the fact that it is essentially a loophole that allows the law to not apply at all in order to effectively prevent the unchecked accumulation of power?

                    So it's a loophole in the murder laws that I can't apply them to you because you didn't murder anyone?

                    So why are you trying to apply anti-trust laws to cases which aren't anti-trust?

      • Capitalism used to be king.

        I can think of few things that represent capitalism better than one giant corporation buying another.

    • this has a certain level of anti trust monopoly to it, if they let the buyout go through

    • I wish there were some solution to stop acquisitions like this

      Trump will stop it. He said Comcast should never have been allowed to buy NBC Universal, and he's already stated he wants to stop the AT&T / Time Warner merger.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Bzzzzt. Wrong. With the new Republican majority and The Cheeto, they find regulations abhorrent. So there'll be no regulatin' on their watch. How does this square with their whining about banks too big to fail? It doesn't, but contradictions like this never bothered them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jdavidb ( 449077 )

      While I'm no fan of government regulation, I have the feeling that this is part-and-parcel of "too big to fail", and requires government intervention. Companies should not be allowed to grow beyond a certain size. If a company reaches that size, it must divest or split itself into smaller, independent entities.

      Surely the main reason we have such monstrously large companies is government intervention in the first place, due to the "too big to fail" mentality.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I wish there were some solution to stop acquisitions like this: a small company with a decent product is consumed by some multinational giant. The product may live on for a few years, but ultimately it gets transmogrified into something unrecognizable and - as often as not - useless. But the multinational now has the patents needed to prevent competition.

      I don't think DYN is a small company anymore. They may have started as a small organization providing free dynamic DNS services decades ago, but then a few

  • Remember the early Dyn? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Monday November 21, 2016 @10:31AM (#53331783) Homepage Journal

    I think Dyn started out as a community effort rather than an explicit for-profit. I signed on back then. I seem to remember signing on for something long-term, for not much money. Not long after that they went commercial. My sign-on was supposed to be carried over to a year's service or something, I don't remember and I didn't pursue it because I was only interested in the community effort.

    • I remember those days. I was one of the paid community supporters before they went commercial, and when they did, I got free lifetime custom DNS service for a single domain as well as free lifetime premium service for dynamic DNS in the dyndns.org domain. The quality of Dyn as a provider, and their willingness to keep their end of that deal (unlike, say, Joyent), is why I use them as my registrar and why I've recommended them professionally despite the fact that there are far less expensive alternatives (su

      • Same here. When they went commercial, I got a "VIP" label and free DNS service for my domain, since I had donated something like $20. I highly doubt that service will continue under Oracle.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Que_Ball ( 44131 )
        Yep, lifetime VIP and lifetime free standard DNS for up to 50 domains here. Donated to dyndns in the 90s and bought lifetime with editdns before they were taken over by dyndns.

        For anyone who was paying it was already looking pretty bad with constant price increases and reductions in features and service for the lower priced options. Only the fully managed anycast DNS platform appeared to be getting much attention. Host logs from dynamic clients has been broken for years for example.
    • I do remember. I signed on for some light-weight services when they were small (like you mentioned) and signed up for some lifetime something or other. Really, it was like paying for 2 years up front or something cheap like that so I thought 'what the heck'. A while later, I had forgotten all about my account there, but needed the service there again, so I reset my password, signed in and to my surprise saw that I had been grandfathered into to a lifetime subscription even though they went commercial. Which
  • for example

    OpenOffice ... almost dead
    Netbeans ... almost dead
    OpenSolaris ... dead
    Glassfish Server ... dead in commercial
    MySQL ... almost dead first, now in war with MariaDB

    we can see the glorious destination that DNS register will have ... maybe we are going to need to host DNS registers now in Oracle RACs!

  • I guess it's time to find an alternative service.

  • Hmmm (Score:2)

    by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
    Good thing I use no-ip for my basic needs. I don't want to support Oracle if I can help it. I wouldn't piss on Larry Ellison if he was on fire.

  • Well that sucks. Dyn bought my DNS provider, EveryDNS a few years ago. Even though they promised to keep providing services for donors, they really made you jump through a lot of hoops to keep it, the services were very limited, and every contact with them was an up-sell opportunity.

    I'm sure with this acquisition that promise will be completely broken, as Oracle loves to monetize everything. Time to find another DNS provider. Again.

  • My paid account ends then, let's see if Oracle somehow manage to fuck it entirely before then,...?

    I really like the HUGE amount of modems / routers / cable boxes etc which support Dyn. Does anyone know of a product which even comes close? The closest I can think of is no-ip.com, they seem to be fairly common on a handful of cheap and pricey routers but still not as many as Dyn.

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