GoDaddy supports SOPA, redditor proposes "Move your Domain Day"
reddit.com
reddit.com
Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but no one who still has a domain at GoDaddy will be entitled to complain about SOPA if it passes.
http://judiciary.house.gov/issues/Rouge%20Websites/SOPA%20Su...
I love how you can pick nearly any topic in almost any subject(especially computer science) and find an amazing book for free, or for about $60, yet every textbook my school uses gets < 2 stars on amazon and costs $150.
My "favorite" was a biology book written by a guy with a B.S. in journalism. He published the book years ago and every year he releases a new edition with the chapters out of order.
Be a proud pirate.
(Edit: found a bank that offers Amex, but there's no debit corporate cards, plus I'm not allowed to get a credit card here because I'm not a citizen).
Ah, duopoly.
1. I think it is usually free to all EU countries too as long as you use IBAN.
Funding a company that supports a company that supports SOPA is just one step away from supporting a company that supports SOPA...which in turn is just one step away from supporting SOPA. Scary, isn't it?
Remember when Glenn Beck was still on Fox and people were crying continuously? Nothing worked until they started boycotting the companies advertising for him.
I had only heard of 5 of those companies, but this one stood out. Tasc.com
Checkout one of their services:
Cyberwarrior training
http://www.tasc.com/capabilities/cyberwarrior_training/
"Cyber security requirements have changed: hackers have started working full time for criminal syndicates; spammers and adware/spyware developers are now using the same code as worm writers; and organizations are increasingly on the front page news for losing customer data. You need to protect your information now.
The sheer complexity of the Internet makes it difficult to understand and defend against attacks. You may be unaware of vulnerabilities that affect your network.
Modern day computer systems, comprised of millions of lines of software code, are wrought with bugs and exploitable weaknesses. Education is your best defense. While understanding how computers and networks operate is important, to defend your network from attack you need to understand how attackers exploit weakness in your system.
TASC is a leader in IT security for the U.S. Government, Intelligence Agencies, and the Department of Defense. TASC offers the CyberWarrior Course Series to teach you about the latest computer network threats, tactics, defensive measures, and certification and accreditation processes.
The CyberWarrior Course Series will give you the skills you need to ensure you are practic"
While the brochure makes it sound like standard netsec training... I find the wording of a "Cyberwarrior Training" program to be... surreal. Further, I think it is pretty sick to market such services to a government that clearly is clueless about the internet in general. (not the defense industries - the political arms of the government)
The reason is that it is probably easy to market this service to politicians who want to appear savvy:
"Look, we need more cyberwarriors on the net - we need to block the firewalls of the cyber criminals. This is the next fronteir in protecting our nation!" --- *For the low cost of $150,000 per cyber warrior. No guarantees apply. Check you state for local restrictions.
THey would not be the ones taking the training - but the ones spending tax dollars on a service they really don't understand - thus the likelihood for abuse is higher.
I err on the side of corruption when anything pertaining to governments is concerned. Call me paranoid.
Alternatively, you could suggest Ron Wyden's OPEN bill. OPEN nixes the the DNS filtering, but keeps some of the follow-the-money measures in SOPA. More importantly, it also requires a full court hearing before any action can be taken.
Stop removing DNS entries; that's attempting to censor things that aren't in the US for non-US citizens.
Require a full court proceeding to stop advertisements and payment processing in the US - ie, no "court order", it has to be a full lawsuit with the ability to defend.
Require the removal of access to only affect a specific, listed set of companies.
Require the company requesting the blocking to pay reasonable costs of blocking.
Remove the making of copyright infringement into a felony; each of these things can easily happen by mistake.
Unless, of course, the fragrance company Coty Inc has been seeing a lot of their fragrances being pirated online.
I did another thread on here regarding this as well and I'm curious how far people are willing to go to prove a point or are they only singling out whatever makes sense. The above three have some strong strong monopolies or close to it so it makes things much harder. GoDaddy just happens to be one of the easy ones people can choose to switch from.
I only have dealings with GoDaddy and Comcast; and while I can't get away from Comcast, I'm going to do my damnedest to get away from GoDaddy.
From the Reddit link:
"Name Cheap messaged me with a special discount code for reddit users: BYEBYEGD I'm not taking any positions i'm just reporting it. I asked him to give reddit users a better deal."
I'm not affiliated with NameCheap at all, but if you're going to move your domain, this might make things easier.
Great price for something you were going to buy anyway. I just moved 10 domains.
Is this about scammers flocking to NameCheap because it's, well, cheap? Or is NameCheap somehow marketing to spammers while trying to maintain plausible deniability? I'd be happy to consider moving my sites over to NameCheap, but I don't want to move from one evil registrar to another registrar.
I've kept with them largely because of the generally convenient and low-upsell nature of the website on top of this.
One caveat for U.S. customers: on the very rare (once or twice a decade) occasions when I've had to contact customer service, the time separation and some rough English skills have led to a slightly bumpy communication experience while resolving issues, but even with those obstacles, they're better at it than GoDaddy (and their English is a heck of a lot better than my French :).
~$15usd/yr rather than $7ish a year isn't a big deal for domains I care about.
Again, I am not affiliated to iwantmyname nor do I have ties other than my own domain being with them.
(Note: We are a competitor of godaddy.)
I was going to complain about this sentiment from someone not that rich and who can't afford the fanciest red polo shirts money can buy ha ha, but then I said forget it, for what it truly costs to move a domain it's far less then the cost on our liberties if SOPA passes, so I went outside shoveled a few driveways and earned enough money to move over the domains I have without cutting into my budget. There really isn't a reason for people not to do this.
http://rudysyndrome.com/2011/10/28/online-copyright-laws-won...
"Most of what we are seeing is either 1) rhetoric, 2) regurgitated lobbying spin, 3) criticism of language we have already fixed, or 4) retweets by people who like to steal music and buy fake, but cheap, goods."
Ugh.
(oBDisclaimer: I work for a registrar that unequivocally supports the Open Internet."
You can't reasonably support free speech in all instances, just like you can't reasonably support an "open internet" in all instances. There have to be some exceptions.
It's the listing of those exceptions and how you deal with them that's the tricky bit. So saying "I support an open internet" is just ignoring the issue.
Why? I am fine with the internet not blocking anything at all, even though I accept limits on free speech.
To drag the "speech" analogy further, I can shout whatever I want and I'm ok with the fact that in some cases this can bring consequences.
What about people who DDoS attack you? Is that fine? No need to have any recourse there?
How about those that hack DNS to dupe people into visiting their site etc
Those are all "Open Internet", but they're also not very nice.
I don't think it's as clear cut as some make it.
I don't know if SOPA gets it right or wrong, or if the current laws are sufficient, but I'm glad we have some of those laws in place to make the internet a slightly nicer place.
I'm not sure why you'd say that, when the parent says
> and I'm ok with the fact that in some cases this can bring consequences.
Bad stuff happens on the Internet. People need a way to stop that bad stuff happening. SOPA is not that way.
eBay? also, already illegal based on trademarks, copyright, etc etc.
"What about people who DDoS attack you? Is that fine? No need to have any recourse there?" "How about those that hack DNS to dupe people into visiting their site etc"
already illegal
--------------
from my understanding, SOPA is more about removing due process than making bad things illegal
> I'm against SOPA as much as the next guy
Here, you're saying you don't know whether to support the warrentless censorship of websites you disagree with. Why are you saying two different things?
1) Child pornography
End list.
National security is not enough of a reason for restrictions. Copyright is not enough of a reason. Further, the assumption that corporations or governments have exclusive moral authority to determine what constitutes impermissible material is, frankly, ridiculous. Giving them the authority to make such decisions is destructive, to both freedom and economy.
2) Websites that are known for mallware, phishing, or otherwise going to mess you up.
As I said I don't know if SOPA is good/bad, but my point was that "I support an Open Internet" is a bit of a cop out.
There are anti-viruses, browser plugins, and even the browsers themselves protect you from stuff like that. You don't need the Government itself to do it, and they wouldn't be any more effective anyway. They would just abuse the power.
2) SEO tips 3) Get things done technique websites
to that list.
;-)
Honest question, is it illegal everywhere? I'm just taking a stab in the dark that there are societies somewhere in this world that either haven't established laws or are terribly enforced if they do exist. Playing devils advocate what if a child porn site is hosted in that area, then what? I realize that the situation is unlikely but if it's possible wouldn't there need to be a way to handle it?
For every country named, the ambassador to Germany was able to cite laws that prohibit child pornography (or just porn, eg. in countries with sharia law). In all cases, they stated interest in enforcement by their governments, too.
Given that they tried a couple of times, and failed just as often, I'll assume that no such country exists - otherwise some advisor to our local propagandists would have found and presented it on the second or third try.
Censorship just stops people from seeing the content; it doesn't deal with any of the root issues.
This is why I believe the banning of child pornography sites is mostly used as an excuse to show "proof of concept censoring" and then use it to expand it to other stuff like copyright. This is why RIAA and MPAA love to use it as example that it's possible to censor them.
Obviously this is an extremely touchy subject, but I think the fact you have even one exception shows you are not grasping the problem here.
So in your country, "Child" may mean <18, while on the other side of the world, it's <21, or maybe even <16. Even more troubling, the clothes that many teenagers choose to wear in many western countries are clearly considered pornographic in nature in other more conservative countries.
It just makes no sense to say "There are no exceptions. Except this one, that can be interpreted in hundreds of different ways". Once you leave it for interpretation, the scope will expand and expand until children are being listed as sex offenders for taking photos of themselves.
The fact that this is already happening gives me chills.
We really need to openly discuss and codify the reasons behind the war on child pornography.
Or we are discussing two different things, which is completely my doing.
I was thinking of speech in the constitutional sense; I was not speaking of domain seizures. I completely agree that the government/corporations should not have the power to seize domains under any circumstances.
(Although eminent domain might be an interesting angle to consider, although that is another beast entirely.)
Remember, many countries don't have a constitution and don't care for yours.
> > I was thinking of speech in the constitutional sense
> Remember, many countries don't have a constitution and don't care for yours.
For some reason I can't see a reply link under hir answer, so I'll just leave this here:
Constitution is neither the only one, nor the most effective assertion of unalienable freedoms. Since the aftermath of WW2 there have been many Charters, Conventions and Declarations of all sorts, many of them accepted ("ratified") by many countries alongside their local laws.
Perhaps the most widely known and accepted one is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_...
I believe that the deeper a thread is, the longer it takes for a reply link to appear on a comment. This is to prevent endless flamewars, which immediate replies facilitate.
After that you're in a gray area, but below that you definitely should get into a lot of trouble.
And what about teenagers wearing tiny bikinis?
The slope is more than slippery, it's vertical.
I don't want to see any more young teenagers branded as sex offenders, a label they'll have to wear for the rest of their life, because they sent naked pics of themselves from their phone to a friend of theirs that's the same age.
I don't want to see parents being run through the legal system because they've got some pictures of their baby that happens to be naked.
I don't want to see someone being thrown in jail because they have some kind of manga which, under a broad definition, would qualify as this even though no actual children are involved.
Anything that involves abuse, pornographic or otherwise, should be what the laws focus on regardless of the age of the subjects.
If it was merely "child pornography" that could get your site taken down, then the first idiot teenager to post a topless shot of herself or a guy posting his junk, which you have to admit is disappointingly common, would get your site blown off the internet permanently.
With SOPA in place, Chatroulette, or anything like it, would never have happened at all.
I also find it highly ridiculous that politicians (at least here in Germany) still spout crap about "international, millions of dollar heavy child porn rings" or similar nonsense.
I'd wager[1] that most child pornography is either a) documented domestic abuse of children by relatives or b) jailbait (ie, suggestive or explicit pictures of legally underage, but physically mature persons).
For the former, we're fighting a symptom. As I said, we need to fight the cause, child abuse. But there's a problem with that: it's a long term process, and a difficult one at that. Demanding the takedown of websites with child pornography works way better to get yourself elected.
For the latter, I'd go as far as to ask the following: who is hurt by people with a paraphilia involving underage persons[2] masturbating to images? Especially if those images were made in consent with or even by the person depicted?
[1] This is another thing about the entire child porn discussion: you can't confirm anything without getting yourself in all sorts of legal trouble. There was a good example of this here in Germany a while back, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joerg_Tauss
[2] I'm putting it this way because Pedophilia isn't the only such paraphilia, even though the term is often used to mean "attracted to underage persons", which is very wrong.
The US, instead of enacting laws that restrict movement, needs to put into place laws that make copyright infringement illegal. Oh wait, they already have them.
In short, go after the people not the domain. I want to be able to walk around the internet the same way I can walk around a city. If there are seedy places online then it is my choice to avoid them and not the governments right to simply declare them quarantined or off limits.
If you want to make the Internet safer, more secure, better for commerce, more accepting of DRM, whatever, then let's take that up as a technical discussion and figure out how to amend the infrastructure so that it continues to work. Hiving off slabs of address space and putting them under the control of national legislatures is the fastest and most direct way to ensure that the entire network stops working real quick.
If anything I wouldn't be for a law that completely bans the cheaper versions of the original. I'd be for a law that only makes it illegal to say they are originals when they are not. But I would allow them to be sold in the market, as long as they state it's a "clone" product or something.
It might or might not hurt the big corporations (would the people buying the cheap clones really have the money to buy the expensive originals otherwise?), but I think it would be much better for the market overall
You could go as far as suggesting these people are helping godaddy. If you take away 120 domains (as one redditor is doing) that godaddy are losing money on and you're only using them because they're cheap... that's a win for godaddy surely, unless the scale at which people do this makes a dent in godaddy's total customer/domain figures, which are a marketing point, but that would require millions to leave.
You also neglect to see the effect of thousands or tens of thousands of savvy people actively changing their mind about a company and NOT recommending it to people or bad mouthing the company. My suspicion is, the kind of people reading HN/Reddit are also the type of people that get asked 'computery' stuff quite a bit. I know from personal experience I've probably influenced ~30-50 people's registrar choice this year. Even if it were 1-2 as the average number, the knock on effects could potentially put a nice dent in them.
I've definitely paid them back several times over for the domains I registered with them for $1.
The fact that you can switch and that it makes financial sense to do so does not mean that people will.
I'll renew all my domains for the maximum time possible if it means godaddy will lose money on each transaction. Then I'll transfer them out.
Savvy people have been badmouthing GoDaddy for years. Being recommended by the technorati simply isn't a part of GoDaddy's business model.
Here in Vancouver, there's a plumbing company called Milani. They hire bad plumbers, don't train them, and pay them poorly. They do shoddy work. Every other plumbing firm knows not to hire plumbers who used to work for Milani, and gets a significant amount of business going back to Milani sites to fix their mistakes. But, Milani takes out a full page ad on the front cover of the Yellow Pages. They advertise on bus stops and billboards. Milani spends more on advertising than the next 5 companies combined. When the average, uninformed person needs a plumber, they think of Milani. That's their business model.
GoDaddy is the Milani of registrars. They quite simply don't give a fuck whether they have a service worth recommending; they spend enough on advertising that they'll always have customers regardless.
This happens to be correct for me, I'm a computer technician (to pay the bills) And I supervise several other technicians. I know for certain that no one will be recommended to go to godaddy if they come to us. And thought it's a local thing I can see it being reasonable that many of the same local shops like mine have employees that visit reddit and HN. It's obviously too early to tell but I think it's going to trickle down until they (godaddy) feels it.
I personally don't use them because I find their advertising extremely distasteful and find the UI to be worse than anything AOL has done in the 1990s.
Obviously I'll be moving not only my domain names, but the two hosting accounts as well.
I just spoke to them on the phone, to figure out how to unlock the DNS registration. The rep had never even heard of SOPA.
The reason this thread is about domain transfers is because GoDaddy is at large known best as a domain registrar. If they were primarily a hosting company/etc., this thread would just as easily be about transferring your hosting/etc.
+1. GoDaddy, you lost a customer today.
There really isn't any reason for anybody to use GoDaddy anymore, unless you're hunting for their coupons, but in this instance you really get what you pay for.
Unless I've missed something, the answer's never. So, when Joe Public wants to register a domain, he only knows about one way to do it.
Seems like a pretty effective marketing strategy to me.
And name.com is a small company here in Colorado, so I am supporting local while I am at it.
I find it difficult to imagine that any HN reader would. Was there ever an era when GoDaddy's reputation and service were respectable?
If you find one of the not-infrequent "Which registrar do you use?" posts, even on HN a lot of people still use them.
For basic website hosting, I've been very happy with HostGator. For about $7 a month you get unlimited space, bandwidth, and domains. It takes care of DNS for your sites (just point your registrar nameserver information at HostGator's nameservers), has SSH access, provides unlimited MySQL databases, and has a pretty nice interface.
I needed a registrar that was able to handle IPv6 glue records, which was rare at the time. (The TUCOWS-backed services only got this capability last month! Before that you had to email TUCOWS and have them manually add the AAAA records to your glue, which I didn't consider a solution.) For all their many flaws, GoDaddy was surprisingly ahead of the curve on IPv6 support.
I suppose by now some of the other registrars probably have gotten their act together. Anybody with experience running IPv6-hosted nameservers have recommendations?
Anyone care to enlighten me about what I'm missing here?
They're a scummy company that have no respect for their customers, obnoxious advertising, and a clunky, annoying web interface. Why would you use them when you could use any of hundreds of other name registrars and web hosts?
http://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/...
It would be awesome if anyone who is transferring domains away from go daddy could add their to the list
What I like about Safenames is the simplicity of their user interface, not the huge number of clicks required by many of the other registrars. Simple text areas where you just can paste the list of domains or a DNS zome file for example.
In a quick Google search, I found this post referencing support by the Business Software Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Apple, and many others: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2011/11/17/which-tech-companie...
Its initial support did lead to a couple of firms quitting the BSA though, notably Kaspersky.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/11/even-the-bus...
There's that expression, "Don't hate the player, hate the game". In the same way that I'm not a fan of a basketball player flopping to draw a foul, I'm not a fan of a company supporting this bill. I totally understand why they do it, but it's not in the spirit of the game IMO.
The bigger problem is the way the game itself is set up. Most people think it's a good idea to hand over their power to a small group of people who get to make decisions for everyone. Businesses see this and figure out that they can realize the benefits of the larger group while only incurring the costs of catering to the smaller group.
Something tells me the affiliates are about to have a very wonderful christmas.
Still, biting the bullet and (finally) transferring everything over now.
ONLY 60-70??? Can you just abandon 2/3 of them...?
How about blocking any domain registered with GoDaddy from a certain date? Do it on DNS servers Hacker News techies control.
Extreme I know, but less extreme than what SOPA will do!
For example, I registered a domain last week using a code that got me $1.00 domain registration.
The code expired last week unfortunately so posting it would be irrelevant.
Hello,
I am writing to you to inform you that because of GoDaddy's continued support of SOPA I am transferring my domains to a different registrar as soon as I can(they were renewed recently so I have to wait).
I read your press release today and I felt that you didn't actually respond to a bulk of the criticism of SOPA, that is that takedown requests can be filed by private parties and the respondent is legally required to remove the content before even considering challenging the takedown request. This obviously presents a large challenge to sites based on user-created content.
A world with SOPA is one in which businesses can't run websites with user-generated content without having a legal team on hand.
SOPA is bad for the open internet and if GoDaddy refuses to look into the issue and actually give a reasoned, intelligent response(as opposed to the "well, we have to stop piracy!" argument your press release made -- yes, something should be done about piracy but SOPA is NOT the answer) then GoDaddy, too, must be considered bad for the open internet and I will stop hosting my domains with you and stop recommending my clients host domains with you.
Thanks,
<me>
Anyone here use Godaddy? How are their prices and service?
I have used their hosting in the past, and I wouldn't recommend it to a professional, but would to someone who wants to post pictures of their cats, or run a low traffic personal wordpress blog.
I'm against SOPA as much as the next guy, but it's a moot issue. Browsers will just release new versions that use alternate DNS systems or get past any 'blocks'.
There's nothing uglier than an internet hate/protest mob.
To say it's a moot issue because there are technical work arounds is pretty naive. I seriously doubt any major browser would ship with a work around to this...I don't know why you assume they would.
Instead, these things tend to be two stage processes. In stage 1 the government attains new powers in order to further some generally positive goal. However, in stage 2 the lack of safeguards on that power leads to abuse and excess but by then it's already too late to easily roll back or block that power.
If we wait until the sky is falling then we will have waited too long. We need to ensure that personal liberties have strong protections, both offline and on. Failing to do so won't lead to immediate disaster but it will lead to making it nearly impossible to stop a disaster as it's happening.
I really can't stand this kind of stance.
Technical workarounds are NOT AN ANSWER to law/political problems.
At best, they are a kludge.
At worst, they get illegal, and some people end up in jail.
It's nice to have them, but only as a last refuge.
The number one priority is to have a sensible legal/political system, not to work around it.
A world without Youtube, Flickr, Etsy, and Vimeo. Plus the suppression of future innovative startups, all at the behest of dying media companies grasping for control.
If you think SOPA is a moot issue, you aren't paying attention.
"SCREW GODADDY" is on a loop in my head right now.