No organization should tie their infrastructure maintenance to individuals, but processes are really hard to consolidate and automate and knowledge is not easily shared either.
Curious as to how other people approach reducing their bus factor.
Hey thanks, GoDaddy for releasing a statement[0] instead of fixing the problem. They literally choose this over siding with the customer and their lawyer.
I thought that the problem was the web3 people pretending to build decentralised services while in fact they're relying on a convicted criminal to renew a domain?
There is no problem to 'fix'. The people who paid for eth.link domains do not own them, so GoDaddy has zero obligation to even acknowledge their existence. Hell, they're lucky they even got a statement at all, if I was them I'd just start selling off the domains slowly while I watch Twitter melt down.
Because there are rules around this stuff. Rules designed to maintain integrity of dns and trust in the system. They can't flaunt the rules, and if they did, they'd be at risk of losing accreditation.
Registrars seem to flaunt the rules all the time and not lose accreditaion. CloudFlare cancels peoples domains prematurely due to "false positives" - gets away with it. NameCheap cancels peoples domains prematurely due to their country of origin - gets away with it.
You seem to be using "cancels" in a very loose sense. When you're talking about actions of these providers, and their duties/responsibilities, some precision is required.
These companies are allowed to end a business relationship. They are not allowed to just "take away" a domain without just cause^. That domain is still registered and you are free to take it to another registrar.
>NameCheap cancels peoples domains prematurely due to their country of origin - gets away with it.
If you're referring to their actions about Russia, they didn't "cancel" a domain. They gave all of their users a time frame to transfer their domains out before they ended the business relationship. Now, personally, I believe their timeline was too short - but a week is a reasonable notification.
This is very different from a more colloquially understood usage of cancel, which would imply that they immediately terminated service and did not allow the domain registrant to keep the domain. That is simply not the case, and also within line with ICANN policies.
^ im not an expert on the tos or legalities of this stuff, but things like fraud or spam can definitely get your domain "taken away" on most (if not all?) tlds
>They are not allowed to just "take away" a domain without just cause". That domain is still registered and you are free to take it to another registrar.
Im not sure you read or understand the links correctly so let me clarify.
>This is very different from a more colloquially understood usage of cancel, which would imply that they immediately terminated service and did not allow the domain registrant to keep the domain.
that is exactly what CloudFlare did. They manually set the domain to expire quickly and prevented the user from transferring it out.
In the case of NameCheap, while they did allow transfers out, also manually set the domain to expire quickly and failed to give users adequate time to transfer.
Overriding a domains expiration date to a date in the near future is akin to cancellation. Sure we could split hairs and argue semantics about the technical difference between a "forced accelerated expiry" and a "cancellation". But ultimately what matters is, in both cases, the registrars manually overrided the domains registered expiration dates with a date in near future, effectively cancelling them. 100% "taking them away without just cause".
>Im not sure you read or understand the links correctly so let me clarify.
I did in fact.
>Sure we could split hairs
That is literally, LITERALLY the whole point of if they are "flaunting rules" or not. You said they were flaunting rules. According to those links you posted, it turns out they are not flaunting the rules. Your statement is false, your language imprecise. These things matter.
Were their actions distasteful? Sure. But they were in accordance with the rules.
How is preventing a person from transferring out their domain + setting it to expire quickly effectively any different from outright cancelling a persons domain immediately? The end result is the same. Sure there is a technical distinction in the WHOIS but I can see how a court could find it to be the same thing in spirit(and thus, a violation of the ICANN-registrar agreement)
When you sign up for Namecheap, you are acknowledging that they can change their TOS at any time and can effectively revoke ownership of any domain you own at-will. This is the same for pretty much everyone, unless you're buying straight from ICANN.
Wild and unbased speculation. In fact, there have been lawsuits around de-platforming that haven't gone well for the plaintiff - I can't imagine a more cut and dry scenario would make it easier :)
>Sure there is a technical distinction in the WHOIS
These are two quite different cases from "what happens to the domain" perspective, and for Namecheap I don't see the formal problem - I don't believe the accreditation requires them to never terminate a customer contract, and the domain remains active and can be transferred.
Because they're GoDaddy, not a crypto-charity. They run a business, nobody has any right to complain that they're not giving away their product free-of-charge. If they want their precious domain so badly then they can compete for it on the free market; that's the spirit of decentralization and deregulation, after all!
Someone else can pay for the domain, they just have to wait for it to lapse first. This seems perfectly fine to me, and if the original owner agreed to the GoDaddy TOS then I see no reason why they should make a magical fairy dust exception for this case.
I don't see enough information in the article or GoDaddy statement saying the ask was to do it free of charge just they won't allow anyone else do the renewal.
As much as I dislike crypto-crap as the article points out ENS itself would handle this situation fine and GoDaddy reversing its position on this is pretty much the opposite of the argument for centralized services being better able to handle these scenarios.
I wonder if there is a reason they felt compelled to reverse their decision and omit any details as to what contact initiated that. I'd imagine the nature of the service handling that type of traffic could be significant to some.
EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic had previously struck a deal to renew the domain address for another year before the domain provider allegedly decided to stop honoring the deal “suddenly” and “without notice.”
Another one in the great pile of reasons to avoid GoDaddy and other US American domain name services -- you don't own your domain name, you're just an authorized user as long as the US government allows it.
Regardless of how you feel about "web3", I think most people (especially in technology) should see this as a problem and aspire to a brighter future where governments/corporations aren't making decisions about what people can and can't see on the web, especially when they're inherently biased.
i register all my domains and especially those that belong to a community or a company with a registrar that allows anyone to pay the renewal fee. like gandi does.
for a community that means that any member of the community can pay the fee, and for small communities this is a nice way to make an effortless donation.
for a company it means that any office assistant can manage the payments without needing administrative access.
some registrars let you keep a balance, so even if you can't pay in advance, you can load up your account balance so instead of trying to bill your card it just deducts your balance. Idk why godaddy wouldn't have this so I assume he just didn't keep an account balance.
Yeah, I try to also do that, as the domains are so important to me that I want to front-load as many things that could fail as possible. This one domain I have only allows me to renew it when it's less than 60 days to expiry and it's not possible to auto-renew, which really sucks.
Will domains have to be renewed at all in the future?
When you put a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, it will stay there forever. You don't have to renew it.
Why not the same for domains? You put "mydomain > 111.222.333.444 signed: me, the mydomain owner" on a blockchain and as long as you do not put another signed message that overrides it, it points to 111.222.333.444 forever.
What in the world are you talking about? That's the entire point of blockchains, to have immutable records. And short of forking the blockchain or breaking the underlying encryption, there's literally no way to transfer a DNS record (in a world using DNS built on top of a blockchain) without the private key.
rebuking the implicit, "ergo this method is bad" part of your post, given its context. more specifically, the idea that its worse than current methods with DNS and X.509
The future is what we've built upon in the past. Domain names are not going to change in any significant way because the DNS system won the test of time.
there's a concept I like to bring up here, the Lindy Effect, that shows that DNS because of its longevity will likely be around for decades or centuries to come.
ENS already mostly has this. depositcontract.eth expires in the year 2150 and cannot be modified or transferred until that point. Infinite expiry doesn’t really make sense.
Having a name system improves the UX of a bunch of products. Products want to provide the best UX so they would be willing to pay for it as without it their product will be worse.
What the actual hell is with blockchainers and using centralized CRAP like Discord, Google, Amazon, and a decentralized naming system that nobody actually uses the decentralized way because they are not aware of the concept of running code on your own machine.
I can't help but wonder if this is in any way motivated by the fact that ENS could be viewed as a threat/competitive in a hypothetical future where web3 becomes more mainstream.
"decentralized web3 nonsense crumbles the second there is some issue on the centralized web2 architecture its built on behind the scenes", more news at 11.
"Basically" is doing a lot of work in that sentence:
> In September, Griffith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate international sanctions against North Korea. Griffith was arrested in November 2019 after giving a talk at a cryptocurrency conference in Pyongyang in April of that year.
> “What you see here is an intentionality…and a desire to educate people on how to evade sanctions,” [U.S. District Judge Kevin] Castel said.
> Judge Castel read a series of text messages and emails from Griffith in which the defendant admits to sharing information with North Korea for the express purpose of helping the repressive Kim regime evade sanctions.
> What the judge found most damning, perhaps, was a photo of Griffith presenting at the conference, wearing a traditional North Korean suit and standing in front of a blackboard on which it read “No sanctions!” with a smiley face.
It's so funny how people are so happy to jump in defense of the US regime.
Are international sanctions laws just? Should the US government have the right to bar other countries from transacting financially with the world?
> Griffith has been limited to two or less meals a day, usually peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because gangs in MDC control the kitchens and the commissary
Gangs control US prisons because the US government is too incompetent to properly administer their prisons.
The judge refused to send him to a lower-security prison (this guy is clearly not a physical security threat) because allowing him to avoid gang-conflict would "not be enough punishment".
> Are international sanctions laws just? Should the US government have the right to bar other countries from transacting financially with the world?
North Korea happily transacts with China. It just can’t transact with us or with our friends. This makes sense given Pyongyang has credibly stated it would be happy to bomb us and our allies. If someone wants to work for our enemies, a few years in jail is–historically and compared to how other countries treat such people—quite light.
>Are international sanctions laws just? Should the US government have the right to bar other countries from transacting financially with the world?
Yes and yes. With being the #1 super power country in the world, a lot of power comes with that.
Griffith could have avoided ever being in prison had he not ignored the US government, lied to FBI agents, and then attempted to assist NK in evading sanctions.
> Are international sanctions laws just? Should the US government have the right to bar other countries from transacting financially with the world?
The US government supporting international sanctions by penalizing institutions and individuals who violate said sanctions?
Yeah, I have no problem with that…
And prison is designed to be a n unnice place, for the longest time the Maricopa County (where Phoenix is) jail was a bunch of tents because they didn’t want people to be there. Foreign nationals got nice air conditioned cells but your basic DUI offenders (and random petty criminals) got to go to Tent City.
No organization should tie their infrastructure maintenance to individuals, but processes are really hard to consolidate and automate and knowledge is not easily shared either.
Curious as to how other people approach reducing their bus factor.