In this, our holiday episode, we’re joined by returning special guest, Duane Wessels, who discusses a recent event involving the root name servers and a lot of obviously spoofed traffic, as well as his ongoing work in the IETF around DNS privacy.  We reach into the mail bag and find a question from our friend, Rob Fleischman, musing about possible additional metadata that recursive servers could send to authoritative servers.  As it happens, Duane’s also working on a DNS protocol extension directly related to Rob’s question, which he tells us about.  Finally, we end with a brief and spoiler-free discussion about The Force Awakens.