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Why shouldn't they be angry at jotform? It looks like they had no expedited process for reporting phishing forms which had to have been a known risk somewhere around #1 on their list of known risks, they actually made it easier to go upstream instead of searching for their contact page (only linked in the footer) and hoping someone replies today.

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.

Some good points.

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.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree they shouldn't have been destroyed and that GoDaddy has no right to be the executioner.

Then how do you rectify the statement you made that their customers should be angry with them, and that they shouldn't be destroyed? I really want to hear this.

Because there are two things here:

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.

How doesn't it? The argument could be made that GoDaddy would have done that deed anyway, even if (2) hadn't been rectified.

GoDaddy might not have, if those provisions had been in place. Do these sorts of stories with GoDaddy happen often?

GoDaddy's actions don't cancel it out because ignoring or not adequately preparing for phishing was wrong every single day and a foreseeable problem for about a decade now. They had a responsibility to prevent this for their paying users.

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.

Do you plan for every illegal thing that could happen on your website?

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.

This isn't really some unforeseeable edge case that nobody could have reasonably expected to happen - their site lets you build a form, embed it on a page, and they either email or save the form data for you. Not anticipating phishing would be fine if it was 10 years ago.

benologist please stop trying to make it sound as if there is any dependency between your 1 and 2.

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...

You misread what I'm saying. Jotform users deserve to be angry about this situation which in the last decade has been successfully avoided by many free-x-hosting companies who actually prepared for obvious problems.

GoDaddy is, regardless, ridiculous.

There's no evidence whatsoever that this was a US govt take-down. Everything we've seen so far indicate that it was GoDaddy's doing.

The U.S. Secret Service was involved.

benologist please stop trying to make it sound as if there is any dependency between your 1 and 2.

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.

Welcome to risk management 101. Lesson 1: assume the worst of the general public, and you won't be disappointed.

Do you think this would have been averted if they took all the measures you are proposing ? There are no set guide lines here according to which the government is taking down stuff.. This is not DMCA related to create an process to take down stuff.. Even if they could not find the contact page, taking the whole website seems to be ridiculous thing to do.

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.

I think there's a decade of history that shows it could probably have been avoided - they're not the first free-x-hosting company to ever be abused for phishing.

The history of this matter stopped being relevant when domain-seizures stopped being the last option.

The same risk existed last year alongside the many exploitable-by-phishing flavors of hosting. Although this wasn't even a domain seizure, this is just an overzealous domain registar which has also, always, been a risk to web services.

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.")

That's the big joke man... modern day 'politicians' do not seek to create jobs. They seek control and power.

It's up to nerds like us to design, develop and innovate systems that decentralize not only the internet - but politics as well.

JotForm should have bailed from GoDaddy when most other people did. Instead, they were apathetic and took a chance with their business and all of their clients as well.

Damn right it's their fault.

Now thiiis is a valid reason for it being their fault

Even if its not. Bail from Godaddy.com. Seriously. Granted the same problem may persist given that .coms have a US based organization that governs them (I think). Nonetheless, this is the exact same godaddy.com that supported SOPA. There have been so many forks in the road where the obvious choice was to bail on GoDaddy.com. Yet, they stayed and here they are.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Verisign, an American company based in Virginia, is the authoritative registrar for .com and .net.

More precisely Verisign is the registrY, GoDaddy the registrAR. Not that it changes anything in this case.

I'm not sure many US-based registrars would be willing go against a law enforcement agency. Or would be able to do it twice.

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.

I'd like to think that this is still a free country, and that there are some companies that still act as though we live under the rule of law, rather than automatically complying with every whimsical demand our government agencies dream up.

That's not a very solid argument. GoDaddy sucking is besides the point here. I doubt many if any registrars would refuse the government like that. But even that's beside the point.

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.

namecheap does, it is well known that GoDaddy needs nothing but an email from a semi-serious domain with bogus claims to shut down your business.

This was even a reason people were advocating against GoDaddy before the whole SOPA story.

We need a list of startups using GoDaddy, with alternatives, so we can be aware and not use these services for storing anything important.

I no longer want to take this risk blindly.

https://github.com/astronoob/NoDaddy Here is a chrome extension that notifies you if the domain you're on is registered through GoDaddy. Looks like it does an XHR request to who.is and then matches on: new RegExp("/(registrar\.godaddy\.com|whois\.godaddy.com)/")