[HN Gopher] Itch.io Taken Down by Funko
___________________________________________________________________
Itch.io Taken Down by Funko
Author : spiralganglion
Score : 996 points
Date : 2024-12-09 07:19 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bsky.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (bsky.app)
| ailurooo wrote:
| ugh this kind of stuff just makes me wish DNS was less
| centralized, even though it's already incredibly uncentralized..
| of course it's just all registrars just being a weak point.. as
| always
| TZubiri wrote:
| It is as decentralized as you can get. Dns is the entire
| foundation of decentralization, any more and you get into
| schizo hyperprivacy protocols.
| viraptor wrote:
| It's federated, not decentralized. For decentralized you need
| something like https://ens.domains/
| TZubiri wrote:
| Are there any well established definitions for these terms
| as separate?
| viraptor wrote:
| Yes? Basically half of them? Some people put federation
| in decentralised group, some say only distributed is
| decentralised.
|
| In short: centralised = 1 owner/operator, federated =
| many semi-autonomous operators to choose from,
| decentralised/distributed = everyone's an operator on the
| same level.
|
| With DNS you still have groups of operators who can tell
| you what to do and they have the main agencies on top of
| that. I subscribe to the "it's not _really_ decentralised
| " view.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Source: It came to me in a dream.
| viraptor wrote:
| Alternatively, do a quick search for "decentralised vs
| federated" yourself. People here don't owe you basic
| explanations.
| jstanley wrote:
| So, it's not as decentralised as you can get, you just
| personally don't like decentralisation?
| TZubiri wrote:
| *Without descending into a madness that decentralizes your
| very thought process and identity
| remram wrote:
| The network is decentralized, but each domain still has a
| single registrar, making the service you (domain owner)
| receive very centralized. If that one registrar misbehaves or
| is unresponsive, you're out of luck.
| TZubiri wrote:
| You can switch registrars if you want.
| bpye wrote:
| The registrar in question is iwantmyname, so I guess you can add
| them to your "do not use" list.
| paxys wrote:
| I feel like it's better to have a "do use" list for something
| as important as a domain name registrar.
|
| - Namecheap
|
| - Cloudflare
|
| - Route 53 (if on AWS)
|
| Any others?
| bpye wrote:
| Porkbun seem popular, I do use them for a couple domains. I
| haven't heard of anything egregious.
| spiffotron wrote:
| I use porkbun for all my domains, I've never had any issues
| and they don't seem to gouge you on price for the smallest
| things.
| tucnak wrote:
| Gandi?
| jarofgreen wrote:
| They were sold to another company a year or two ago and now
| some people are a bit wary
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| I've noticed that Gandi has become SUPER expensive as
| opposed to Hover lately as well. I'm just letting domains
| expire instead.
| input_sh wrote:
| One of my domains on Gandi was up for renewal. I've
| noticed they charged ~$140, while Namecheap charged ~$35.
| Easiest transfer decision I've ever made.
| em-bee wrote:
| wow that's 4 times as expensive!!
|
| seems like gandi didn't just multiply the prices but
| raised them exponentially.
|
| beware of namecheap though. see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364240
| input_sh wrote:
| I've read my fair share of Namecheap criticisms over the
| years and remain unconvinced.
|
| I point my nameservers somewhere else and then forget
| about Namecheap for a year.
| em-bee wrote:
| i just moved all my domains off gandi because they
| doubled or tripled the renewal prices.
|
| i am guessing they are milking their existing customers
| who don't notice or don't have the knowhow or resources
| to move their domains, and once those wise up to that
| they will lose a lot of them
|
| apart from prices their operation didn't seem to change
| after the sale. although i only have a few domains so i
| probably didn't interact with them enough to notice
| anything else
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| Damn, that's good info. I have all my domains on Gandi
| and noticed the pricing changes, but I just stupidly
| assumed that it was something the registry operators were
| causing. Sucks to have to leave Gandi, their UX is great,
| no stupid upselling, very clear website.
| buro9 wrote:
| I've been doing this too, every time a renew comes around
| I shift it to Namecheap.
| trissi1996 wrote:
| They hiked prices massively so I wanted to transfer away,
| it was a massive shitshow.
|
| Auth-codes given on the website were expired and they took
| 2 weeks to give me the correct ones near the end of the
| registry period.
|
| Support was extremely unresponsive. As this this was a side
| project I couldn't spent time on every day my domain went
| into quarantine for a short time. They answered 2 days
| before the end of the rental period, when requesting the
| auth codes ~2.5 weeks before.
|
| Will never use them again after this experience.
|
| Porkbun is my new home for most stuff and domains.lt for
| .lt which porkbun doesn't offer yet sadly.
| tucnak wrote:
| Wow, I never knew that to be the case! How would I find a
| registrar that supports .at LTD? Cloudflare, AWS, Google
| --neither supports it.
| trissi1996 wrote:
| From looking through https://www.nic.at/en/my-at-
| domain/at-partnerfinder the only one that I knew and did
| not hear shit about seems to be OVH.
|
| Others might be good, but no idea who exactly, many small
| unknown companies in the list that could be either great
| or shitty.
| tucnak wrote:
| Thanks for Porkbun suggestion, I'll keep that in mind; it
| doesn't support .at but I'm now tempted to move my other
| domains there. Gandi used to be good, it's a shame what
| it's become.
| nouryqt wrote:
| I'm using dynadot for my .at domains
| eps wrote:
| Bought by a private equity company.
|
| Went back on their contract obligations already, hiked
| prices, etc. Will be milked to death.
|
| Best to consider them dead.
| supermatt wrote:
| god no - gandi absolutely suck now for both service and
| price. I moved all my domains to netim.
| midasz wrote:
| I'm with Namecheap and they're decent but one big minus is
| how inaccessible their API is, would put them on the bottom
| of the "do use" list.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Namecheap has horrendous billing UI with their products, also
| not PDF so makes it hard for freelancers when you have many
| domains and your accounts want an PDF. Easiest is a registrar
| that mails you invoices in PDF.
| teitoklien wrote:
| their billing works just fine, i pay with it all the time.
|
| They support credit/debit cards, bitcoin, and Paypal. I
| went with Namecheap especially because of their seamless
| payment method, Used to struggle at times paying for my
| domains with Gandi, etc.
|
| Namecheap payment system works just fine.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Me: "Namecheap has horrendous billing UI"
|
| You: "their billing works just fine" [then talking about
| payments, when I wasn't talking about payments but
| billing, "The process of sending an invoice (a bill) to
| customers for goods or services" -Wikipedia]
|
| They have their billing for domains and products spread
| over several pages, there is not one place in the UI
| where they have all payments/billing combined, they don't
| have PDFs as I've stated and they don't sent invoices by
| email. Their billing UI is horrendous.
| TZubiri wrote:
| What's wrong with aws lmao
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Nothing. He said that they are one you _should_ use.
| koito17 wrote:
| Personally use Porkbun since Namecheap's API is poorly-
| documented and they attempted a KYC audit for purchasing a
| $100 domain.
|
| I am fine with the identity verification, but their ticketing
| system seems to have sent all of my e-mail to their spam box,
| because they would never respond. I attempted opening tickets
| explaining the e-mail situation, but they wouldn't listen. In
| the end, I gave up and let them deactivate the account.
|
| Moved to Porkbun, purchased the exact same domain (no KYC
| required!), and have been a happy user of their API for about
| two years now. They also have much more lax requirements for
| API usage compared to Namecheap. Porkbun also supports
| WebAuthn and logging in with a security key. It's overall a
| much nicer service than Namecheap.
| antihero wrote:
| Do porkbun have a terraform provider?
|
| E: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/cullenmcdermott/
| pork...
|
| Not sure if it works though
| yorer wrote:
| That kyc thingy is icann requirement, its how domain
| registration works. Icann require every accredited
| registrar to verify registrant details so registrar would
| randomly ask for id, passport etc. That include porkbun,
| they're bound to their contract with icann as an accredited
| registrar too. They probably won't ask today but maybe
| tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or next year, or
| never.
| eps wrote:
| Other registrars just send an annual email asking to
| verify your contact details. Done. Icaan satisified. No
| need to actually harass your clients.
| yorer wrote:
| They already got your details from your card details and
| decide its enough. Something like vpn, using niche
| browser, details on card not tally with registration
| details etc etc would throw off their threat mitigation
| system. Also different business operated differently,
| their payment gateway behave differently etc etc. Too
| many random factor to avoid xxx specific registrar
| because they ask for kyc when the kyc itself is a
| requirement.
| egorfine wrote:
| > That kyc thingy is icann requirement
|
| Is it really? Or just contact info is enough?
| rdl wrote:
| The requirement in the contract is nowhere near that
| specific. Contact info validation is sufficient for
| almost all registrars. It's possible a given registry has
| higher standards, or maybe one registrar got some order
| to be more thorough, but great reason to avoid given this
| is a commodity and there are actually good alternatives.
| (I broadly like Tucows and Cloudflare)
|
| Namecheap is on my NO NO NO list, along with GoDaddy (and
| a bunch of others). Google Domains was also on this OH
| GOD NO list, but thankfully Google did the Google thing
| and killed the product.
| egorfine wrote:
| Most of my domains are on Namecheap since the times when
| wikipedia's domains were there. Hopefully, my low-key
| personal domains are of no interest to anyone...
| aviraldg wrote:
| What's the problem with Namecheap (I have my domains
| there right now)?
| adhamsalama wrote:
| I bought a domain on Namecheap instead of Porkbun for the
| exact same reason!
| poincaredisk wrote:
| OVH is pretty good
| nicoloren wrote:
| Yes, never add a problem here (in France).
| teitoklien wrote:
| Route 53 is outrageously expensive for domains, one should
| only use it, if they need AWS's DNS product.
| pfoof wrote:
| You can use any registrar with R53, so it's more like: if
| you really need to have domain registration written in
| Terraform and the other registrar doesn't provide it
| nucleardog wrote:
| For .com as of Aug 2024, Verisign says they charge $10.26
| wholesale, and ICAANN charges $0.18/domain for a total of
| $10.46/yr wholesale.
|
| Route53's .com is $14/yr. So the three year price is $42.
|
| Three year prices from a few registrars (there's so many
| pricing games the "per year" price is nonsense in most
| cases): Cloudflare: $31.32 (-0.06)
| GoDaddy: $46.93 (+15.55) Namecheap: $41.24 (+9.86)
| Namesilo: $51.87 (+20.49) Porkbun: $29.61 (-1.77)
| Route53: $42 (+10.46) Spaceship: $28.98 (-2.40)
|
| All diffs given against the $31.38/3yr wholesale price from
| Verisign+ICAAN.
|
| Not sure how that qualifies as "outrageously expensive".
|
| You can make your own trade-offs, but for something that's
| literally the foundation of my online identity, business,
| etc I'm willing to pay $3.50/yr over wholesale for a
| company with a reputation, support, and generally aligned
| incentives.
|
| You may choose to instead tie your online identity and
| business to someone charging less than cost to save half
| the price of a big mac a year. But I will find it hard to
| dig up much sympathy when we all find out _how_ they're
| planning to make money doing that.
| TurtleStacker wrote:
| INWX
| cybrox wrote:
| Been with INWX for >10y, never had an issue.
| sebmellen wrote:
| INWX is really great and they also support just about every
| TLD.
| zeeZ wrote:
| I'm very happy with INWX, but their API is a bit lacking
| when it comes to limiting the potential blast radius.
|
| It's either full access to everything or, thanks to their
| support for creating a special account on request, only
| full access to DNS management.
| weinzierl wrote:
| easyDNS (not to be confused with DNSEasy or DNS Made Easy).
| Very happy customer for many years and there are not many
| companies I can say that about.
|
| If you are in Germany donaindiscount24.com is good option
| too.
| clan wrote:
| Beware! The OP was originally at a good provider which got
| bought out by Team Internet. See:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364033
|
| If you take a look at:
|
| https://www.domaindiscount24.com/en/about-us
|
| You will see that Team Internet owns them as well. So I
| would personally bve on the fence if I would consider them
| good or not.
| seanthemon wrote:
| I've been using namecheap for over a decade and have had zero
| issues with them.
| kallistisoft wrote:
| I've been using IONOS (formerly 1und1) for the last 20 years
| for all of my DNS and hosting needs and couldn't be happier.
| Their uptime, non-obtrusive policies, and customer support
| have all been top notch _. Can 't recommend enough.
|
| _ As an example; I had a dedicated server that I was leasing
| that I wanted to upgrade, the sales tech noticed that the
| plan I was currently on had been retired/replaced and
| credited my account with difference of what I had payed vs
| the new payment tier which amounted to six months of billing
| on the upgraded server. You can't really put a price on that
| kind of honesty!
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Their extremely weird and annoying adverts in the UK have
| ensured I will never use any of their services.
| sli wrote:
| Back when I was using them, their ToS disallowed a whole
| lot of perfectly benign content, like pictures of
| celebrities. If you had a blog about movies and posted a
| picture of an actor, your account would get deactivated
| and your data simply deleted. I wouldn't ever trust them
| for anything I care about.
| supermatt wrote:
| I read this as you having to contact them in order for them
| to credit you for overcharging you for a retired product
| when the replacement equivalent was priced lower.
|
| Why didn't they proactively inform you that your service
| was retired and there was an alternative available?
|
| It sounds like this must have been going on for a while to
| be worth 6 months of service in difference alone.
|
| I left 1and1 close on 2 decades ago. If you consider this a
| story of good service, then I would suggest you try some
| other provider.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| IONOS requires you to make a phone call to talk to their
| retention reps before you can cancel _anything_
| antifa wrote:
| 1and1 would call my house trying to sell me shit.
| norman784 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on Cloudflare?
|
| I currently have some domains there (moved a few years ago
| from Godaddy), so is there something I need to worry about?
| framapotari wrote:
| This is a "do use" list, so recommended services.
| beAbU wrote:
| Cloudflare is on the GP's "do use" list, not the "do not
| use" list.
|
| I think the HN consensus is that Cloudflare is a reasonably
| safe bet.
| jsheard wrote:
| Though keep in mind that domains registered through CF
| must use CFs nameservers, you can't point them elsewhere
| if you need to. They sell domains at cost so of course
| they want to keep you in their ecosystem so you might pay
| for something else.
| beAbU wrote:
| That's true. I have my domains on Namecheap and my DNS on
| CF. I think it's just that little bit of extra safety to
| spread the risk a little.
| JimDabell wrote:
| Namecheap is definitely on my "never use under any
| circumstances" list for reasons I outlined in this comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18091287
|
| The full thread is worth reading for more feedback on a range
| of registrars, particularly Namecheap:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18086522
|
| I _strongly_ encourage people to only recommend domain
| registrars if they have verified that customer support won't
| completely fuck you over when something goes wrong.
| Recommending registrars when you've only experienced the
| happy path is doing a disservice to the people you are trying
| to help out.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Namecheap gave me a quick response and help when requested
| support regarding a DNSSEC issue. So not everyone has bad
| customer experience when they needing it.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I use namecheap too.
|
| Apart from their UI being, huh, I've had no problems.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Namecheap is terrible and cannot be trusted, you can google
| tons of horror stories.
|
| Without a doubt, Porkbun is one of the best. Their staff is
| knowledgeable, helpful and efficient. Highly recommend them.
| Luker88 wrote:
| Any recommendations for people looking for a strictly
| European registrar?
| conradfr wrote:
| Infomaniak
|
| Netim
| bondant wrote:
| I'm also looking to move my domains out of gandi but stay
| with a european registrar. Did someone try netim
| customers' service? They say on their "about us" webpage
| that the company is still owned by the founders, so I
| would think the enshittification hasn't started yet. But
| if some have experiences to share it would be nice.
| conradfr wrote:
| I went to Infomaniak when moving from Gandi because at
| the time I found the text contrast too light on Netim
| ahah, seems better now.
|
| But they seemed quite proactive on Twitter around the
| time people left Gandi en masse.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| I'd prefer a 'do not' list, because 'experience quoted'. Any
| one of the names you mention could be bought/ new CEO etc
| tomorrow and start the turdification (tm) slide.
| astrange wrote:
| Hover is fine. Never had a domain shut down though.
|
| I have one on dynadot because Hover doesn't support the TLD,
| and the website sure is a lot more awkward.
| freedomben wrote:
| Another happy Hover user. Been using them many years. Not
| the cheapest, but a reasonable markup and works well, and
| hasn't shown signs of enshittification. Knock on wood.
| astrange wrote:
| Well you're not going to get reliable service if you want
| to know which one is cheapest. You want the professional
| registrar large corporations use if anything.
| spariev wrote:
| I use pananames.com, they for sure won't do things like OP
| described
| kuon wrote:
| I use infomaniak from switzerland. Mainly because I can
| physically go to their office and discuss in person if there
| is a problem.
| cachedthing0 wrote:
| I used infomaniak once, I'm sure you spended quite some
| time at their office.
| orphea wrote:
| Namecheap is on my personal "never use; fuck them" list. I
| moved my domains to Cloudflare, and I am happy since then.
|
| Porkbun is great.
| pfoof wrote:
| I use Namecheap and sadly still Gandi for old domains.
|
| The only issue I experience with Namecheap are included
| redirects which have something like 90% uptime.
|
| Route53 domains is seriously not needed for anything - just
| add zone in AWS and point your registrar to new NS.
| weberer wrote:
| >Route53 domains is seriously not needed for anything
|
| If you're already hosting on AWS, then you'd only have one
| potentially hostile company to deal with instead of 2.
| xoa wrote:
| easyDNS still seems good for those who want a more old style
| "full fat" registrar like gandi was? I know some folks I
| respect who have long used it alongside Route 53. Though they
| don't appear to support hardware tokens which is a major
| black mark in my book in 2024.
|
| As well as Gandi, DNSimple was another higher service one I
| really liked that went crazy on pricing. Agreed the registrar
| scene nowadays seems like a quite small "do use" list vs a
| couple of "don't use" :(.
| mech422 wrote:
| I've been using easyDNS for 5(10?) years... Never had a
| problem with them and highly recommend them. I do 'hobby
| stuff' - nothing fancy, but it always just works. One time
| I called to ask if they support wildcard sub-domains (www.
| _.example.com or whatever._.example.com) and actually had a
| real engineer pick up the phone :-) (btw - it did work,
| very well actually :-) )
|
| The backup mail spool is nice too...
|
| all in all - not the cheapest - but worth the piece of mind
| in my book :-D
| bb010g wrote:
| I've had great experiences with NameSilo.
| smitelli wrote:
| Another happy customer of NameSilo here. A handful of .com,
| .net, and a .org domain registered with them, and I've
| never been personally irritated by anything they've done.
| gcr wrote:
| Namesilo?
| thequux wrote:
| I've used Register4Less for over a decade and I've been
| thrilled with them. They're slightly more expensive than the
| cheapest options (by a buck or two), but this is more than
| made up for by the fact that they're the only registrar I've
| ever used who have proactively reached out about minor
| issues. Every time I've needed to email them, I've gotten a
| response from somebody who can fix the problem within
| minutes.
| latexr wrote:
| I've been using Hover since they advertised on 5by5 a decade
| and a half ago, and never had a single issue. They never
| bother me nor do I need to remember they exist. I only hear
| from them when they need ICANN contact confirmation or to
| remind me a domain is expiring.
| itscrush wrote:
| Namecheap's been out a while, I'd drop them from your list
| too. Porkbun's in for now.
| f33d5173 wrote:
| The upper two have had several known issues with them. I
| haven't heard anything about the latter one, but that doesn't
| mean they're free of issues.
| rf15 wrote:
| Brand Shield and other AI slopware needs to be sued to death for
| all the damage they cause, including their customer's reputation
| and bottom line
| kvdveer wrote:
| Of course the problem is that legally speaking, they don't
| cause any damage - service providers they target cause the
| damage. BS have no true authority over these service providers,
| just the threat of some legal claim. The service providers
| comply voluntarily as they don't want to spend time checking if
| the claim is valid.
| PostOnce wrote:
| I don't think this is the kind of advice a good lawyer would
| give.
|
| BrandShield, Funko, and iwantmyname all caused serious
| financial harm through, at a minimum, tortious negligence.
|
| I'm not a lawyer, but even a yokel like me knows there's more
| to this legally than a shrug and "the software did it".
| RichEO wrote:
| It's clear that you're not a lawyer, because if you were
| you'd know that there's no established duty of care between
| BrandShield and web masters.
| klez wrote:
| Clearly I'm not a lawyer either, but isn't accusing
| someone of doing something that is not true and that can
| have legal ramification a suable behavior in the US?
| pera wrote:
| According to this no one has ever been prosecuted _just_
| for sending false DMCA takedown notices:
|
| https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-
| bee...
|
| They do mention a case where the defendant acted in bad
| faith and was found liable for damages though.
| pdpi wrote:
| It's a good thing it's not a DMCA takedown notice, then.
| They reported itch.io for phishing.
| pera wrote:
| Sorry you are right, somehow I'd missed that part
| pdpi wrote:
| Sounds like a pretty straightforward case of tortious
| interference, actually.
| jcranmer wrote:
| IANAL either, but my guess is that itch.io has precisely 0
| plausible legal recourse here.
|
| The strongest case would be something along the lines of
| breach of contract via the domain registrar, but your
| standard internet contract has a term in it that amounts to
| "we get the right to fuck you", so I assume that applies
| here, so no breach of contract actually exists. This also
| kills every claim that's dependent on breach of contract,
| so tortious interference is also dead.
|
| Fraud will fail because itch.io itself isn't being
| defrauded at the very least. Business disparagement, and
| anything else along the lines of defamation, is going to
| fail because you need something like actual malice--
| specific knowledge of falsity--there, and that's
| essentially impossible to prove, not without somebody
| admitting that they knew all along everything was false.
|
| Tortious interference is dead for several reasons. First,
| you need an underlying tort, which, as detailed above,
| probably doesn't exist. Next, you need specific knowledge
| of the contract being broken. Finally, you need
| intentionality here: it's not "I did something that caused
| the contract to be broken", it's "I did something _to_
| cause the contract to be broken. " Outside of somebody
| jumping up and down shouting "I'm tortiously interfering
| with your contracts," it's basically impossible to prove
| tortious interference.
| amyjess wrote:
| > you need something like actual malice--specific
| knowledge of falsity
|
| IANAL, but as I understand it the definition of malice
| also includes "reckless disregard for the truth". I'm
| sure a good lawyer can argue that not having human
| lawyers review, investigate, and confirm computer-
| generated abuse reports before sending them to outsiders
| constitutes a reckless disregard for the truth.
| jcranmer wrote:
| A lawyer might argue that, but it's not going to be a
| compelling argument. Recklessness is generally a
| conscious disregard of the consequences; as applied to
| defamation-like claims, it's generally seen as "you
| specifically voiced doubts about the truth". Failing to
| vet automated abuse reports is going to be at best
| negligence (and I'm dubious of even that, because given
| the nonbinding nature of abuse reports, it's not clear
| there is even a duty to candor in abuse reports that one
| can be negligent of), absent internal complaints about
| "the accuracy of these things is total shit".
| gopher_space wrote:
| Knowing that you'll absolutely generate false positives
| and not providing a method of automatically fixing those
| would be a deliberate action, not recklessness or
| negligence. I wouldn't be surprised to find code that
| pings staff based on account size.
|
| It seems like providers could remove themselves from the
| situation by just giving their clients a "fair use!"
| response button?
| rsynnott wrote:
| Eh, dunno about that. They made what would appear to be a
| false complaint; hard to really consider what was going on
| here 'fraud and phishing'!
|
| That the magic robot perhaps did it for them matters not at
| all, in terms of whose fault it is, though a proliferation of
| magic robots does make junk services like this more of a
| problem, in that they can flood the internet with nonsense
| more effectively.
| paxys wrote:
| Even if the suit is 100% justified (which it is in this case),
| and you can show damages, the problem will usually be of
| jurisdiction.
|
| Funko Pop is an American Company.
|
| BrandShield, the "Brand Protection Software" they used, is
| based out of Israel.
|
| iwantmyname, the registrar, is from New Zealand.
|
| They got bought out by Team Internet, which is British.
|
| And who knows where all of them are actually registered.
|
| They are all going to point the finger at each other for the
| problem. Who do you sue, and where?
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| You sue the registrar, because you have the contract with the
| registrar.
| toast0 wrote:
| You also sue the others, because they interfered with your
| contract with the registrar.
| latexr wrote:
| The chain of culpability, in my view as an outsider, goes
| iwantmyname > BrandShield > Funko Pop.
|
| Funko Pop hired BrandShield, but from what I understand they
| did so exactly because the latter does all the work without
| you having to intervene. Kind of like you hiring a lawyer and
| them using ChatGPT to present the case, full of errors and
| non-existent sources. The lawyer might have been acting on
| your behalf, but they didn't really do so according to your
| intentions and their fuck up isn't your fault. On first view
| I'd say BrandShield is _a_ culprit here, but can't be so sure
| about Funko Pop yet.
|
| On the other hand, iwantmyname is _absolutely_ at fault. They
| took down a client's website without asking or recourse, then
| sat on their asses. That's who you sue, because they're the
| ones who ultimately had the power and made the decision that
| affected itch.io. If iwantmyname wants to sue BrandShield and
| /or Funk Pop or whatever else in turn, none of your concern.
| The one's who hurt the business were iwantmyname by not doing
| due diligence or contacting the client but just automatically
| bending over.
|
| Now if they should be sued in Britain or New Zealand, that's
| for the lawyers to know.
|
| In fact, all of this is for the lawyers to figure out. I'm
| not one. I'm merely expressing what makes logical sense to
| me, which could be incredibly wrong.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| If you hire the bad lawyer and loose the case, the lawyer
| won't serve your penalty. If Funko authorizes anyone to
| represent them, they are responsible.
| lxgr wrote:
| You don't necessarily have to sue them in their place of
| registration if they're doing business elsewhere. "Defending
| trademark rights" probably counts as that.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| Yes, but also you need to bring your legislators to heel. It is
| entirely their fault.
|
| That you have grifters like brandshield is a symptom. Although
| you should never employ their lawyers for anything either of
| course. Make the taint stick to them.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our
| response and just disabled the domain"
|
| One registrar off the list of registrars you wanna use.
| jamil7 wrote:
| They used to be really good, independent registrar from New
| Zealand but I think got acquired sometime a few years ago and
| went down hill.
| BrandiATMuhkuh wrote:
| Yes that's true. Just yesterday I bought a new domain through
| them.
|
| I'm surprised about their slowness. Again, 2 days ago I sent
| a request via their web-form and less than 24h later it was
| resolved.
|
| Disclosure: I know the founder (Lenz).
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Is Lenz happy with how he operates his company?
| willvarfar wrote:
| The GP says they were acquired a few years ago.
|
| So the question should be if Lenz is happy with how those
| who brought his company are now running it?
|
| Of course that is not the kind of question that a founder
| should ever answer candidly on the internet :)
| BrandiATMuhkuh wrote:
| Correct. The company was sold many years ago. So I have
| no idea if he is happy
| jomar wrote:
| As noted above, what used to be a cool little Wellington-
| based company got bought by some offshore conglomerate.
| Lenz himself left about five years ago.
| conradfr wrote:
| The same thing happened to Gandi.
| officialchicken wrote:
| Gandi went sour when the original French company was forced
| to open a separate company for the US several years before
| being sold. IIRC it was related EU privacy but they
| publicly stated it was about credit card processing.
| em-bee wrote:
| interesting, do you have a link to more details on why
| the split company was needed and how it affected using
| them?
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Didn't know, could you explain how a French company is
| forced to open a US company because of EU privacy laws?
| Algent wrote:
| It's crazy how downhill Gandi went in 2 years. Went from
| decently priced French registar to basically asking for
| 70EUR a year for a mailbox and lately asked me for over
| 40EUR to renew a dot dev domain. I ended up transferring
| all my domains due to this.
| juped wrote:
| Everyone involved in this is terrible except itch.io; it's a
| shame litigation, the available method for redressing this, is
| often avoided due to the high expense.
| zo1 wrote:
| As a naive and new adult entering the world, I would have
| assumed that all you need to do is report this to your
| police/government, and they'll start a case, preliminarily
| determine that "Yeah, some sort of fraud happened" and then
| proceed to start a court case against the accused party so that
| a jury/judge can determine it's validity.
|
| The fact that lawyers and the "lawyer system", in conjunction
| with prosecutorial offices and the police, has made this
| expensive and pretty impossible for 99% of people and companies
| is a huge problem. It basically nullifies the whole point of
| government as protector of people's rights and enforcer of
| laws.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| It's very unlikely that anything criminal has happened here,
| so government is irrelevant. I'm not even sure we're seeing
| any malevolence, just rank incompetence.
| runevault wrote:
| Not Criminal but invalid DMCA takedowns do open you up to
| lawsuits. I'm curious if both sides (aka the registrar and
| Funko) are liable or only Funko.
| masklinn wrote:
| > invalid DMCA takedowns do open you up to lawsuits
|
| Invalid takedowns don't open you up to anything. The only
| risk to takedowns is misrepresenting the purported owner
| but that's not the case here and the risk would be from
| Funko not Itch.
|
| Much of the reason for DMCA abuse is that beyond the
| notice being assumed legitimate there is basically no
| risk to the complaining party until they dispute a
| counter-notification.
|
| Not that this is relevant in this case, as it was not a
| DMCA takedown. A takedown notice would have been
| addressed to Itch.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Negligence at scale is malevolence.
| zo1 wrote:
| Maybe not "criminal", sure. But even us thinking "oh it's a
| civil matter, not criminal one" is something conjured up by
| the lawyers in conjunction with government. It's such a
| convenient excuse, basically making it so that you as the
| injured party need to prove something at your own expense -
| expense that is directly funneled to the lawyer class.
|
| At the very least what happened here is lying in a
| commercial context. Arguably something that should be
| illegal, and sometimes is illegal under the banner of
| "fraud". Again, the definition of fraud is not obvious
| (despite them arguing it is super explicit in the laws) and
| we have to rely on the lawyer priesthood to determine what
| the "sacred texts" say about it. Maybe even rolling some
| conjured up lawyer-dice and seeing what the Oracle at the
| Court says about it after they convene a little "ritual"
| known as a court meeting or deposition.
| will5421 wrote:
| You don't have to go through a lawyer, ie represent
| yourself, afaik.
| jmholla wrote:
| This is not a good strategy. You're almost guaranteed to
| lose being pro se against corporate lawyers.
| pjc50 wrote:
| This stuff would be civil jurisdiction in most countries. The
| Internet adds an extra layer of problems: the registrar,
| complainant etc may be in different countries, making it
| practically very hard to get anything done.
| Sophira wrote:
| It feels like Linode did a good job, too.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| itch.io removed the fanpage (that didn't break any rules) that
| caused the takedown.
| haunter wrote:
| Slight off topic but interesting that the post has similar
| interaction stats (replies and reposts/quotes) between Twitter
| and Bluesky except the likes which are 3x higher on the former
| https://files.catbox.moe/82x7ue.jpeg
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Interesting - most Bluesky accounts, especially those related
| to gaming, are reporting higher engagement stats on Bluesky, at
| least relatively if not absolutely.
| blitzar wrote:
| My crypto spam scam bot gets far higher engagement on
| twitter.
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Thanks for making the internet shittier
| Etheryte wrote:
| Well of course, your bot is having a wonderful time
| interacting with other bots. A whole bunch of resources
| wasted while making everything worse for real humans.
| tbatchelli wrote:
| This is a fair description of our future. I'm stealing it
| Etheryte wrote:
| See also: the Dead Internet Theory [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
| rsynnott wrote:
| Oh, they've made it to bluesky now as well, unfortunately.
|
| (Though, if you use a moderation service which flags/hides
| accounts with AI generated imagery, that's close to 100%
| effective for catching crypto scam stuff. Apparently, your
| average crypto scammer just can't resist a bit of AI-
| generated banner.)
| smitelli wrote:
| Odd flex but OK.
| robin_reala wrote:
| Luckily with Bluesky you can link to a post and everyone can
| see the replies.
| Retr0id wrote:
| For now! The bluesky URL contains "itch.io" (their handle),
| and under atproto, DNS name resolution is actually an
| integral part of handle resolution. It will start 404ing
| if/when relevant caches expire.
|
| This one uses the "DID", not the handle, and will not 404: ht
| tps://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:oy37ivqnriw6nx3lrbcht2u3/po...
| (cc dang)
|
| Open issue regarding making bsky URLs less fragile while also
| not looking ugly: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-
| app/issues/1221
| peckemys wrote:
| I think GP comment meant that when you link to a Twitter
| thread, logged-out users will only see the single post
| without any replies. On Bluesky, you can see the whole
| thread.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Right, and I meant that in the near future you may see no
| thread at all on bluesky, depending on when the relevant
| caches expire.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I don't think it's that surprising; Bluesky is quite big
| amongst the audience who cares about this sort of thing, and
| the author isn't a bluetick so will have visibility relatively
| suppressed on Twitter.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| BlueSky seems to be far less like-oriented. They aren't just a
| good metric of engagement there. People read and move on. If it
| might be helpful to others, they will repost, and that's it.
|
| Besides, with 26K followers on BlueSky vs 173K on Twitter, I'd
| say the engagement on the former is significantly higher any
| way.
| gcr wrote:
| I heard about this incident from a link shared from Bluesky
| first, which is significant because most of my social circle
| tends to use twitter
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Question to lawyers: is there a colorable lawsuit against Funko
| and/or Brand Shield if itch.io can demonstrate quantifiable lost
| revenue for those N days of being offline?
| lmm wrote:
| Given that this was apparently a false (and recklessly so,
| though that's going to be the hard part) report of
| fraud/phishing and not a DMCA takedown, yeah that sounds like
| tortious interference.
| slippy wrote:
| How many other domains were knocked off by this AI reporting?
| Seems to me that if you make claims that have business
| repercussions, you need to be suable for fraud and face civil and
| possible criminal complaints.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Criminal seems like a stretch (at least for this sort of
| damaging-a-business stuff), but making false claims can
| absolutely have all sorts of civil consequences.
| leafo wrote:
| I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you:
|
| From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing
| Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official
| site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is
| probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their
| trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and
| registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on,
| likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected
| DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they're
| the malicious actor in all of this. Their website, if you care:
| https://www.brandshield.com/
|
| About 5 or 6 days ago, I received these reports on our host
| (Linode) and from our registrar (iwantmyname). I expressed my
| disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I
| had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed
| and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded. This evening, I
| got a downtime alert, and while debugging, I noticed that the
| domain status had been set to "serverHold" on iwantmyname's
| domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname
| other than this one. I'm assuming no one on their end "closed"
| the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the
| domain after some number of days.
|
| I've been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and
| support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so
| I decided to "escalate" the issue myself on social media.
| seanthemon wrote:
| man, this shit is ridiculous.. now we can't even make fan
| pages?
|
| Will you be moving away from this registrar? It seems like it
| could very easily be abused again.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| After this, _everyone_ will be moving away from this
| registrar...
| PostOnce wrote:
| Not only that, I'm moving a domain to a local registrar so
| I can get legal redress here if I need to.
|
| Not from iwantmyname, never heard of them, but of course
| now that I have, I couldn't do business with them in light
| of the situation.
| npteljes wrote:
| You'd think, or hope, but GoDaddy and other actors proved
| over the years that this is not the case. I think that the
| kind of site most impacted by an event like this are social
| sites, where if people leave, they might take their
| networks with them. But a normal b2c service provider just
| needs to update their PR and prices and business will be
| back to usual.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| And itch.io who removed that page.
| crtasm wrote:
| >a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko
| Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots
| of the game.
|
| I'd expect them to remove that, they're not a host for
| fan pages.
| SunlitCat wrote:
| I never understood that urge of people to do "fan pages"
| (or fan anything, without the permission of the original
| creator) while at the same time blatantly ripping
| content.
| Hamuko wrote:
| Fan anything has always been at the mercy of the trademark
| owner.
| seanthemon wrote:
| there was a time where the internet wasn't a corpo
| hellscape.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > there was a time where the internet wasn't a corpo
| hellscape.
|
| DMCA passed in 1998. it was short lived.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Not that short-lived in practice, because it may have
| been passed but it was not enforced to oblivion like it
| is now.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| This kind of impersonation/defamation is one of the edge
| cases where its good to have a DMCA process. You want to
| quickly take down something like this and then deal with
| the slow legal stuff over time.
| Kye wrote:
| They have a DMCA process. As far as I know it only helps
| in a case like this if they sue Funko or the brand
| management service. Itch is a small indie operation
| funded by actual commerce, so might not be able to afford
| it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Some companies have always been terrible about this. Fan
| projects involving companies like Nintendo or Take Two
| Interactive (GTA) are like lawyer bait. Disney has hired
| lawyers to sue a daycare center that had (clearly unofficial)
| character art painted on the walls. It's dystopic, but it's
| the world we live in.
|
| I didn't really expect Funko or 10:10 Games to be like that,
| but then again I didn't expect anyone would like Funko enough
| to make a fan page about their dolls.
|
| Other companies allow fans to do pretty much whatever you
| want with their IP as long as you don't turn it into (too
| much of) a business. Sega has even hired a fan for their
| remasters rather than DMCA his project into oblivion.
|
| When companies do this, I interpret this as the company
| giving a clear message: "don't be a fan of our work or we may
| apply legal pressure".
| CM30 wrote:
| Just gonna point out that the Nintendo going after fanworks
| bit is a tad blown out of proportion, especially online.
| They're definitely known for being way too heavy handed
| (especially compared to the likes of Sega), but they're not
| exactly going after every fan project they see on the
| internet. Large sites whose entire purpose is to host fan
| games and mods for the Mario, Zelda, Pokemon, etc series
| have been up for decades without any issues, and most mods
| and homebrew projects for consoles older than the Wii U or
| Switch are going fine.
|
| Unless a project is going viral in the media, raking up in
| a significant amount of money via a paywall or is directly
| competing with a current game, the chances of it getting
| shut down are incredibly low.
| multimoon wrote:
| Nintendo just finished killing both major switch
| emulators.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Nintendo also is responsible for keeping Dolphin off of
| Steam. Dolphin wanted to get on steam for improved steam
| deck integration and Valve reached out to Nintendo who
| said, essentially : Lol fuck no we will ruin your life
|
| The courts have told Nintendo numerous times that they
| are in the wrong in this behavior and outlook. They have
| no legal means to keep Dolphin off Steam and it is a
| matter of judicial record that emulators are not an
| infringement of your IP on their own. Nintendo doesn't
| care and openly discusses their intent to make you suffer
| through lawfare. A just system would smack them down with
| a vexatious litigant label, but our system gives
| businesses infinite benefit of the doubt.
| gcr wrote:
| Not true. Nintendo is notoriously litigious in the fan
| games community.
| willis936 wrote:
| It's just so surprisingly tone deaf when things like this
| are done by companies that exist purely within the goodwill
| of their customers. Nothing that funko brings to the table
| has inherent value. If they have any world outlook other
| than to love their customers as much as they can, then they
| will fail in a time measured in quarters.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Funko used their service in good faith
| and didn't know it's based on over-aggressive AI
| bullshit. They're still on the hook for picking a bad
| company to partner with, but I don't think they intended
| to take down the entire domain.
| Rotundo wrote:
| I don't see a large message on the Funko site with a
| profuse apology for taking down Itchio. This indicates to
| me they fully endorse their action and are not willing to
| make amends.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I noticed that iwantmyname has very little presence on social
| media: no bluesky account and a twitter account that posts once
| or twice a year. That wouldn't necessarily be a problem if they
| responded to emergencies like this promptly, but they clearly
| _don 't_ so it _is_.
|
| I also wonder if their "automatically disable" policy takes
| size/importance of site into account. Is this how they would
| treat all their domain owners, regardless of significance?
| clarionbell wrote:
| The significant ones have lawyer writing them letters.
| antihero wrote:
| Can you transfer the domain out?
| leafo wrote:
| Unfortunately the domain has a hold placed on it by the
| registrar, so I believe transferring is disabled. I also
| wouldn't want to risk doing a transfer at an hour when their
| staff aren't available to help with the current issue.
| duggan wrote:
| iwantmyname was bought out by a conglomerate, "Team
| Internet[1]", a few years ago.
|
| Prices went up, service went down. I'd recommend moving your
| domains when you can (Porkbun have been good, though I haven't
| had any incidents like this).
|
| Best of luck!
|
| 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Internet
| spondyl wrote:
| Oh damn, I didn't know this!
|
| I've used their services for ages and even got to briefly
| meet the founders once in Wellington who gave a talk on
| Erlang.
|
| Ah well, while it sucks that the good times may be over, I'm
| glad the founders got their exit :)
| kaoD wrote:
| > I'm glad the founders got their exit
|
| I'm not.
|
| I mean, I am happy for them but this concept of growing a
| business to an exit is not going well for society as a
| whole (at least the exits that are in my areas of interest,
| so I assume it extrapolates to all exits).
|
| Every single business that gets bought out gets instantly
| enshittified in one way or another, always to the detriment
| of the customer. Depending on how entrenched it was it
| takes a different amount of time for people to move on as
| the new shareholders extract its economical value, but it
| almost always destroys societal value in the process as the
| company becomes a shadow of its former self (and hopefully
| dies, leaving way for the cycle to start again).
|
| I wish there was a way for founders to get rich without the
| need for an exit, so the business could keep running... but
| I guess ruthless enshittification is the only way to get
| rich?
|
| Apologies for the tangent, this is something that's been
| bouncing in my mind for a while...
| kiba wrote:
| Sell it to the employees? It won't be lucrative to
| selling it to someone with more cash than sense, but it
| may be more likely to preserve the value. There's no
| guarantee of course, and there's so little experience
| societal wide in running an employee co-op.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| There are a few employee co-ops, but I don't know how
| good they are. Over here in the UK we have the Co-op[0],
| which is a national chain of small local shops. It's a
| consumer co-operative rather than a workers' cooperative,
| though. I don't know how well it works, or what its
| challenges are, but it definitely exists.
|
| [0] https://www.co-operative.coop
| Angostura wrote:
| Don't forget John Lewis/Waitrose and the excellent Richer
| Sounds:
|
| Richer Sounds boss in PS3.5m staff giveaway
| https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48269171
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| The Co-op (referred to in [0]) is also a bank, funeral
| directors, insurer, and solicitor! They're really quite
| successful to be honest.
|
| Nationwide is another example of a successful cooperative
| as well (large UK bank, particularly in the mortgage
| space). They're customer and employee owned I believe, my
| wife and I got PS200 last year as a profit share for
| being customers.
|
| I'm a huge fan of the model, but it's difficult to get
| going. I think they're also more expensive to run as
| their operations tend to be a little more complex.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Every time that happens it just makes an opportunity for
| someone else to start a new competitor
| Nullabillity wrote:
| It's absolutely tiresome having to keep up with that rat
| race for _everything_. And if that principle actually
| worked then enshittification wouldn 't be profitable to
| engage in to begin with.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > I mean, I am happy for them but this concept of growing
| a business to an exit is not going well for society as a
| whole
|
| The last thing I want is to be a 70 y/o still supporting
| a registrar. Especially considering the margins.
| dartos wrote:
| You can be responsible with an exit and sell to someone
| you'd believe will keep the company's mission.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| And what if I can't find anyone? And what if they do 180
| a week later?
|
| And it's not like running a registrar is something what
| can even have a mission other than earning money.
| dartos wrote:
| > And what if I can't find anyone?
|
| I would honestly be surprised if that was the case, but
| if you really tried, then you tried.
|
| You pick who you'd hope would continue the mission OR you
| try to sell to employees.
|
| > And what if they do 180 a week later?
|
| Then you picked wrong, but the risk of picking wrong is
| not a good reason to not try to pick correctly.
| fwip wrote:
| You can retire or quit, like a normal person. I'm sure
| you can find a new CEO.
| popcalc wrote:
| The Alands Island .AX TLD allows anyone to be their own
| registrar for free. Only 20euro/year for domains.
| babuskov wrote:
| Agreed. Promising stuff like "Hey we built this because
| everything else is bad" and then years later selling it
| to a company that turns it bad is somehow even worse than
| classic bait and switch.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Bonus points for using "enshittified".
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I know that I'm basically being trollbait (around here),
| by saying this, but I personally believe that _the very
| existence_ of an "exit plan" is a problem.
|
| A business is supposed to be an ongoing, perpetual
| enterprise. Maybe it grows, maybe it stays the same, but
| it isn't something that should (in my opinion) be
| designed as a product, in itself, with a "sell by" date.
| If it gets brought up, then that's [maybe] good, but it
| shouldn't actually be in the business plan. It's just a
| random lifecycle event. We can plan to be ready for it,
| but it shouldn't be a corporate goal.
|
| It's quite possible to do that. I worked for nearly 27
| years, for a company that is over 100 years old. I think
| the world's oldest company is over 1,400 years old, and
| just got brought out, for the first time, about 10 years
| ago.
| duggan wrote:
| Yeah I was a fan, had every domain with them that I could!
| But once they were acquired their .org renewal prices just
| did not make sense any more, and they were missing some
| functionality that I thought was crucial and didn't seem
| inclined to add it (can't remember what it was now, maybe
| MFA).
|
| Domains are like car insurance - there's no reward for
| loyalty, so makes sense to shop around come renewal time.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Pro-tip: raise your prices before you need to sell your
| service to cover expenses
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| https://domainincite.com/24614-centralnic-to-
| pay-3-4-million...
|
| I appreciated the indie feel as well, but I can't blame
| someone for selling out to the tune of 7 figures when the
| opportunity arises.
| jen729w wrote:
| I see you're being downvoted on Hacker News for what
| appears to be an expression of support for founders
| selling out for millions of dollars.
|
| We have arrived at peak hypocrisy.
| foobarchu wrote:
| HN is just a news aggregator. Being a participant does
| not mean one agrees with YCombinator's business
| practices, nor does it imply any other requisite
| opinions.
|
| So I don't see the hypocrisy
| thomasfromcdnjs wrote:
| aw I've always loved iwantmyname, I haven't noticed any
| issues other than the price increases.
|
| Though it was the indie/personal feel they had as a
| registrar, I might look for alternatives.
| betteryet wrote:
| Same thing with Gandi, which is a shame. Domain renewal price
| silently went up 3x or so last year after getting acquired.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes it's despicable. I'm moving my domains from Gandi one
| at a time and the cost is 4 times less!!
| robin_reala wrote:
| In the same way that "Don't be evil" has disappeared,
| Gandi's "No bullshit!" is no longer a thing.
| kmlx wrote:
| does anyone here use cloudflare as a registrar?
|
| i'm interested in any potential negatives.
| thomasfortes wrote:
| You're stuck with cloudflare nameservers1, so if you want
| to change nameservers you need to transfer them to other
| registrar, how much of a deal breaker this is is up to
| you, to me is project dependent.
|
| 1. Section 6.1 of https://www.cloudflare.com/domain-
| registration-agreement/
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > _6.1 Nameservers. Registrant agrees to use Cloudflare's
| nameservers. REGISTRANT ACKNOWLEDGES AND AGREES THAT IT
| MAY NOT CHANGE THE NAMESERVERS ON THE REGISTRAR SERVICES,
| AND THAT IT MUST TRANSFER TO A THIRD PARTY REGISTRAR IF
| IT WISHES TO CHANGE NAMESERVERS._
|
| there are very few parts of that contract in all caps,
| but that's one of them :/
| technotarek wrote:
| I've got about twenty domains listed with them. No
| problems after 2-3 years, but I do wonder whether it's a
| good idea to use the same vendor for DNS and domain
| registration.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Normally a registrar isn't going to have top tier DNS
| infra so you may as well separate, yes. Exceptions might
| be CF/Google/AWS/DO, but personally I don't like to use
| the big guns as registrars in any case. I use Namesilo
| and never had any issues but on the other hand have never
| run into any of these sorts of issues either..
| seanwilson wrote:
| I've helped move a few domains from Gandi to Cloudflare.
| The move was relatively straightforward (couldn't get the
| Gandi records export to import into Cloudflare so had to
| do it manually...), and the new domain and renewal prices
| are lower.
|
| To replace Gandi email (that Gandi went from free to
| ramping up the pricing for when they were taken over),
| Cloudflare offer email forwarding so you can receive
| incoming mail from a custom domain to e.g. a gmail
| account, and for sending mail you can pair this with a
| custom SMTP service like https://www.smtp2go.com (1000
| emails/month on the free tier).
|
| Apart from that, DNS is something I barely touch for
| years sometimes so I don't find much difference between
| registrars beside their pricing and how much you can
| trust them.
|
| Being able to point your Cloudflare nameserver records
| would be nice though, so worst case you'd need to move
| everything if another registrar had some services you
| were interested in? Would be curious to know more about
| how common this scenario comes up and why.
| atkailash wrote:
| You should check out something like DNSControl. Makes
| switching or having multiple easy. I have mine going to a
| bind zone file and cloudflare, and use the bind file for
| Unbound
| gregoryl wrote:
| FYI, you are hellbanned (your comments are auto [dead],
| very few people will see them). Email hn@ycombinator.com
| to fix it :)
| xnyanta wrote:
| I am happily using them for all of my domains they
| support. The problem with Cloudflare registrar is that
| they flat out don't support many domains/tlds.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Check out Porkbun.
|
| https://porkbun.com/
| bovermyer wrote:
| How is Porkbun compared to Namecheap?
| no_wizard wrote:
| Porkbun is best on the market at this point.
|
| Namecheap I find is less easier to use and sometimes
| higher cost over time. I also haven't had reliable domain
| renewal service from them when I used them.
|
| Granted this is all a few years back. I was at Cloudflare
| until this year when I switched to Porkbun and I've been
| very happy
| derefr wrote:
| Why'd you switch away from Cloudflare['s registrar]?
| no_wizard wrote:
| Nameserver lock in. While I use Cloudflare right now for
| most things, I value the decoupling. Cheap way to make
| sure that my services aren't in total control of my
| domain.
| pengaru wrote:
| I tried porkbun after comments like yours when one of my
| domains needed renewal, but had to transfer out after one
| year when their payment gateway refused to work and was
| very poorly handling the situation while my domain risked
| expiration.
|
| dynadot.com has been superior in my experience.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I use Spaceship now for everything, which is actually
| Namecheap but cheaper.
| username135 wrote:
| I like namecheap. It serves its purpose.
| funkdude wrote:
| Gandi's prices rose, which sucks, but they were great when
| I had a dispute with AFNIC over a blocked domain. They won
| brownie points with that.
| FunnyLookinHat wrote:
| Came here to recommend Porkbun - I've had great experience
| with them and so have all of the friends and family I've
| recommended.
| donohoe wrote:
| +1 for Porkbun
| internet101010 wrote:
| After so many people in this thread recommended them I
| decided to make the switch from hover. Their renewal rates
| have gotten wild.
| esskay wrote:
| Another vote for porkbun here. By far one of the best
| registrars out there right now.
| RestartKernel wrote:
| This issue aside, thanks for doing what you do. I was kind of
| expecting Itch to get sold to some holdings or casino company
| at some point, as good things tend to go, but I've been happily
| surprised to see it mature independently throughout the years.
| Tepix wrote:
| I agree itch.io is awesome!
|
| Edit: And i'm happy to see that it's working again as of
| 2024-12-09 12:27 UTC+1
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| And compared to that brandshield users should be branded by
| their business practices. Also the hoster as well.
|
| Seems to be a difficult time for hosters and also again a
| demonstration that copyright law is deeply flawed, even if
| using stolen assets is a rising problem.
| saghm wrote:
| I don't disagree that copyright law is deeply flawed, but
| even with the current law, it seems like this situation
| could easily have been avoided. The issue is one
| malicious private company (Brandshield) taking advantage
| of the negligence of another private company (the
| registrar) by claiming that a site was being used for
| "fraud and phishing". If anything, the parent comment
| from the person running the site makes me think that the
| situation would have been _less_ messed up if Brandshield
| had correctly asked for the offending copyrighted content
| to be taken down rather than falsely alleging something
| more severe. I understand that Brandshield probably has
| been incentivized to act this way due to copyright law,
| but I'd argue that even reasonable laws will sometimes
| cause bad actors to try to take advantage of things, and
| the easiest way to fight back against this isn't to try
| to change laws to avoid this but for non-malicious
| entities like the registrar not to allow their customers
| to get exploited by this sort of behavior.
|
| Unfortunately, domain registration is an industry with so
| many of its own problems that I'm not sure "vote with
| your wallet" would be an effective strategy for changing
| things here. I honestly wonder if domain registration
| might be the more fruitful target for legislation
| protecting customers if the goal is specifically to avoid
| situations like this one, but even as someone who's
| usually unabashedly in favor of consumer protection
| regulations, I can't say I have a high degree of
| confidence that any changes here would be done
| effectively.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| A bad law is bad if it leads to injustice even beyond its
| original scope. We have seen numerous problems with DMCA
| abuse and copyright strikes in other forms. We have
| patent trolling and this abuse artificially feds a whole
| industry of dubious lawyers. I think this is not even a
| small problem and all these factors combined does make it
| a bad law, even if it would still protect innovation like
| it once was to meant to do, which is questionable as
| well.
|
| Of course services like the registrar need protection
| here too. And certain false copyright claims probably
| need consequences as well. The legal industry servers no
| function here.
|
| Also, it would be legally trivial to make the user
| accountable for the offense, not the whole of itch.io.
| Sure, there would be problems here as well, but there is
| not large barrier to not have a parasitic legal industry
| and have those responsible that actually commit the
| offense.
|
| The problem of enforcement cannot be put on the back of
| the platform itself.
| salawat wrote:
| The platform will always be preferentially targeted
| because the larger you are the more you have to lose, the
| more likely it is you actualy have assets to go after if
| you don't deal with the alleged noncompliance.
|
| How have y'all not realized that's how all this works?
|
| It's why DNS is an anti-feature. As long as registrar's
| exist, it'll be an active lever utilized for basic
| deplatforming. Until everyone can host their own stuff,
| and networking is de-hub-and-spoked, this type of
| behavior will continue.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| >the easiest way to fight back against this isn't to try
| to change laws to avoid this but for non-malicious
| entities like the registrar not to allow their customers
| to get exploited by this sort of behavior.
|
| Easiest? Perhaps. _Nothing_ around law is particularly
| easy (except breaking it, of course!) :) So, not altering
| existing laws, or not making new ones, would absolutely
| be the easiest method to that desired outcome. Many
| things would be easier to do if they were simply done how
| they were described, in a manner in which they were
| excepted, under the terms which they were agreed to.
| However, can we expect that a _lack_ of laws
| /codes/statutes could ever result in _effective or
| consistent_ behavior? Sadly, no. At least, not based upon
| historical experience. Perhaps the disposition of man
| will change one day - who knows what the future holds,
| but God!
|
| Negligence is a thing that is bred in indifference and
| grown through a lack of consequence. Law and reform is
| the sole remedy.
|
| Consider this: It would be far, far safer _and_ more
| profitable for owners, employees, and customers of
| restaurants if the restaurant kept their cooking areas
| clean and tidy. Yet, even with unannounced and routine
| health inspections, various licensing requirements,
| annual training & education certifications, and massive
| fines...in spite of all of that, absurdly high numbers
| owners can't meet the _bare minimum_. People still
| somehow die from unsanitary food every year!
|
| The best we can do then to combat the disposition of
| disconnected employees, and the blase, checked-out
| business owners is to crush their skull. It is a judicial
| vengeance, a constant protector for all the people who
| had been abused unfairly; the ones who were discounted as
| "unimportant nobodies". Law is what gives the common man
| a temporary illusion of equal treatment. And when that
| illusion is chipped and broken from time-to-time, well,
| at least we can put another head up on the spike outside
| our walls.
|
| It's certainly not quick, or easy, or even
| preventative(!), but it is the kind of response that is
| owed to the victims of incompetence and indolence.
| mort96 wrote:
| That's extremely disappointing from iwantmyname. While I
| haven't used it, it was always on my mind as a potential
| registrar when buying a domain. I think I'll have to
| reconsider.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| I really wish BrandShield didn't use AI as a marketing term. It
| just looks like it's doing a generic ctrl-F on webpages?
|
| Then things like this happen, and people think "ooh AI is bad,
| the bubble must burst" when this has nothing to do with that in
| the first place, and the real issue was that they sent a
| "fraud/phishing report" rather than a "trademark infringement"
| report.
|
| Then I also wish that people who knew better, that this really
| has nothing to do with AI (like, this is obviously not
| autonomously making decisions any more than a regular program
| is), to stop blindly parroting and blaming it as a way to get
| more clicks, support and rage.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I fear that ship has already sailed. I think the grifters and
| scammers have already abused the term enough that even decent
| uses of it are now tainted. I _know_ that the two aren 't
| strictly the same, but I would suggest using "Machine
| Learning" instead, which I think has more respectable
| connotations.
| rsynnott wrote:
| AS IS TRADITION.
|
| (After the previous AI bubble, no-one mentioned the dread
| term for about 20 years, instead using the safely ultra-
| broad umbrella term.)
| rsynnott wrote:
| I mean, whether this has anything to do with AI or not (I'd
| buy that they're using LLMs to write abuse letters or
| similar) it fits very nicely into the general pattern of AI
| breaking the internet through an endless deluge of worthless
| misleading spam. So, perhaps call it honorary AI?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| It's possible they were using LLMs (or even just traditional
| ML algorithms) to choose if a certain webpage was
| fraud/phishing instead of mere trademark infringement,
| though. In this case it makes sense that one would be angry
| that a sapient being didn't first check if the report was
| accurate before sending it off.
| acka wrote:
| More than the hypothetical risk of Earth being consumed by
| a paperclip-making machine, I believe the real and present
| danger in the use of ML and AI technology lies in humans
| making irresponsible decisions about where and how to apply
| these technologies.
|
| For example, in my country, we are still dealing with the
| fallout from a decision made over a decade ago by the Tax
| Department. They used a poorly designed ML algorithm to
| screen applicants claiming social benefits for fraudulent
| activity. This led to several public inquiries and even
| contributed to the collapse of a government coalition. Tens
| of thousands of people are still suffering from being
| wrongly labeled as fraudulent, facing hefty fines and being
| forced to repay so-called fraudulent benefits.
| CaptainFever wrote:
| Perhaps in certain cases requiring someone to sign off,
| and take the blame if anything happens, would help
| alleviate this problem. Much like how engineers need to
| sign off on construction plans.
|
| (Layman here, obviously.)
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Hello, I'm legitimately trying to be helpful. I would
| look at the comma rules for English again. I used to just
| pepper them around sentences all willy-nilly until my
| mother beat it out of me (not literally). Incorrect comma
| usage made your comment _very_ hard to read. I believe
| you mean
|
| Perhaps in certain cases, Requiring
| someone to sign off and take the blame if anything
| happens would help alleviate this problem.
|
| Instead of
|
| Perhaps in certain cases requiring someone to sign off
| And take the blame if anything happens
|
| Would alleviate this problem
| jcranmer wrote:
| The comment you are replying to is using commas
| correctly: it's partitioning off a clause of the sentence
| as a side phrase that can be removed, and the resulting
| sentence is a fully grammatically-correct sentence. If
| you really hate commas, you can replace the commas here
| with parentheses, but honestly, I prefer the commas here.
| BalinKing wrote:
| I agree with the parent that in formal written English,
| the comma would be incorrect--cf. the "In compound
| predicates" section in [0]. But I disagree that the
| sentence is hard to parse as a result, and I doubt many
| would think twice about it given that we're on an
| informal internet message board.
|
| [0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/punctuation-
| capitalization/co...
| jerf wrote:
| If the legal system is not itself either fundamentally
| corrupted or completely razzle-dazzled by the AI hype...
| and I mean those as serious clauses that are at least
| somewhat in question... then there are going to be some
| very disappointed people losing a lot of money or even
| going to jail when they find out that as far as the legal
| system is concerned, there already _is_ legally speaking
| some person or entity composed of persons (a corporation)
| responsible for these actions, and it is _already_ not
| actually legally possible to act like a bull in a china
| shop and then cover it over by just pointing to your
| internal AI and disclaiming all responsibility.
|
| The legal system already acts that way when the issue is
| in its own wheelhouse: https://www.reuters.com/legal/new-
| york-lawyers-sanctioned-us... The lawyers did not escape
| by just chuckling in amusement, throwing up their hands,
| and saying "AIs! Amimrite?"
|
| The system is slow and the legal tests haven't happened
| yet but personally I see no reason to believe that the
| legal system isn't going to decide that "the AI" never
| does anything and that "the AI did it!" will provide
| absolutely zero cover for any action or liability. If
| anything it'll be negative as hooking an AI directly up
| to some action and then providing no human oversight will
| come to be _ipso facto_ negligence.
|
| I actually consider this one of the more subtle reasons
| this AI bubble is substantially overblown. The idea of
| this bubble is that AI will just replace humans
| wholesale, huzzah, cost savings galore! But if companies
| program things like, say, customer support with AIs, and
| can then just deploy their wildest fantasies straight
| into AIs with no concern about humans being in the loop
| and turning whistleblower or anything, like, making it
| literally impossible to contact humans, making it
| literally impossible to get solutions, and so forth, and
| if customers push these AIs to give false or dangerous
| solutions, or agree to certain bargains or whathaveyou,
| and the end result is you trade lots of expensive support
| calls for a company-ending class-action lawsuit, the
| utility of buying the AI services to replace your support
| staff sharply goes down. Not necessarily to zero. Doesn't
| have to go to zero. It just makes the idea that you're
| going to replace your support staff with a couple dozen
| graphics cards a much more incremental advantage rather
| than a multiplicative advantage, but the bubble is priced
| like it's hugely multiplicative.
| rjmunro wrote:
| Please say something like "here in [insert country
| name]", or "back home in [insert country name]" intead of
| "in my country", otherwise we have no idea what you are
| talking about.
| acka wrote:
| Unfortunately I can no longer edit my original comment.
| It is about the so-called "Toeslagenaffaire" (childcare
| benefits scandal)[1] in the Netherlands.
|
| Also, here is a blog post[2] warning about the improper
| use of algorithmic enforcement tools like the one that
| was used in this scandal.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefit
| s_scand...
|
| [2] https://eulawenforcement.com/?p=7941
| stevoski wrote:
| They're talking about Australia, and the robodebt scheme.
|
| Read the Wikipedia article and you'll probably feel
| outraged.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
| shakna wrote:
| Unfortunately it seems that the thinking is more
| farspread, and this was the Netherlands [0].
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42365837
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > and people think "ooh AI is bad, the bubble must burst"
| when this has nothing to do with that in the first place
|
| That haphazard branding and parroting is exactly why the
| bubble needs to burst. Bubbles bursting take out the gritters
| and rarely actually kills off all the innovation in the scene
| (it kills a lot, though. I'm not trying to dismiss that).
| kombookcha wrote:
| Exactly this, if you give a hoot about actual useful
| applications for AI, there is a great need to clear out all
| the grifters and scammers attracted by the initial hype
| cycle.
| pdpi wrote:
| I find that businesses that bill themselves as ${TOOL}-users
| instead of ${PROBLEM}-solvers are, as a general rule,
| problematic. I couldn't possibly care any less whether a
| product is built on AI or a clever switch statement or a
| bazillion little gnomes doing the work by hand. I care that
| it solves a problem.
|
| AI does need to die. Not so much because LLMs are bad, but
| rather because, like "big data" and "blockchain" and many
| other buzzwordy tools before it, it is a solution looking for
| a problem.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| The AI hype is annoying in my field as well. AI can have
| its uses, but we already figured out where to use it in my
| field ages ago. That doesn't stop people from hyping
| nothing though.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Yes. If your business solves a real customer problem and
| uses "blockchain" to do it, that's great, but you should
| describe yourself as a tool to solve the problem. If you
| mention blockchain on the homepage of your product at all,
| it should be treated with suspicious. It's a sign that
| you're speaking to investors and fools and not to savvy
| customers.
|
| One exception: personal projects. "This is an NES emulator
| that is built in Rust, and it uses Rust because I wanted to
| learn Rust" is a perfectly good description of a project
| (but not a business).
| pdpi wrote:
| > This is an NES emulator that is built in Rust, and it
| uses Rust because I wanted to learn Rust
|
| Arguably, in this scenario, learning rust is the
| "business need" and the NES emulator is the tool :)
|
| But yeah, exactly. A blockchain is, technically, just a
| content-addressable linked list. A Merkle tree is the
| same, as a tree. Git's core data structure is a DAG
| version of this. These things are _useful_. Yet nobody
| calls Git "blockchain technology", because what we all
| care about is Git's value as a version control tool.
| jandrese wrote:
| When AI is being used as a cover for the bad/questionable
| behavior the company was already doing then there is no
| bubble to burst. The performance of the "AI" doesn't matter,
| only that it throws up a smoke shield in front of the company
| when people call to complain about the abuse.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Is it possible/worth to hold them financially accountable for
| this? (them being IWMN or BrandShield)
| npteljes wrote:
| Brandshield is bad for overreacting, and iwantmyname is very
| bad for hosting such a crucial infrastructure, and having not
| responded to a paying customer with a good track record. I
| honestly don't think time of day matters, as long as the nature
| of the service is that it's provided and used 24/7, support
| staff should also be there 24/7.
| hresvelgr wrote:
| It's surprising that this happened at all. Isn't it in most
| business's best interests to be aware of their most high-
| profile customers? If this was an automatic process, it's
| pretty disappointing that it even occurred. If I was running a
| SaaS, I'd probably want to mark my important accounts so an
| actual human has to investigate any raised alerts instead of
| being dealt with by a cron.
| cipheredStones wrote:
| Something being in a business's best interests is very far
| from a guarantee that it'll happen.
|
| I've worked on a team in a household-name big tech company
| where our mission was almost exactly "make sure we're not
| blowing up our most important customers for no reason". It's
| not nearly as easy as it sounds: defining who's important is
| hard, and defining what should and shouldn't be allowed is
| hard, and then implementing that all correctly and avoiding
| drift over time is tricky too.
| Scramblejams wrote:
| Sounds like you could write a series of blog posts I'd like
| to read!
| paxys wrote:
| Domain names themselves are a loss leader for registrars.
| They make money by upselling customers on hosting, email,
| certificates, analytics etc. So if you are just paying a
| couple dollars a year for a domain name and nothing else,
| your profile doesn't really matter. You are in the lowest
| tier of customers.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| It still matters who your customer is if your mistreatment
| of them drags your own brand name through the mud in a
| front page Hacker News story.
| breakingcups wrote:
| Filing false reports like this should count as fraud.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| I.e. as a crime rather than just a civic tort? I agree.
| pdpi wrote:
| As general rule, I find that sort of thing to be an over-
| reaction, but submitting a complaint for phishing instead
| of a plain old DMCA takedown does warrant it.
| terminalbraid wrote:
| I'm in the outraged crowd and there should be pretty serious
| consequences, but it is important in the interest of justice
| to differentiate between fraud, negligence, and gross
| incompetence.
| Gigachad wrote:
| As long as you have some automated AI bot sent all the
| reports. It's never fraud, you couldn't have known it would
| do that.
| babuskov wrote:
| Looks like AI is becoming a perfect excuse to do whatever
| you like.
|
| It's like having a dangerous dog that usually doesn't
| bite, but you really cannot know if it will change its
| mind one day. Do you just let such dog walk the streets
| without owner supervision?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > It's like having a dangerous dog that usually doesn't
| bite, but you really cannot know if it will change its
| mind one day.
|
| In other words, a pit bull.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Which is why anyone deploying AI solutions should be held
| accountable for whatever the AI does, as if they had done
| it personally and intentionally.
|
| It's irresponsible to deploy AI if you don't know what it
| will do, especially when there are actual stakes.
|
| Maybe we'll have less AI bullshit then.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Whilst I agree in principle that deliberate disruption of
| other people's websites/serivces should be more harshly
| punished, I don't think it's particularly practical.
| There's so many ways that modern companies can obfuscate
| the reasoning behind what they do, so I've come to the
| conclusion that if they're causing harm to someone else,
| then they should be punished/made to pay no matter their
| excuse.
|
| If companies hide behind negligence/incompetence, then we
| need to make it costly for them to be
| negligent/incompetent.
| joquarky wrote:
| Discerning intent is a waste of time and resources in cases
| like this.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Isn't it already classed as perjury?
| plorkyeran wrote:
| No, the perjury aspect of a DMCA takedown (which isn't even
| applicable here as that's not what they did) is if you
| don't actually represent the person that you claim to be
| filing a takedown on behalf of.
| kevingadd wrote:
| It does but there's no actual way to get legal recourse for
| false DMCA notices or anything similar. The legal system is
| stacked for the abusers to have their way and the victims to
| have no recourse, regardless of how egregious the abuse is.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >Filing false reports like this should count as fraud.
|
| It does, but they never mess with anyone with big enough
| pockets to get sued for it.
| jaromiru wrote:
| Hey, perhaps you can mediate the impact by providing an
| alternate way to access the site (IP, alternative domain) and
| posting it somewhere people will see it (bsky, here, ...)?
| Realistically , this may take days to resolve.
| egorfine wrote:
| > I had removed the page and disabled the account
|
| Did this account violate your ToS or the actual law? While I
| totally understand where are you coming from and I would
| probably be forced to do the same, I still tend to believe that
| closing a fan account is exactly the same thing that your
| registrar did to you.
| 0x073 wrote:
| It's not optimal, but he must choose between every published
| game there and one fanpage.
|
| Besides that, there are so many websites with copyright
| content that never changes the domains, is just the domain
| registration bad or why they just disabled the domain?
| egorfine wrote:
| _It 's not optimal, but the registrar had to choose between
| every registered domain there and one business._
|
| But yes, no doubt, that system is broken and the registrar
| should have known better.
| 0x073 wrote:
| I don't know the company size, but as a paying customer I
| expect them better support and more time.
|
| If they have a customer like steam would they just cut
| off the domain? Probably not.
|
| Other domain registrations would just ignored this and
| nothing would happened.
| egorfine wrote:
| > I expect them better support
|
| I expect total ignorance from a typical domain registrar.
|
| > If they have a customer like steam would they just cut
| off the domain? Probably not.
|
| Take a look who is they registrar and then look their
| prices up.
|
| > Other domain registrations would just ignored this and
| nothing would happened
|
| Yeah, they would totally ignore their customer just like
| that one did.
|
| Unfortunately, providing proper support and protecting
| own customers in digital realm is an unsustainable
| business practice for most registrars.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > Take a look who is they registrar and then look their
| prices up.
|
| So, in case anyone is interested, their registrar is
| MarkMonitor Inc., with a pricing of "contact us". The
| only pricing info I could find [0] said that it's 20$/yr
| for a .com, but with a minimum spend of 10k$ (probably
| reached by using their other services, such as the stated
| purpose of monitoring of trademarks).
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18063232
| egorfine wrote:
| Last time I have heard about them it was $5k/y.
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| It's not optimal, but the domain registrar must choose
| between every domain they have and one that is causing
| trouble.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| (FYI, if you didn't already notice this, you're probably far
| too busy anyway, but still: https://bsky.app/profile/botherer.b
| sky.social/post/3lcuitcck...)
| TheEnbyperor wrote:
| I run a domain registrar. "serverHold" is not a status that
| iwantmyname could've set. If they had suspended the domain it'd
| have "clientHold" set. Server Hold means the registry (i.e. .io
| directly) has suspended the domain. Your best bet would be to
| contact the Internet Computer Bureau Ltd who run .io at
| admin@icb.co.uk, or the registry technical support provider
| Identity Digital at techsupport@identity.digital.
| kj4ips wrote:
| I've heard a ton of stories about .io, IMO, they play fast
| and loose in a space where that isn't okay, and they get away
| with it mostly because they are a ccTLD.
|
| The last time someone I knew had an issue, they had to get a
| senator to make waves to get anything resolved.
| 0x38B wrote:
| I regret going with .io for my personal domain name. At the
| time I thought it was cool, but they've since raised prices
| and hearing things like this doesn't instill confidence...
| qingcharles wrote:
| And isn't .io on borrowed time, since the country will
| soon no longer exist?
| Suppafly wrote:
| Do they get rid of TLDs once the country they are
| assigned to goes away? I assumed they'd sell them to
| someone or something.
| unanimous wrote:
| They might not have much of a choice but to shut down all
| .io domains. This video explains a little:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yJ6AZsUlpc
| foobarchu wrote:
| Nobody really knows. There are only a few precedents,
| i.e. the old Soviet Union .su tld being kept around, or
| the 2 letter country code that I can't recall which was
| reassigned to a new country after the old one went out of
| existence.
|
| There isn't really a precedent for a tld with as many
| domains under it as .io, it's a very strong possibility
| it will be kept around and given to a private entity or
| even to GB.
| sigio wrote:
| That, and the Indian Ocean territory will cease to exist
| in the (very) near future, so the .io domains might be
| going the way of the dodo. I won't be registering any new
| ones at least, and recommending everyone to stay away
| from them.
| leafo wrote:
| Interesting, this morning I got a response from a staff
| member of the parent company that owns iwantmyname saying
| they didn't get my response with regards to the abuse
| notification they sent and that's why they took the domain
| down.
| paxys wrote:
| > Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor
| in all of this.
|
| While I agree, the people who hired them are equally culpable.
| You don't get to wash your hands of the mess just because
| someone else is doing your dirty work.
| Arch485 wrote:
| I smell a class action lawsuit. That's a whole lot of lost
| revenue and time for you and itch.io's creators.
|
| Godspeed!
| nstart wrote:
| For what it's worth, I know Namecheap gets a meh rep, but we've
| been on the receiving end of several phishing/copyright reports
| and have responded across the spectrum in terms of time span.
| We've responded immediately. We've responded with an hour or so
| to go. In all cases, Namecheap has somehow responded quickly
| and resolved the issue.
| rexreed wrote:
| I coincidentally just this past week ran into a major issue
| with Namecheap on a fraudulent domain marketplace sale that
| they did not resolve properly or in a timely manner. They
| deserve their meh reputation. They were decent about a decade
| ago. Come renewal my domains up for sale are moving to
| Dynadot. Was considering porkbun but I sense they are heading
| the namecheap way.
| Sindisil wrote:
| > but I sense they are heading the namecheap way
|
| What makes you say that?
| rexreed wrote:
| Some of the comments and feedback I'm seeing in the
| reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/PorkBun/. But then again
| I don't have any firsthand experience with these issues,
| so who knows. Are you having good experiences with
| Porkbun?
| safety1st wrote:
| So it sounds like this was DMCA abuse by Funko, aided and
| abetted by BrandShield, and it resulted in damages to you. Also
| sounds like iwantmyname just went along with it, they are
| probably conditioned to do so by the rules.
|
| I would write up a complaint and send it to the incoming FTC
| Commissioner. Yes, I'm serious. From the signals Trump is
| sending if there is ever a time when Republicans may support
| some form of DMCA reform, it's now. He's on record talking
| about punishing Big Tech and supporting "Little Tech." You're
| Little Tech. Send copies of your letter to Funko and
| BrandShield. Also reach out or at least send a copy to Matt
| Stoller, the guy who publishes a very popular newsletter about
| monopoly, anti-trust and corporate abuse in America, he will be
| interested. Go for the throat.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Given the OP and admin in the comments explicitly say that
| this wasn't a DMCA claim it would rather hurt any campaign to
| lie and say it was.
| tremon wrote:
| But the DMCA is the only legal mechanism for demanding
| swift action from a registrar/hosting party without the
| involvement of a judge, at least FAFAIK. So if this wasn't
| a DMCA takedown, then the registrar was acting completely
| of their own volition and should be liable for all fallout.
| qingcharles wrote:
| No, sadly it's not. These are private companies.. if you
| write to them and tell them to take a site down for
| "reasons" and they think the "reasons" are good enough,
| they'll do it.
| vasco wrote:
| Hope you have money to fight them. I stuck to my guns on a
| wrongful one like this and while Digitalocean and Cloudflare
| both had my backs (surprisingly before I even asked, both of
| them got a lot of good will on that - they informed me they
| already checked and it was spurious!). Google didn't have my
| back though and immediately caved when they upgraded their sham
| copyright infringement claim to money laundering and fraud
| based on nothing - a fully static website with no backend
| calls. Good luck! I still have the sites exactly as they were
| just to spite them and will keep running them at a loss until
| I'm dead. Copyright infringement my ass. This abuse has got to
| stop sometime.
| latexr wrote:
| > I still have the sites exactly as they were just to spite
| them and will keep running them at a loss until I'm dead.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spite_house
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Curb_Your_Enthusiasm_e.
| ..
| joseda-hg wrote:
| If they are fully static couldn't they probably be run at
| close to 0 cost from you?
| vasco wrote:
| Yes I'm not the pope, it's a cheap server. Still doesn't
| make any money.
| SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
| If it's a static site, you could move it to Cloudflare
| Pages to reduce the cost to zero.
| vasco wrote:
| And make my story worse? I feel like to optimize for
| spite I need to pay a little as well. You made me laugh
| though - have a good day :)
| registeredcorn wrote:
| spite^fake-DMCA-claim
| thn-gap wrote:
| I wanted to take the time to thank you for the service you
| provide. itch.io is unvaluable to the indie community, and I'm
| perplexed when I see some devs complain about issues like this.
| Thabks for all your work.
| JosefAlbers wrote:
| It's working again now.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've had the same thing happening; I run a simple forum, and
| some years ago people were discussing a manga, posting images
| of fan translated pages.
|
| My hosting party (Hetzner) forwarded the emails and / or put it
| in their own system, I removed the offending images / page,
| replied to the email, and done, right? Wrong, the email said I
| had to fill in a statement through some online form somewhere;
| I did that too late and got more and more threatening emails
| like "pack your shit we're evicting you in 24 hours". Nobody
| seemed to actually read my replies / explanation, probably
| because this is so routine for them.
|
| And I get it, nobody can be arsed to read longwinded
| explanations and the like for routine operations. I hope AI
| assisted tooling will help the overworked support employees
| with making decisions in favor of giving people the benefit of
| the doubt and the help they need; for them it's routine, but
| for me it was the first time I got anything like that.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| You really need to get off both .io and this no-name registrar.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that the Funko Pop - Funko Fusion -
| brandshield.com - BrandShield automated software - DMCA -
| iwantmyname.com (Team Internet) - itch.io path means that it's
| no one's fault and no one's to blame, and there's no one to
| appeal to other than the media.
|
| Wonderful how we've constructed our society like this.
| lxgr wrote:
| > it's no one's fault and no one's to blame
|
| There's obviously somebody to blame. Somebody getting a
| legitimate domain taken down for hours should have
| consequences, if only to make mistakes more expensive for
| trigger-happy automated "IP protection" services (the only
| signal they'll probably understand).
|
| The question is just if itch.io has the funding and energy to
| actually pursue the matter legally, now that it's technically
| resolved. I couldn't blame them for just changing registrars
| instead.
| tonygiorgio wrote:
| Unfortunately "serverHold" goes above registrars. I learned
| this the hard way. There's a variety of watchdogs that false
| flag things all the time, and a handful of tld's that will
| blindly obey these orders. I'm guessing io is one of these.
| You'll have to escalate it with them, though I was never
| successful. Good luck.
| derefr wrote:
| > The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate
| all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports
| independently to our host and registrar claiming there was
| "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation
| instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of
| this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of
| this.
|
| I feel like there's also some missing layer of infrastructure
| here.
|
| itch.io, like a lot of sites (HN being another), is meant to
| act as a host of user-generated content, over which the site
| takes a _curatorial_ but not _editorial_ stance. (I.e. the site
| has a Terms of Use; and has moderators that take things down /
| prevent things from being posted according to the Terms of Use;
| but otherwise is not favoring content according to the
| platform's own beliefs in the way that e.g. a newspaper would.
| None of the UGC posted "represents the views" of the platform,
| and there's no UGC that the platform would be particularly sad
| to see taken down.)
|
| I feel like, for such arms-length-hosted UGC platforms, there
| should be a mechanism to indicate to these "brand protection"
| services (and phishing/fraud-detection services, etc) that
| takedown reports should be directed first-and-foremost at the
| platform itself. A mechanism to assert "this site doesn't have
| a vested interest in the content it hosts, and so is perfectly
| willing to comply with takedown requests pointed at specific
| content; so please don't try to take down the site itself."
|
| There _are_ UGC-hosting websites that brand-protection services
| already treat this way (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, etc) -- but
| that 's just institutional "human common sense" knowledge held
| about a few specific sites. I feel like this could be
| generalized, with a rule these takedown systems can follow,
| where if there's some indication (in a /.well-known/ entry, for
| example) that the site is a UGC-host and accepts its own
| platform-level abuse/takedown reports, then that should be
| attempted first, before trying to get the site itself taken
| down.
|
| (Of course, such a rule necessarily cannot be a full short-
| circuit for the regular host-level takedown logic such systems
| follow; otherwise pirates, fraudsters, etc would just pretend
| their one-off phishing domains are UGC platforms. But you could
| have e.g. a default heuristic that if the takedown system
| discovers a platform-automated-takedown-request channel, then
| it'll try that channel and give it an hour to take effect
| before moving onto the host-level strategy; and if it can be
| detected from e.g. certificate transparency logs that the
| current ownership of the host is sufficiently long-lived, then
| additional leeway could be given, upgrading to a 24-72hr wait
| before host-takedown triggers.)
| robertduncan wrote:
| There is a parallel to the public suffix list, which domains
| like github.io are listed on:
| https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat
| codatory wrote:
| Smells like tortious interference to me... and likely some form
| of perjury. I'd probably stop talking to them now that service
| is restored and get in touch with legal representation.
| meaydinli wrote:
| Behavior from "iwantmyname" doesn't sound like they deserve
| your business anymore.
| nonplus wrote:
| I hope you come out of this in good shape. I try to get all my
| (digital) TTRPGs and indie games through your platform.
| Suppafly wrote:
| I wish brandshield would pull this shit with someone that was
| large enough to sue them for fraud or tortious interference.
| Razengan wrote:
| Lemme use this opportunity for having your attention to suggest
| some form of collaboration or even a merger with the Godot game
| engine:
|
| * itch.io users could launch the Godot Web Editor to quickly
| make prototypes or simple games right on itch
|
| * Publish from the native Godot editor directly to itch.io
|
| * Godot adopts itch.io as the official asset store for art
| packs etc.
|
| * Introduce social features for devs and artists to collaborate
| with each other:
|
| * A publisher could choose to add a "Fork" or similar button on
| their itch.io game page that downloads and opens the project
| source in Godot. * All "forks" published that way would include
| a link to the original game's page, and so on.
|
| I think Godot+itch could/should become the Github of Games :)
| sureglymop wrote:
| A similar thing has happened to me before. There is a company
| with the same name as my surname with a trademark for it.
|
| When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the registrar
| had an automatic process in place that checked for this trademark
| and took away access of the domain. So far so good. The problem
| was that the registrar and its support then ghosted me and also
| never refunded me for the money already paid to lease the domain
| for a year. Overall it was a bad experienced with bad
| communication that made me switch registrar (note: this was a
| different registrar than mentioned here).
|
| I think one of the problems is that as more and more individual
| consumers buy domains, certain legal processes and automation are
| not ready for that. A good registrar should anticipate that an
| individual private consumer may not have the legal experience or
| knowledge to deal with just being hit with something they were
| never explicitly warned of.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Trademarks are country specific while domain names are not.
| Would be interesting to know what happens if they took this to
| trial (in which country though).
| lxgr wrote:
| Of course domain registrations are also subject to national
| law. .io in particular is (currently) under UK jurisdiction.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Hmm ... you're right, I could have worded that differently
| to help people like you understand the point being made.
|
| s/domain names are not/DNS is not/
| lxgr wrote:
| I still don't get the point (presumably due to being in
| the set of "people like me") - could you please
| elaborate?
|
| And I don't get what DNS has to do with any of this; this
| is a registrar/legal dispute, not a nameserver/technical
| one.
| hobofan wrote:
| > I think one of the problems is that as more and more
| individual consumers buy domains
|
| Huh, I was always under the assumption that the percentage of
| domains bought by individual consumers is shrinking. As in, in
| the early days of the internet until ~2010 where
| commercialization was only slowly picking up (or only
| concentrated to a few domains), the majority of domains were
| personal websites and blogs.
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| > _Huh, I was always under the assumption that the percentage
| of domains bought by individual consumers is shrinking._
|
| Yes, but a segment of the domain market still buys their name
| domains and defends them on the Internet.
|
| I bought my fname+lname domain a few years ago, but I'm not
| planning to surrender it to a random conglomerate.
|
| > _As in, in the early days of the internet until ~2010 where
| commercialization was only slowly picking up (or only
| concentrated to a few domains), the majority of domains were
| personal websites and blogs._
|
| A deep part of me hopes this part of the market never dies,
| for the good health of the Internet's sovereignity.
| djsnoopy wrote:
| The percentage share of personal domains doesn't tell you
| everything. More and more consumers probably are buying
| personal domains just by the nature of it getting cheaper and
| easier to host and there being more people on the internet
| year over year. Could be proven wrong though because I don't
| know how to get the numbers.
| will5421 wrote:
| Which registrar was this? I'd like to avoid them.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| "iwantmyname", from leafo's post here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364033
| lxgr wrote:
| I find it curious that this (purely factual and correct)
| comment got downvoted/flagged into oblivion.
| roryokane wrote:
| How would you know whether Modified3019's comment is
| factual and correct? sureglymop wrote "note: this was a
| different registrar than mentioned here", and they
| haven't written any other comments in the thread that
| might identify the registrar.
| lxgr wrote:
| > How would you know whether Modified3019's comment is
| factual and correct?
|
| By following the reference they provided, which is to a
| post by the person running itch.io stating just that.
|
| I don't know if the linked comment is actually correct,
| but the link to a comment plus quoteof the relevant part
| seems as factual as it gets.
| Modified3019 wrote:
| Now that it's morning, I realize that the comment I was
| replying to wasn't asking about itch.io's registrar, but
| was actually a reply to a post by sureglymop.
|
| Basically I didn't notice the very slight indentation on
| my phone. Whoops.
|
| I don't know who sureglymop's registrar is. I'd encourage
| them to name and shame, refusing to refund is
| unacceptable.
| lxgr wrote:
| Update: Turns out GP simply replied to the wrong thread,
| so it was just a typical case of "downvoting takes less
| effort than pointing out a mistake", I suppose.
| lolinder wrote:
| > When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the
| registrar had an automatic process in place that checked for
| this trademark and took away access of the domain. So far so
| good.
|
| I don't think this is good.
|
| Trademarks are country-specific, not global like domains.
| Further, within a country trademarks are only valid within the
| scope of certain classes, which means:
|
| * There will often be more than one trademark holder of even
| non-surname trademarks.
|
| * You can't trademark a surname to prevent its use generally,
| you can only restrict its use in a narrow sphere.
|
| I understand why domain registrars automatically overenforce
| their country's trademark laws (they can't deal with the legal
| complications that will result from them not doing so), but
| it's very much _not_ good that someone like you can get to a
| domain for your surname first and be told you can 't have it in
| case the trademark holder (for which class???) might want it.
| lxgr wrote:
| > Trademarks are country-specific, not global like domains.
|
| Domains are also subject to local law! For ccTLDs, it's
| usually that of the country in question; for gTLD, to my
| knowledge the US has effective jurisdiction (through ICANN)
| over at least some of the popular gTLDs such as .com and
| .net.
|
| "Local law" in this case doesn't just include actual laws on
| the books, but also the risk and cost of getting sued by
| either a trademark holder or a non-trademark-infringing
| domain owner.
|
| This is exactly the type of issue that people usually don't
| consider when picking a TLD, vanity or otherwise.
| Animats wrote:
| Hm. So Funko sells merchandise related to the Jurassic World
| franchise.[1] But, according to Licensing International, Mattel
| licenses the toy rights to that franchise from Universal Products
| and Experiences, the merchandise arm of Universal Pictures. [2]
| Also, Funko sells Disney Princess dolls.[3] Mattel announced a
| multi-year licensing deal with Disney to license the doll rights
| for Disney Princess dolls. "The courage and compassion found
| throughout our Disney Princess and Frozen stories and characters
| continue to inspire fans around the globe," said Stephanie Young,
| President of Disney Consumer Products, Games and Publishing. "By
| furthering our longstanding relationship with Mattel, we look
| forward to expanding the worlds of Disney Princess and Frozen,
| introducing an innovative new era of these beloved franchises
| through captivating products and play opportunities."
|
| Might be useful to send letters to Disney's and Mattel's legal
| departments. Mattel paid a lot of money for that Disney license.
| Disney is very protective of those licenses. Mattel lost the
| Disney license to Hasbro for a few years due to overproduction of
| low quality dolls. I'm surprised to see Funko selling low-quality
| Disney dolls. They degrade a Disney brand.
|
| [1] https://funko.com/pop-tyrannosaurus-rex-fossil/80225.html
|
| [2] https://licensinginternational.org/news/mattel-and-
| universal...
|
| [3] https://funko.com/fandoms/animation-cartoons/disney-
| princess...
|
| [4] https://corporate.mattel.com/news/mattel-and-disney-
| announce...
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Why on earth would you send letters? These are all huge
| corporations with sizeable legal departments. They either know
| or they should, and most importantly, are paid to handle this.
| Moreover, you're not likely to be heard or understood by the
| first line of customer care there, even if this was something
| they weren't aware of (quite unlikely) but wished they were.
| It's a waste of time, and something even the biggest altruist
| would find hard to defend as a sensible effort.
|
| Besides, Disney is perfectly capable of degrading their own
| brand.
| OrangeMusic wrote:
| I think OP's plan wasn't to help Disney, but to hurt Funko?
|
| But I agree this is most probably futile :)
| therealcamino wrote:
| I think Funko's products are classified as collectibles, not
| dolls. I am sure they have licenses from Disney.
| jerf wrote:
| Funko still exists, ergo, they have licenses from Disney.
|
| Disney chases down little daycare centers:
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/daycare-center-murals/
|
| They would not miss Funko.
| dawnerd wrote:
| Disney and Universal license and even sell Funko in their
| parks. But what you did discover is why some are bobble heads.
| timvdalen wrote:
| I got a "cease and desist" type email from one of these (Tracer
| AI) last week. Really annoying, but I guess spam is a prime LLM
| use case...
| rsynnott wrote:
| Spam is, when it comes to it, basically the only proven LLM
| usecase at this point. Everything else is all a bit 'jam
| tomorrow', "doesn't really work now, but it'll be magic soon,
| we promise!", but it has very much revolutionised the spam
| industry.
| nicoloren wrote:
| I've experienced the same thing: a YouTube channel deleted
| without any explanation (the email from Google mentioned spam,
| even though I filmed all the videos myself), Facebook preventing
| me from sharing posts from a website (without any explanation),
| and of course, domain names that get deindexed from Google
| without any reason (no message in Google Search Console).
|
| I believe we've reached a point where any activity on the web can
| vanish overnight due to an AI or an algorithm making decisions
| based on obscure criteria.
| subarctic wrote:
| I mean at least those are walled garden platforms where this
| sort of thing we've come to expect. An independent website as
| big as itch.io going down because of a bogus complaint is a big
| surprise
| Aachen wrote:
| That's what I thought. Last week, two of my domains were
| frozen by the TLD owner without notice, and they'd take them
| offline altogether in 7 days if I didn't supply some
| paperwork to my registrar
|
| I've had these domains for ten years, now all of a sudden
| this is super urgent and if I'm on holiday that'd be a real
| shame I guess
|
| So I contact the registrar and a link to the relevant
| legislation was sufficient to send them a perfectly agreeably
| censored version of my identity document (removing just
| irrelevant information they can't use or verify anyway), but
| apparently all they do is forward it to support@afnic.fr and
| not actually mark the domain holder as verified. So AFNIC,
| predictably, rejects it because GDPR doesn't exist in France
|
| I saw no other choice but to send everything into AFNIC's
| email inbox / support system, which famously never get leaked
| and they assured me was "highly" secured when I asked to at
| least remove it after verification
|
| With just 7 days' notice and half of that going to the
| distraction of a registrar, there's also no way to figure out
| what's even going on or have any sort of conversation. They
| hold all the cards and you jump when they say hop
|
| I'm considering my options for any TLDs owned by AFNIC...
| evidently .io isn't better, but how to know who is
| leonard-somero wrote:
| I am Leonard Somero, I run verysoftwares.itch.io. I have over 300
| followers and a game with 20k+ plays that has been repeatedly
| featured on the front page.
|
| This certainly changed my morning routine! I am glad to hear that
| the reason wasn't me deleting my Twitter from my page. My first
| panic reaction was thinking it was me who's caused it, due to
| some kind of ad revenue conflict.
|
| Ever seen the movie Summer Wars? I felt like the protagonist for
| a moment there, but glad it turns out it was just some 2020s AI
| nonsense.
|
| Either way, there's surely an engineer somewhere who's very busy
| right now.
| Shank wrote:
| > Ever seen the movie Summer Wars? I felt like the protagonist
| for a moment there, but glad it turns out it was just some
| 2020s AI nonsense.
|
| Love Machine _was a rouge AI_ in Summer Wars, though.
| gessha wrote:
| Rouge or rogue :D
| disjunct wrote:
| Funko as a brand exists entirely on derivative content, albeit
| licensed. Seems like exactly the sort of brand that would trip
| auto-DMCA software.
| totetsu wrote:
| Is it possible for itch.io to follow the advice of putting user
| generated content onto a seperate domain from their main one?
| gsck wrote:
| The entire site is user generated content
| HelloNurse wrote:
| Congratulation for the return of the site!
| cherryteastain wrote:
| How are all these "DMCA Ignored" domain registrars? Do they
| actually send all DMCA requests to /dev/null? Sounds like using
| one of those would have "fixed" the problem here.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I used to host my TV torrent tracker with one of these that
| would ignore literally everything. Was expensive, but was
| factored into the costs.
| TophWells wrote:
| It's back up now!
| CM30 wrote:
| It should be illegal for any company to rely on AI or automation
| to handle legal risks, especially without any human driven
| support to fall back on. The fact we're handling over things this
| serious to unreliable and poorly configured systems feels like
| absolute insanity to me.
|
| Also, why is the domain registrar even being contacted here? I
| thought the general idea was that you'd first contact the site
| owner and wait for a response, and if there's no response in a
| certain amount of time, then you might contact the registrar or
| something. No one should be going over the heads of website
| owners and creators for matters like this, especially not as
| their first resort.
|
| In a logical world, they'd contact Itch.io and Itch.io would take
| down the page (which they did), and that would be it. No need to
| involve the registrar at all in a case like this one.
| lxgr wrote:
| I don't think it needs to be illegal - it should be enough to
| just hold companies responsible for the consequences, just like
| they are for using any other kind of technical system without
| appropriate supervision.
| teddyh wrote:
| Like I frequently1 advise2:
|
| Don't look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that
| you look for local registrars _in your area_. The TLD registry
| for your country /area usually has a list of the authorized
| registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a
| local address.
|
| Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are not in
| our target market.
|
| 1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499>
|
| 2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507784>
| remram wrote:
| How do you monitor for when they inevitably get acquired?
| teddyh wrote:
| That's a very SV view on things; i.e. that small companies
| inevitably get acquired. Most small companies _don't_
| actually get acquired, and are not looking to be acquired.
|
| The simple answer is: Choose a registrar without significant
| external investors.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Since when it is registrar responsibility to take down domains
| based on third-party reports? I would think to do it registrar
| needs at least a warrant from officials, and not without a notice
| of domain owner.
| Jdfmiller wrote:
| I sent a request to the registrar, and they emailed with this
| response. They're claiming it wasn't their fault.
|
| -------- Your request has been updated. To add
| additional comments, reply to this email. 9 Dec 2024,
| 10:57 UTC Hello and thank you for your message.
| The domain name was already reinstated earlier today after the
| registrant finally responded to our notice and took appropriate
| action to resolve the issue
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The registrant is itch.io. Sounds like victim blaming.
| Beijinger wrote:
| There are some recommendations of registrars here in the chat.
| Let me recommend two:
|
| 1. internet.bs No Bullshit Domains. I am using them since 10
| years, and I am very happy. Email is comparatively expensive, but
| you can buy this separately from infomaniak.com for 18 EURO a
| year.
|
| 2. If you need country TLDs, this may be a good option: inwx.com
| josefritzishere wrote:
| It may ultimately be lost revenue and lawsuits that protect us
| from the tidal wave of AI garbage.
| 6bb32646d83d wrote:
| One of my .xyz domain was taken down because one it somehow ended
| up on a single spam list as Phishing (it was not hosting any
| phishing, and all the code is actually open source).
|
| I never was able to get it cleared. It's crazy the power that
| those spam list can have and they care very little about false
| positives
| drusepth wrote:
| We actually had almost the exact same thing happen to Notebook.ai
| last month:
|
| - automated notice of trademark infringement from some posted
| user content, accusing us of "fraud and phishing" (filed by a
| third party on behalf of Meta)
|
| - that user content was immediately deleted upon receiving the
| notice
|
| - exactly a week later, our host (Heroku) banned our account with
| a generic no-reason "Your account has been banned."
|
| Total downtime of about 24 hours until it was resolved; luckily,
| Heroku's support simply unbanned the account whenever I reached
| out to ask why we were banned. Migrating to another host wouldn't
| have taken much longer, but would have been a pain.
|
| Goes to show layering a couple automated processes together can
| have pretty devastating false-positives. I'm glad there was a
| human in the loop at Heroku I could reach to get things sorted
| out relatively quickly; also glad to see Itch.io is back up and
| got it sorted out relatively quickly as well.
| StuntPope wrote:
| easyDNS here. Our ears were burning as multiple people have
| mentioned us in this thread.
|
| If you want to get with a registrar who is actually clueful about
| takedowns, we can help you out.
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