Was there some sort of assurance that nothing was going to happen when the contract expired, and this expectation was changed? Freenom hasn’t been registering domains since Jan 1.
It’s seeming a little odd to me that this is catching people with their pants down.
Actually, I think it’s amusingly perfect that the tankies were hyperfocused on conjectural threats posed by capitalists and entirely missed the much more imminent threat posed by a government.
Very true. I had to laugh when I saw lemmygrad.com
lemmygrad.com is just a redirect to exploding-heads.com which is just another extremist instance at the other end of the spectrem.
Yeah. It still made me smile.
What is a tankie? First time I’m seeing it today.
A tankie is a communist who at least defends and often advocates for forced submission to their rule, or more broadly defends the authoritarian regimes that engage in such. It dates back to the USSR sending in tanks to crush an uprising in Hungary in 1956, and was applied to the UK communists who argued in support of the USSR.
The owners of lemmy.ml are tankies.
Someone who drives tanks to work
When’s the last time you saw a government sieze a TLD?
That’s highly disengenous, they didn’t seize the tld, they own it. They just didn’t renew the operator’s contract.
.ga earlier this year I believe
They didn’t seize it. .ml TLD was contracted for 10 years to some Dutch dude. That contract expired on the 17th
No, the Freenom registrar (the Dutch dude) had a contract to issue .ml domains for 10 years. That expired. Other registrars can register .ml domains without issue, as long as their contracts with the government remain.
You mean the country that owns and has always owned .ml TLD, which states rules you must follow if you want to register a domain with that TLD, which states the penalties which include forfiet of your domain name, surpised people when they did what they said they would do?
This is kind of interesting to see how the public views ownership. There seems to be an assumption that buying xyz.com is akin to buying a utility (we pay for water service to drink and drown or waterboard). This ain’t it. A domain name is a registration in a database on servers that need to be constantly online, it had costs, it has governance concerns and technical infrastructure that must be maintained. There isn’t a higher power here, no government owns the internet, but some governments do own their own TLDs. This makes it possible to have mali.ml vs visitbeautifulmali420.squarespace.com. It might feel like you have the power to buy fuckmali.ml and put turn it into goatse but mali can nuke your registration if they wanted to. How did these countries get the TLDs? ICANN. But don’t think ICANN is going to jump in and break their rules for you.
This sucks but ICANN has a solution… there are many many TLDs out there now. They all work the same: it’s just a name, point it where you go and it works like any .com or .org. or whatever. Fun ones like .zip and .xxx. grab one you like but be sure to read the rules when registering. Some TLDs do NOT allow private registration. Most country based TLDs (ccTLDs) require that you live in that country and provide proof of citizenship.
This has been around since the inception of the internet. There are alternatives to ICANN, but I am not positive you will want to use them because:
- your visitors will need to use these alternatives on all devices or on the router in order to access your site.
- legit domain holders may not have records on these alternate services but malicious actors might. If we change the IP to a malicious actor for apple servers at the DNS level because the TLDs arent using the root-servers.net, anyone using those TLD root servers could easily be hacked.
It’s not great, but ICANN starts the chain of trust upon which the internet relies.
The even bigger/more hilarious part of this IMO is how millions of emails meant to go to the US defense department - .mil - ended up going to Mali - .ml - because of typos. The Dutch company that up til now managed .ml has been trying to get the military to respond but no luck, and I think they had to hand everything over to Mali — which is closely aligned w Russia…
Why is lemmy.ml still running, though?
Nobody really knows, but there are two theories floating around:
- The Lemmy devs paid for their domain
- Their DNS entries are still cached and it will stop working tomorrow
A contract expiring and not being renewed is nothing unusual. But it doesn’t automatically mean revocation of all domain names. If A gives B a contract to manage resources and you as C sign a contract with B who is acting in the name A, it doesn’t automatically dissappear if A and B break their arrangement.
Any lawyers to pitch in to confirm if works like that?
It’s common courtesy and maybe a legal obligation to announce such intentions.
C didn’t sign a contract with B. B let C use A’s property for free while B was managing it. The only contract was between A and B for managing their property.
Using a free TLD for anything you wanted to stick around was a terrible idea in the first place.
deleted by creator
For anyone looking for alternatives, I think this list is the most up to date: https://free-for.life/#/?id=domains
That is a dangerous host name, none of those things are free for life at all
I just realized your username is emojis… I’m surprised that’s possible.
Wonder when .co will go back to Colombia?
There was also news today about a change in Mali that affected US military emails that were sent to .ml instead of .mil. I didn’t read the whole article so I don’t know if that was real or clickbait.
It was real, but totally unrelated to this.
Thanks.
lemmy.ml is still working. is it not?
Others that had used .ml aren’t. Lemmy.ml isn’t the only one.
Yea…
