Mali Government takes back .ml domain, brings down one of largest Lemmy servers
very.bignutty.xyz
very.bignutty.xyz
At least Montenegro is managing their own ccTLD, not like some mysterious islands (.io, .pw, etc).
If someone secured the `.mf` ccTLD, they could grab other Pulp Fiction fans who want to be `<name>@bad.mf`.
The .io TLD is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territories, and there's currently an ongoing international legal dispute over whether the territories even exist, or they just belong to Mauritius. If the U.N. "wins" the .io domain would be slated for removal (technically).
It’s 400 active volcanoes to start with, in a body the size of Earth’s moon.
If we could tap its flux tube for energy though—- now that’d be cool.
What about Europa (.eu)?
.eu is already the ccTLD if the European Union.
Northern Ireland exists and is still unfortunately a part of the UK. The UK would still be the United Kingdom of X and Northern Ireland even if Scotland leaves.
If Wales leaves, the United Kingdom of England?
Wales was conquered in 1284 - the Kingdom of England includes Wales.
From the article:
That follows the abrupt enforced shutdown of vb.ly, a "link shortening" site run by Ben Metcalfe and Violet Blue, after it was declared that the content of the site was "against Sharia law".
An image of Violet with bare arms, drinking from a bottle of lager, was emblazoned across the front page of the site when the government-owned Libya Telecom & Technology got in touch earlier this month. "Pornography and adult material aren't allowed under Libyan law, therefore we removed the domain," the letter said, adding: "The issue of offensive imagery is quite subjective, as what I may deem as offensive you might not, but I think you'll agree that a picture of a scantily clad lady with some bottle in her hand isn't exactly what most would consider decent or family friendly at the least."
(Policy: https://sonic.so/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/dotso-domain-nam...)
twitch.tv, goo.gl, youtu.be, etc. is the tip of the iceberg. Twitch and Google probably are unlikely to have bases in Tuvalu and Greenland respectively.
goo.gl is a link shortener like youtu.be aint it?
I dunno, It's just asking for trouble needlessly
And bit.ly probably isn't working out of Lybia.
Hitching your wagon to their success seems unwise. They won't make sure you make it to the end
Just buy a gTLD domain. You probably don't even need a separate domain for your link shortener...
Given that .us doesn't allow privacy, there's apparently a huge market for web designers and the like to watch registrations and use this as a 'lead generator'.
I have never received as much spam as I did after registering two .us domains. Thankfully, I used a number I can safely ignore
It truly should be enough that the registrar can get a hold of me
Theoretically each country can change the rules of their country code at any time. These rules can be rather arbitrary and can technically happen whenever. As an example of a rule, the .us domain is only available to US entities.
Also, if the country ceases to be, there's a chance the ccTLD will go away, because that country doesn't exist. Hence the fear with .io, as the Indian Ocean Territories as a political unit may not last very long or .tv as the islands wash away and disappear with rising sea levels.
As others have mentioned, IANA isn't always fast at removing old ccTLDs. The .su domain for the Soviet Union still exists.
My blog entry about it from 10 years ago:
https://github.com/stickfigure/blog/wiki/Beware-cutesy-two-l...
To repeat a past comment with a little bit of "I Told You So" cynical feeling:
> I think the barrier [to joining] would be lower if I knew I could migrate my identity to another instance if the first one became sketchy or shut down or de-federated.
> Instead AFAICT I have to choose not just what community to join and where the content will initially live, but also which of these random groups to trust with my identity indefinitely going forward.
Alternatively, if you want to use lemmy's interface, you can create your own instance and use it only to subscribe to remote communities. This way, your identity is one place but the commuities is in another.
- lower the bar by improving the software
- supporting those that want to try but still are struggling to migrate
- actively rejecting participation in the legacy networks to reduce the value of that network (https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...)
In contrast, imagine a system where you could use a private key to sign things, thus proving "author Bob on Instance X is the same as the prior author Bob on now-defunct Instance Y". You'd still be sunk if you lose the key (or it gets leaked) but at least your identity as an author wouldn't be at the mercy of the Mali government.
This is how things work now, the issue is that most (if not all) of existing AP software the server is generating and abstracting the keys away from the users. But (in theory) there is nothing stopping a system where the server (e.g, mastodon.example.com) works for clients (actor in AP vocabulary) with a different domain, and requesting the actor to sign the messages before accepting in the inbox.
This is pretty much standard for all fediverse apps...
> > Instead AFAICT I have to choose not just what community to join and where the content will initially live, but also which of these random groups to trust with my identity indefinitely going forward.
Nope, not remotely. That's part of the point!
Why?
So if Mali confiscates a TLD “rightly so” seems like an unreasonable response. “This is a warning to all of us” makes sense however.
Other sovereigns -- hopefully one of them counts you as a citizen and involves you in its processes through democracy -- can simply boycott, or embargo them, or dissuade them through diplomacy, or armed forces. Unless you understand this, you don't have a good model of what "the Government of Mali" means, and thus it doesn't make sense to make business with "the Government of Mali".
[1] Well, except maybe to the people of Mali, or the constitution of Mali, but that's an internal "implementation detail" that's abstracted away from you, unless you're a citizen of Mali.
That said, from what I understand, ccTLDs are owned by countries they are allocated to (maybe with some corner cases, but irrelevant here), so Mali is certainly not doing anything wrong even in the above "legal" sense by asserting their ownership.
A country-associated TLD should host personal, commercial and governmental services / representations for entities operating out of this country.
If you provide something, a custom TLD like .service .shop .framework is more appropriate.
The ones like .eth or .bit are a bad joke. If you want something that's truly yours, generate a .onion.
"Use an .onion" is genuinely better advice. (I wouldn't do that either, but an .onion at least has a reason to exist.)
It's leaking out into normal DNS.
No, it isn't. I'd never seen a .eth link anywhere on the normal web, yet I've seen plenty of Gemini:// urls, just to throw in something niche for comparison.
You've discovered network effects in the the wild!
Are there really millions of people who use the ENS? Do you have a source?
I have no dog in this fight, I'm just curious.
How many of those aren't the owner?
How many of those aren't bots?
(Flip those last two questions as you'd like; I wasn't sure which would be more illuminating.)
If by nobody you mean "no one outside of the mainstream", sure. But I don't need a lot of work to have my .eth domain resolving to an IPFS file, and there are browser extensions that will let you query ethereum blockchain and use it to resolve IP addresses based on ENS.
A lot of them clearly have value, as the "desirable" eth domains sell for thousands of dollars.
> "Use an .onion" is genuinely better advice. (I wouldn't do that either, but an .onion at least has a reason to exist.)
You seem to be extremely biased against anything related to cryptocurrencies
As for numbers:
> In April 2023, Brave Browser reported 57.27 million monthly active users.
> There are more than 21 million monthly active users of Metamask.
The resulting arrangement would virtually certainly be something like Tuvalu and .tv. Nobody is suggesting that they go into a Freenom-style domain mess like .ml and a few other domains (which some countries decided to just give away for free).
But if you choose .io, you're gambling on the future of your internet property in a way that the owners of traditional domains like .com simply don't have to worry about.
What if someone decides to start a media campaign for divestiture of .io domains? It's not particularly likely, but it's a risk to weigh against the benefits of a cool domain.
I wouldn't be surprised if many were in the same boat. Registrars should probably warn if buying a ccTLD.
>Millions of US military emails have been misdirected to Mali through a “typo leak” that has exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers.
>Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady flow of email traffic continues to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, as a result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix to all US military email addresses.
>The problem was first identified almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali’s country domain.
>Control of the .ML domain will revert on Monday from Zuurbier to Mali’s government, which is closely allied with Russia. When Zuurbier’s 10-year management contract expires, Malian authorities will be able to gather the misdirected emails. The Malian government did not respond to requests for comment.
>“Much of the email flow is spam and none is marked as classified,” and apparently if you work in the US military and you email someone else in the US military, the system prevents this typo. But if you are an outside contractor, or an Army officer emailing from your personal account, all bets are off. “Around a dozen people mistakenly requested recovery passwords for an intelligence community system to be sent to Mali.”
This is one of the rare good sides of having near-monopolies.
Is this the reason why lemmy.ml and lemmygrad stay up?
Or other less likely domain to be a typo.
I noticed that lemmy.ml was still up, but it has some error messages as I was browsing, too.
I can't imagine this is all related, but maybe?
Lemmy.ml still seems to work for me, I wonder why that is exactly. Perhaps the administrators have bought the domain from .ml's new owners?
So I registered <surname>.me for me to use <name>@<surname>.me as email address.
My surname with generic domains such as .com, .net, etc was already registered and didn’t feel like registering my full name. This is pure laziness, didn’t want to use something like hello or contact @<fullname>.com as email.
Visiting the link with scripts disabled gives me a "damon is g*y" banner.
Not only can the message be construed as hate speech (could be an inside joke but I'm not "inside") but it could also be that you outed someone who didn't want to be out.
This is a very different case. I would point out maybe it's not a super great idea to pick a ccTLD in a country with a decade long war internally. I've seen Haiti's (.ht) used a decent amount (notably as a secondary for sourcehut, sr.ht) and would think this one is a particularly vulnerable one as well.
[1] https://www.afnic.fr/wp-media/uploads/2023/05/ga-domain-name...
Have you got domain moved status from cloud flare?
Is cloud flare still showing pending nameserver change status?
Is your emails no longer coming through? Is your website no longer working? Wondering when the government will restore access?
Here is the link to it https://cltchighereducation.com/mali-government-update-regar...
> The contract between Freenom and the Malinese government that gave Freenom technical control over the domain extension and give out the domains for free, has expired on Monday July 17. The contract was not renewed, which means that the control of the .ml domain extension is returned back to the government of Mali.
[1] https://forum.infinityfree.net/t/all-ml-domains-are-down-due...
To add to that, imagine if every small business that wants/needs to have a web presence (basically, everyone) could have many different hosting providers where they could have their own Mastodon server, Web Page, online support and calls via Matrix, etc. This doesn't need to cost more than $50/month, i.e, probably less than what people pay in their cellphone bill.
Just that would make - almost by definition - that no server would house more than 1000 people. It would be completely resilient.
- Nothing stopping the possibility of having redundancy though relays. nostr actually has this by design. If one node goes down, the service might get degraded but never interrupted.
- "self-hosting" does not necessarily mean the act of hosting it yourself. One could, e.g, use a service provider like elest.io, yunohost or my own [0] to run the services. You'd still be responsible for the basic administration, but you'd have actual professional support for uptime, software maintenance, backup, etc.
It feels that mainstream social media has set the expectation that any downtime is big news. That’s, of course, not the case for small social media. People can handle downtime.
If anyone is interested in contributing to small social media, this site is a good guide for the Fediverse side of things: http://runyourown.social/
Wait, what? Aren't we talking about lemmy? The instance owner absolutely does host, in clear, all of its users' content. What am I missing?
The customer protections are much better for generic TLDs.