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Comment by ericabiz | Hacker News Reader

Can we all PLEASE agree to stop using GoDaddy?

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.

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Seriously. I was prepared to be sympathetic until I saw GoDaddy's involvement. Jotform chose to use a despicable company with a long history of behaving in this way. They shouldn't be surprised when they're the next to get screwed.

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.

Heh, that was exactly my reaction. I was literally reading the statement out loud to a friend of mine as we talked about it and stopped midsentence and said "ha! godaddy. No wonder."

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.

Yes. For another account, see David Rusenko's blog post about GoDaddy and Weebly: http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2011/12/godaddy-a-glimpse-of-...

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. (?)

If it's anything like the others I've seen, GoDaddy will charge an "administrative fee" of hundreds of dollars to get the domain name turned back on, let alone unlocked and able to be transferred out.

I have been telling people this for YEARS. Yet everyone always thinks "It won't happen to me." Until it does.

Yet everyone always thinks "It won't happen to me." Until it does.

This principle also keeps Paypal in business.

Indeed, but there are zillions of good alternatives to GoDaddy (shouldn't the name be a clue???), many, sometimes no alternatives to PayPal.

(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?)

If you look at the spam-and-abuse.com domain, all the records pointed to it are GoDaddty domains, the IP addresses it uses are GoDaddy's, and the domain itself is registered to GoDaddy:

http://xml.ssdsandbox.net/dnslookup/ns1.suspended-for.spam-a....

GoDaddy may not have fought very hard for Jotform, but I'm pretty sure any US registrar would be hard pressed to the US Government saying "Turn off this website or else."

Or else what?

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.

At this point it seems negligent at best to host your site on a US or US ally based registrar

...or on a .com, .net or .org tld, since "having a business connection with Verisign" is enough to put you under US jurisdiction. Apparently.

The USA judicial system might think you are under their juristiction, but your local juristicion might disagree.

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.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Rojadirecta.org

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/court-refuses-give-sei...

The domain has still not been returned.

That's assuming your local jurisdiction has a spine. I have multiple .com and .net domains all done through Canadian registars, for the sole purpose of not wanting to deal with the BS that is going on down south. If what I'm reading is true, they can be pulled offline whenever someone gives the word go and they're gone. I have no faith that the local courts will do anything of use, especially with the current government that we have. I'd be hard pressed to think of any western nation that would.

Let's not get out of hand here. This didn't happen because it was in the US, this happened because the domain was on GoDaddy.

Having your domain hosted with a reasonable registrar would have been enough to prevent this.

Not saying this is what we would do (as a registrar) but an order from the government generally has a time stamp on it where you can verify the "order" and then comply. While I can't get into the time period allowed or any details like that I can say that it would be possible to alert the registrant and/or stall the request if one so chooses to do that. I'm not saying we would do this of course. I'm just saying that getting an order from the US Government, unless it appears on it's face to be a true emergency situation, a registrar could always take the time to check with legal counsel.

And if it were a true emergency the Government would go straight to Verisign (for .com/net) and not even bother with the registrar.

Do we have any evidence that the US Govt pressured them?

The fact that the secret service are involved? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3597821

Fair enough, although that wasn't posted at the time I made that comment (which is why I asked).

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.

This is exactly what I thought. I think SS just emailed GoDaddy and GoDaddy just shut down everything. Everyone is moving to different registrars, mainly NameCheap, I just hope they will be able to stand up for their users and ask for a court order. If other registrars start to shut down at the whim of the US Government, then we might have to move to registrars overseas. Unfortunately, that doesn't even seem safe to me, since there has been news of US pressuring other governments to put out SOPA-like laws. There is also the case of the British kid who was extradited to US.

I somehow have the feeling that moving out of GoDaddy won't protect you from any of this. Potentially the US "authorities" can take down your dot com domain (operated by Verisign), your hosting if in US, or maybe even prevent DNS resolutions to your domain inside the US (they can ask large ISPs to update their DNS servers). What you are left with is using a non dot com, non US hosting, and avoid having too much business from US customers. Then you might run into the same in Europe, etc. That does not sound like a good long term strategy.

Wow. There are over 224,000 domains that are linked to spam-and-abuse.com

http://www.dailychanges.com/spam-and-abuse.com/

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