Jotform domain seized by US due to user generated content
jotform.net
jotform.net
In other words, this might very well kill a company that someone worked hard to get off the ground. And if you have any usergenerated content it might happen to your company too. Apparently without due process, and without warning.
This is preposterous.
At the very least, they should have sent an email, telling people to switch the urls so the forms would work.
A while back I was advocating that we reach out to such people and explain this SOPA censorship stuff in a way they understand and this is precisely why. SOPA's supporters have done a really great job of training regular folks to think like some of these angry users making them think that somehow it was Jotform that did wrong. If they only knew how totally arbitrary this stuff is I think they'd be mad at the Feds like they should be.
It's so sickening that the government probably just hurt not one but maybe thousands of companies in one fell swoop and everyone's pissed at the wrong guy. Then the politicians want to go around talking about creating jobs... Ha! How about destroying them? That's what it looks like to me.
Did they have any automated detection? If they didn't have a "report a bad form" button then maybe they didn't even try and find bad forms ... like anything with a sign in button or password field. 2 million forms is too many to inspect, but you could narrow that list down very easily.
What happened to them sucks but it seems like the problem could probably have been avoided.
Edit: it let me make a form with "Account number" and "Password" complete with emailing me what people put in it which is suggestive of no preventative measures at all.
See this comment by the founder of Jotform: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3597821 (Relevant quote: "Our Bayesian phishing filter has suspended 65.000 accounts last year.")
But surely they should have been sent a warning, even a 24 hour one, to remove some content before just being wiped off the Internet.
This action is business destroying and draconian.
1) GoDaddy overstepping their bounds and shutting down a website
2) JotForm having inadequate, perhaps even non-existant measures in place to prevent or respond to phishing
Obviously #1 dwarfs #2 significantly but that doesn't make #2 okay.
GoDaddy might not have, if those provisions had been in place. Do these sorts of stories with GoDaddy happen often?
Maybe it wouldn't have saved them, but there are a lot of free-x-hosting companies out there that haven't been shut down in spite of abuse.
It's easy to not imagine what sort of evil your site could be used for when you're thinking of just the awesome problem you're trying to solve.
How can anyone who has ever used the Internet or has even a basic understanding of the Domain Name System believe that it is a registrar's right or responsibility to take down a domain, especially without notice, and that does nothing to contravene the conditions of owning that domain name?
I wouldn't even say you are beating a dead horse with that dependency. It was never a horse to begin with!
The blame obviously lies squarely with the US federal agencies - you do not see this happen in other developed countries, for example (UK does not count since its a US colony in all but name).
In particular, to be able to shutdown or ruin the reputation of a business at the drop of a hat due to alleged breaking of the law - not even by the business itself - before it has even been processed by the justice system!
Just imagine if this had been a takedown of Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook site, all of which easily meet or have met the conditions for alleged infringements of US IP or other laws at some point, if for no other reason than hosting user-generated content...
GoDaddy is, regardless, ridiculous.
He didn't. In fact, his point was that there is not a dependency between the points - which is what it means that even if 1 is worse than 2, 2 is still a serious problem.
I think things like this will make websites with user generated content to move away from .com domains and even move into countries where there is more due process to things like this.
It's up to nerds like us to design, develop and innovate systems that decentralize not only the internet - but politics as well.
Damn right it's their fault.
It all depends on what was on the letter they got and who sent it.
Should they have ditched GoDaddy? Most probably yes. Would that save them now? I wouldn't bet my company.
This is why we can't have nice things.
What the real issue here is, is that law enforcement pretty much busted in and took down a domain name without warning. They shot first and asked questions later. Jotform is a legit site, not even close to dubious like some others where you can actually argue that they might have been knowingly violating copyright and such. This is scary stuff. There was no due process, no warning, nothing. They just did it. It's proof that any more laws giving the Feds power to take down sites is totally superfluous and unnecessary as its already happening in a very public way.
You don't get mad at the company for not switching registrars (even if they are a douchey one). Jotform could have been able to take care of this situation had someone just alerted them to the problem. No way is this their fault, especially not for the reason you put forth.
This was even a reason people were advocating against GoDaddy before the whole SOPA story.
I no longer want to take this risk blindly.
This is a GoDaddy thing, plain and simple. They get one complaint--they shut your domain name down by changing the name servers to NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM and NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM. Exactly what happened here.
This has been going on for at least SIX years now; see http://seclists.org/nmap-hackers/2007/0 (and I saw a hosting company shut down for similar reasons a year before that.)
Wasn't their support of SOPA enough? When are we all going to wake up? How many times does this have to happen?! STOP. USING. GODADDY.
They're trying to get sympathy from the internet by framing this as an example of SOPA-like abuse after they financially supported a company which supported SOPA. That shouldn't fly.
But that wasn't because Godaddy supported SOPA, although that does make me feel shadenfreude, it's because I used to work in the domaining industry. I honestly thought that even average web site operators with limited knowledge about registrars would know not to have your business domain on Godaddy. Even accounting for their scale there are a lot of shady episodes like this.
The SOPA part is just icing on the cake they were eating instead of doing their due diligence.
Their .com doesn't seem to have the same ugly ICE/government/FBI logo landing page, so that seems to also implicate GoDaddy.
If that's the case they could get their services up again by just switching registrars and DNS servers. (?)
I have been telling people this for YEARS. Yet everyone always thinks "It won't happen to me." Until it does.
This principle also keeps Paypal in business.
(Wasn't I just reading something recently about a payments system startup that isn't likely to extend itself to Australia due to their laws and regulations?)
http://xml.ssdsandbox.net/dnslookup/ns1.suspended-for.spam-a....
If there's an actual law and due process, ok. If people are just supposed to automatically comply because somebody in a government agency says so...well, I hope we haven't sunk that far.
I can't wait till they cross the line, and block some .com, then a group in that (non-US) country gets local injunctions forcing it to resolve. It could split DNS or wrestle it out of US control.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/court-refuses-give-sei...
The domain has still not been returned.
Having your domain hosted with a reasonable registrar would have been enough to prevent this.
And if it were a true emergency the Government would go straight to Verisign (for .com/net) and not even bother with the registrar.
Although to be fair, the SS just made a request, and GoDaddy had no responsibility to comply, they did so on their own accord without any type of process.
In my book, it's GoDaddy's responsibility to do the right thing, not the SS' responsibility to not complain. If they would have been with a reasonable registrar, this would not have happened.
JotForm.com has been suspended by Godaddy for more than 24 hours now. They have disabled the DNS without any prior notice or request. They have told us the domain name was suspended as part of an ongoing law enforcement investigation. In order to resolve the issue, they asked us to contact the officer in charge at U. S. Secret Service.
When I contacted the Secret Service, the agent told me she is busy and she asked for my phone number, and told me they will get back to me within this week. I told them we are a web service with hundreds of thousands of users, so this is a matter of urgency, and we are ready to cooperate fully. I was ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user. Unfortunately, she told me she needs to look at the case which she can do in a few days. I called her many times again to check about the case, but she seems to be getting irritated with me. At this point, we are waiting for them to look into our case.
Our guess is that this is probably about a phishing form. We take phishing very seriously. Our Bayesian phishing filter has suspended 65.000 accounts last year. We have been training it for many years, so it can detect phishing forms with great accuracy. We also take any reports about phishing very seriously and quickly suspend the accounts and let the other party know about it. By the way, we are also very serious about false positives. If we suspend an account accidentally, we will quickly resolve the issue, and apologize.
I believe this can happen to anybody who allows users to create content on the web. So, if you have such business, my recommendation would be to make sure that you can contact your most active users quickly if your domain is disabled. Many of our users are shocked and angry at us. But, many also thanked us for quickly letting them know about the issue by email and providing instructions to continue operating their forms. Since DNS propagation takes some time, many active users were able to switch their forms to the new domain before it went down. We still have not contacted all users, we are sending emails most active users first.
Next, you need to spend 100% of your time raising hell about this. This story has all of the marks of stuff the tech press loves to eat up.
#1 Godaddy is run by a bunch of assholes who walk all over their customers rights.
#2 The secret service is still full of a bunch of buffoons. These are the same guys that raided a roleplaying game company because they couldn't tell the difference between an imaginary game and a hacker manual. I'm sure the press would like to answer the question, are they still hiring FBI rejects?
You have to turn this story the other way around. You can make jotform a name people remember.
I've used jotform myself for quite some time (2 years or close to it?) It is a great service. Obviously you were doing nothing illegal, and were going to great lengths to stop the bad guys. Thats a news story everyone wants to hear.
Personally I think you made a horribly stupid decision to use GoDaddy, but it is what it is. Sounds like you need to launch a PR campaign about this.
Tell your customers to call the agent in charge. Tell your users to call GoDaddy to complain.
Put up a web page with a running ticker of how many people are getting their service interrupted because of this. Tell the world who is sitting on their hands while your business collapses. Call news stations. Put up a youtube video. Shine a light on this, don't just sit there hoping for an agent to give a crap.
Make this shit a bigger deal that the government and GoDaddy have made it. GoDaddy doesn't give a shit about your domain or your business. Make them give a shit. The agent in question couldn't care less about your troubles, their full time work is about making someone (hopefully the right person) miserable. You are just one more such person in the big stack. Make that agent give a shit.
Solution (2) - get a lawyer and prepare to sue for lack of due process.
If that delay is longer than it usually takes for an abuse report to come in, and for it to be acted on, then it would prevent phishers from getting any data before the page is taken down. Maybe just do this for free users?
It's comparable to trying to stop spam in forums/blogs by disabling url's in posts. Usually you'll get the same number of spam posts, but the url's will be plain text.
You provide an excellent service. Keep up the good work!
We are taught not to bully but this is exactly what the U.S. Gov't is doing. Mixed messages?
Oh.. and don't register the domains at Godaddy.
The registry of .me, doMEn, is a joint venture between Godaddy and two other companies.
I'm just glad I haven't done business with you.
0. Get corporate membership with EFF.
1. Identify all applications with user-generated content.
2. Move all associated domains to a non-US based registrar.
3. Migrate DNS, web serving and other critical services to non-US based servers.
4. Migrate yourself to a non-US controlled country.
I'm sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don't miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.
Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.
You can see the list of governments whose policies is controlled by USA with the signatories of ACTA.
well put
Their beauty is not only in their read-only nature, but also in the fact that their number and content can be controlled.
Losing control of the narrative means the end of the narrative.
In our case, the concept of centralized power is dying, because the tales that justify it are dying in unwatched TV programs and unread newspapers.
Unfortunately, their dying will take some time.
Fortunately, any measure taken to save a dying narrative hasten its end.
1. Set up your company outside of the US.
2. Don't keep a bank account in the same country that your company is in.
3. Don't have customers in the same country that your country is in or where your bank account is.
4. Don't live in the country where your company, bank account or customers are.
5. Don't live in the same time zone as your in-laws.
I live in Thailand (for 13 years now) and have a company in Singapore. We are opening companies in Laos this year then Cambodia and then Burma over the next two years. My Bank Accounts are in Hong Kong. I try to find customers in any country other than those listed above, and the States.
Bandwidth is better out here than in most places in the States. And hardware is cheaper because you're buying closer to the source. And as long as you aren't living in Singapore, Hong Kong or Toyko, the cost of living is far cheaper than in the States.
This is not as difficult as it might seem. It's great living out here, and I would encourage everyone to do the same.
BTW our latest startup is an infrastructure for the semantic Web and about as cutting edge as you could hope for, so don't whine about how you can only do your startup in Silicon Valley. The future is here, not in the States.
A tax audit is crippling enough for business. Registrars like GoDaddy are exposed to a huge vulnerability in the form they don't know exactly with whom they do business. All you need is a credit card.
Much as I like my country (Uruguay), I know we'd cave in faster than New Zealand did with Kim Dotcom.
China might not be US-controlled, but they have their own issues. And a smaller country means it's probably going to be bullied by the US. Maybe Switzerland? (that does sound like a nice place to live :) ).
Plus the skiing's great here :)
Where would one relocate to? Only real options appear to be a .ru domain and location.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I love it!
good night, and good luck.
We juggled dozens of Softlayer tickets at the time, so another anonymous tracking number just got lost in the shuffe. Never underestimate the power of unaccredited strangers to fuck you through your hosting provider.
If it is a managed service, we'll just chmod the image to 000 or whatever does the least damage to their site. Unfortunately, if we don't have the login to the server (unmanaged) or if it's a colo, we just have to disable that IP on the switch or router (or null-route their IP for a bit) until they contact us and can take their "illegal" content down.
My point: hate DMCA, not SoftLayer, for this. They (assuming unmanaged service) just did what they were legally required to do.
What pisses me off was that this wasn't even a DMCA request--SL had no legal responsibility to take action. It was just some random internet vigilantes making an unsubstantiated threat.
Come to think of it, SL may have taken us down for DMCA as well. We had an obvious path for handling abuse that both the accusers and SL could have used. After some negotiation I think we were able to convince them to just forward abuse emails to our address--but it took some doing.
We've had India law firms call us screaming at 6PM on a friday, and we told them: - we require that they submit all abuse matters to our abuse@ e-mail address per RFC 2142 (kinda, but this sounds official when you say it to some law intern chump) - they can scream all they want; we're not taking it down unless they submit a "valid legal order" to us (I don't even mention DMCA because I don't want to give them ideas) - we're not responsible for the content of our clients, so they need to take it up with them
>"We had an obvious path for handling abuse that both the accusers and SL could have used." They (accusers) don't, and they do this on purpose. They don't really want the content just gone, they want collateral damage as revenge for your "violation".
>"After some negotiation I think we were able to convince them to just forward abuse emails to our address--but it took some doing."
Sorry that that even required negotiation. We forward all abuse e-mail besides spam complaints for managed services. With anything like this, we try our best to do as little damage as possible to our clients.
https://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512c/
Because we're in the US, it's critical that we comply with all the DMCA crap, otherwise DHS/FBI/CIA/whatever will come in and seize our equipment. They've actually done it before when we SWIP'd some stuff for a client, so we didn't get the abuse mail. They just ignored it, and one day some people showed up with a court order and we had to hand over their server (it was a colo.)
I see now that this JotForm issue might not be due to DMCA, which is pretty appalling, but to put it lightly, "they [gov't] have ways of making you comply".
From this article: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/02/16/online-form-buildin...
"GoDaddy had complied with a Secret Service request to take down the domain" Are you suggesting that service providers should say "no" to the secret service? Real talk: I really don't think that telling the secret service to get stuffed would turn out well. In fact, since ATT is so in bed with gov't at this point, they'd probably just have our uplink shut off if we tried to pull that.
The ideal situation is that both datacenters can handle your total load, but when one fails, the other doesn't explode under the thundering herd of traffic rerouted its way. So you need to plan your systems in such a way that they're elastic under load; response times rise within these limits, but you won't see outright failures.
You use a DNS failover service to provide each client with the appropriate DNS. There are various issues around caching and preferred A records--for instance, some name servers or DNS clients will pick the first A record, sorted, which can send all your traffic to one datacenter. Typically you hand out different combinations of A records depending on locality, so clients are hitting, say, the two closest datacenters to them.
When a DC fails, you remove the DNS entries which pointed to that datacenter's IPs, and lookups start returning only the known good ones. Clients which already have your multiple A records can detect the failure and fail over immediately. Where client software doesn't support that, they have to wait until DNS caching expires to get the new records.
The datacenters themselves need to contain enough of your infrastructure to function autonomously, but also should share state. Cassandra, Oracle, Riak MDC... there are lots of options out there. We were on MySQL at the time, and maintained a slave in the secondary DC which could be promoted in the event that the primary DC was, say, nuked from orbit. This system was not partition-tolerant; if the mysql link between datacenters failed, one DC would become functionally read-only. We proxied DB traffic back and forth over SSH tunnels managed by upstart init jobs. This was shockingly reliable. We actually started off using mysql's SSL support but as it turns out mysql will segfault if it gets more than, say, 8 ssl connections in a short timeframe. So we tunneled everything--redis, mysql, stats, over SSH.
The rest of the infrastructure had little shared state, so we ran the typical web stack: two identical boxes running nginx (static content) -> haproxy (load balancing) -> rails and ramaze apps spread across various boxes. Each nginx forwarded to both haproxies, both haproxies forwarded to all the app servers, so you could lose either machine in a given DC and service would keep running. We used heartbeat to manage a shared virtual IP interface between the two forwarding boxes, so you'd drop TCP conns but failover switch time was generally in the tens of milliseconds--however long it took to ifup and gratuitous-arp the rack's L3 switch.
We ran memcache independently in both DCs--since user sessions almost never switched between DCs it was OK for us to just have two distinct pools. Queues were split up as well. Some services weren't critical enough to split across DCs so we just accepted that if the primary DC died they'd be down for a few hours, until we could deploy another copy on the backup DC. Non-critical things like statistics, garbage collection, etc. Automated deployment made that a lot less painful.
I wouldn't recommend doing this at an early stage--dual environments, especially on different hardware, takes a lot of testing to get right. You have to worry about doing everything twice--two DNS zones, two Redis clusters, etc. You also have to worry about asymmetries if you're doing master-slave replication. All of this comes with operational and development overhead; your app needs to be aware that might might running in a partitioned state, that writes might take much longer than reads if you're doing master->slave across DCs, etc. I'm a strong believer in planning for that stage of your growth--but you always have to strike a balance between the ultimate reliable configuration and getting other things done.
Does that help answer your question? :)
I'm curious - I keep hearing that some clients don't support this. Which clients are that in particular? Is it a real issue, or a rather esoteric case?
So this solution is totally unrelated to the story at hand.
And indeed you might want to consider reposting that explanation on your or your company's blog--just for showing off ;-)
I spent a few minutes checking the registrar for YC companies with press in techcrunch:
crowdtilt.com
doublerecall.com
drchrono.com
memsql.com
verbling.com
readyforzero.com
I'll do my small part. I have over 200 domains registered with them as well as a couple servers (to play with, not for anything important).
I'll start to transfer everything as soon as I identify a registrar that won't fuck over their clients like this.
Any registrar care to make a statement of loyalty here on HN so we know that you have our backs?
I am really starting to think that a coalition of large internet companies needs to stage a full and real shutdown. I am talking about something substantial, like a full day. This would send a strong message home to idiots running this country.
This could be advertised and announced on a daily basis over the Internet and TV for a full month. Then, on that Monday morning, all services go quiet for a day while displaying an appropriate announcement on their sites. If the event is well communicated to all users this should protect all involved from legal action. If you've been told about it every day for thirty days that should pretty much cover it.
Due process should apply to everything. We want due process. Sites that engage in criminal behavior are one thing, but, when the government is the criminal you are dealing with something entirely different.
Time to make noise again?
Stop the song and dance. If you haven't moved your domains already, you probably never will.
Maybe this is a good way to measure internet time - "We launched our first service four GoDaddy scandals ago, and pivoted two scandals later."
EDIT: Foxylad, you're the kind of ethical person I would like to work with in the future. Please leave some contact info in your profile so I can reach you. Thank you.
How come we don't see Youtube, Yahoo, Facebook suspended? Do they have procedure in place? Does that mean that you're much weaker if you're small? What are the legal safeguards for UGC startups?
There should be equal rights for all companies. Right now it seems the US government is picking those it can easily bully.
Yes, they do. And if you allow users to post content, you should too. You need to formally register as a hosting company and have a DMCA process published and usable.
First, register here:
http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/
If you've done it right, you'll get one of these:
http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/agents/a/auganllc.pdf
Then post a notice on a Policy page linked from every page of your site. For example:
In compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the “DMCA”), please send DMCA notifications of claimed copyright infringements to: Advection.NET c/o Jonathan Band PLLC, 21 Dupont Circle NW, 8th Fl, Washington, DC 20036, with electronic copy by e-mail to...
Pursuant to the DMCA, Advection.NET will terminate the accounts of repeat infringers. Advection.NET will cooperate fully with any civil and/or criminal litigation arising from the violation of this policy.
We've used DirectNIC for nearly a decade and never had a problem even when Echostar (improperly) tried to make them take us down because of one of our clients. We also recommend http://www.puregig.com/ as a web hosting colo for the same reasons along with their distance from natural disasters.
But yeah your point about fairness is loud and clear.
[1] http://www.webhosting.info/registrars/fastest-growing-regist...
When I have spot-checked lists of seized domains in other cases, domains registered with GoDaddy were serving the ICE seizure page while domains with other registrars were simply down.
I'm not saying governments should not fight crime or that there should be no way to shut down a website, but what we're witnessing these days is a total breakdown of long established principles of law, including due process and proportional justice.
It may sound strange and some would say nonsensical, but I feel that legal systems worldwide and especially in the US have gone down hill since 9/11. What seems to have changed is that governments have given up the idea that global problems can be solved within the framework of established legal principles.
It feels like everything they do is guided by a mindset of martial law. It's all a helpless thrashing about. It's going to take a long time for the globalised world to find its footing again and until then we have to find better technical solutions to limit the damage they're able to do.
Why isn't there a big scary US ICE seizure banner on the domain? They're usually quite proud of their work.
Why is his .net domain still operational?
This looks to me more like GoDaddy operating on their own.
Still, if the guy had not used Godaddy he probably would have his domain back already.
Out of online community, these kinds of law violations are handled in a more sanely fashion. For instance, if a firms one department has a law violator, law enforcers makes a case against the violators in obscurity and proceed to handle violators trying to be as low damaging as possible. They won't block any roadblocks that leads to every building or holding to that firm and try to exclude any not related property or individual. But the things are different on the Internet. It's ridiculous. The law enforcers treat online entities like there is no business going around and every business is crime oriented. So they just go forth and block every way of execution of the entity.
We must stand against this.
Also this is an ongoing trend over the world. And seems like it won't end any time soon.
Governments are revolting against the Internet. I think they believe Internet is becoming uncontrollable , so they are trying to make every ridiculous move to make online entities miserable so they will settle with hard control instead of these unbelievable ones and be happy.
Registrant: Interlogy, LLC
Registered through: Go Daddy Domain Name: JOTFORM.COM
Domain servers in listed order: NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM
Shutting down a domain will always be a lot cheaper than any involvement of a legal team.
Bahamas, baby.
JOTFORM.COM nameservers are set to NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM, and spam-and-abuse.com is owned by GoDaddy. Just doesn't seem to be the normal way the government has been involved, but then again, nothing should be normal about domain seizures.
Shoulda shown solidarity. That's what you get.
such willfull misunderstanding in those comments. my sympathy to the people behind jotform.
the only way this can be (legally) fixed is by a court deciding that despite all the mumbo-jumbo in the registrar terms of service, domain names look an awful like property, and are not to be yanked without due process. unfortunately it seems courts mostly write opposite-minded decisions these days.
That said, I do not support the confiscation, and I hope Jotform sues and wins. I'm not holding my breath, though.
I would love to see a DNS replacement that is not only decentralized but allodial.
(You're right in that I was incorrectly implying a domain name would be property owned by the registrant. But it certainly could be considered property that the registrant is currently in possession of)
I feel like a huge chunk of this story is missing.
I guess it's time customers started calling up these companies and telling them that the reliance on GoDaddy is something that they are worried about.
DMCA lays out several things which can be done to at least attempt to have the appearance of qualifying for safe harbor. If you host user-generated content, do you do one or more of these?
- adopt and reasonably implement a policy of addressing and terminating accounts of users who are found to be “repeat infringers?
- remove or disable access to the allegedly infringing material upon notice?
- implement any sort of "red flag" process?
It's a form hosting site; the user-generated content could be bank account phishing pages.
DMCA does not provide safe harbor from being an accessory to financial scams.
And JotForm appears to respond quickly and take action, at least to that request.
The dns is set to a godaddy domain which has over 224,000 domains attached to it.
http://www.dailychanges.com/spam-and-abuse.com/
As a registrar that has been contact by the US Government this (change of dns) isn't consistent with what we have experienced when contacted about a problem site. It's more consistent with an individual registrars policies.
If the government was seizing a domain, generally, they would change the whois information. It wouldn't still be listed in the name of the registrant.
This isn't an attempt by the way to get one up on godaddy. They are a gazillion times bigger than we are and they cater to an entirely different market segment.
It's so wrong that a legit business can be killed overnight.
"Because of a Godaddy suspension, our jotform.com domain is currently disabled. Since, we do not know when the issue might be resolved we recommend changing your forms from jotform.com to jotformeu.com. "
So their .com domain is suspended, and they move to a new .com domain?
I don't understand; why don't they move to a European country top level domain like jotform.co.uk (that one's been domain squatted, but I'm sure they could find one they like.)
Pretty ironic coming from the country that gave it birth.
From http://www.isnic.is/en/: "The registration of a domain confers rights to the use of the domain name according to ISNIC rules at any time but does not confer ownership of the domain."
I had a nice startup idea, it was shot down by my legal adviser (which happens to be my father :P ), and Google went ahead and implemented it (well, at least he saved me from competing with Google).
That spam must have been terrible.
"Yeah, in France!"
"Bet you'd vote for Palin!"
http://www.collegehumor.com/video/3980096/we-didnt-start-the...
i thought this only happens in china.
Cycle it a few years forward and it wouldn't be surprising if 1% to 2% of the biggest 10,000 .coms have been seized (100 to 200 sites).
I have been a vocal proponent of Godaddy over the years - but no longer.
Godaddy's involvement with and support of SOPA is reprehensible, but I was hoping their about-face was for real, but this action is the last nail.
Look at jotform's nameservers:
NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM
That's just great....
I've got hundred of domains registered at GD, but I'll be damned if they'll be there after tomorrow.
cr1t1calh1t
</bitter sarcasm>
Registered through: Go Daddy
Domain Name: JOTFORM.COM
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM
NS2.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COMSource: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&...