4 ms·

I don't find this surprising at all. This can happen in any scenario where a special shortcut has been added to get around a standard process (where standard p

by blunte 7y ago

I don't find this surprising at all. This can happen in any scenario where a special shortcut has been added to get around a standard process (where standard process usually involves some human review and judgement). I imagine that in most cases, the shortcuts were created simply to speed up a process where some (perceived) harm is significant, and a rapid change would alleviate this harm. This would allow some enforcement agency to rapidly take down a child porn site, for example. Such shortcuts can also be designed to prevent any other party from knowing what is going on - why the change is being made. This would be the case where some high level governmental agency (FBI, for example) wants to change something to prevent a situation they deem as bad or to perhaps to enable better awareness of a process/communication by inserting themselves into the middle of it. And finally, in this case, an automated or human error resulted in this person's domain name being included on a "bad list", and the shortcut swept their domain along with the trash. This particular situation doesn't bother me as much as the "Google/Apple/FB suddenly closed all my accounts" scenario (which is often triggered by some opaque artificial wishful-intelligence system). Regardless of the situation, it's not ideal that our best course of action in recovering something wrongfully taken is by complaining on public forums. It's a shame that we have to hope for the attention and generosity of someone with more power to champion our case to right the wrongs. So I say, bring the humans back into the process! :)

admax88q 7y ago
> This particular situation doesn't bother me as much as the "Google/Apple/FB suddenly closed all my accounts" scenario This situation bothers me so much more. Google/Apple/FB are private corporations. If they continue to adopt user hostile practices it is possible for some other company to out compete them in the more or less free market of internet services. TLDs are government controlled entities administering scare resources. I certainly _feel_ like I have much more ownership over my domain name than I do my Google or Facebook account.
- gowld 7y ago
  Here's the problem: A big corp is never going to alienate 10% of its user base at large, enough to motivate a competitor. But they are highly incentivized to alienate 1% -- millions of people, as a cost-cutting measure. Or they might even alienate 20-40% of potential users, as long as those users are not wealthy or powerful enough to "matter" (see: chattel slavery). This is the history of society, of marginalization of the disabled or other outgroups. It's hard work to overcome that, often through force (Civil War) or the threat thereof (Americans with Disabilities Act).
alias_neo 7y ago
I hope to see someone come up with a bright solution to this in the near future and post it here. One of the most terrifying thoughts is that of losing domains to someone who points them at alternative mail servers thus gaining access to everything that uses email for verification.
marcosdumay 7y ago
This is not really ok. There must be a clear contact point for the affected people (not only namecheap). Also it was very bad on the transparency front. If they are taking down a domain, the operation is not secret anymore, so they can tell why. No telling you is bullshit. That being a German operation, I would expect much better on the democratic handling of it. And it being an international operation, India should have complained that it was badly done too. What would happen if namecheap didn't care?
- derefr 7y ago
  I think there is a clear point of contact, and it is your registrar. This is part of the reason a hierarchy of registrars exist, rather than each TLD just being one organization maintaining its own registry service: so that the people with ultimate authority (the TLD, in this case) can have personal relationships with representatives of “constituencies” of domains (the registrars), rather than necessarily-impersonal relationships with a flat collective of millions of individual accounts (the domain owners). By analogy: Google has necessarily-impersonal relationships with millions of Gmail users; but rather more personal relationships with far fewer GSuite and Google Cloud organization owners. If you were an employee of a company that uses either of those, and your service was breaking, you’d ask your GSuite organization-owner (i.e. the person Google has a personal relationship with) to contact them for you.
- blunte 7y ago
  I did not say it was ok. I think it's a bad system, and I think it's getting worse - company by company, and month by month. But when it comes to not telling someone, that's usually because there's some high level legal/law enforcement situation. In those cases, there is sometimes a reasonable argument for not alerting someone. The problem is that if there's no human oversight, innocent people sometimes get caught in the net.

by blunte 7y ago

admax88q 7y ago

> This particular situation doesn't bother me as much as the "Google/Apple/FB suddenly closed all my accounts" scenario This situation bothers me so much more. Google/Apple/FB are private corporations. If they continue to adopt user hostile practices it is possible for some other company to out compete them in the more or less free market of internet services. TLDs are government controlled entities administering scare resources. I certainly _feel_ like I have much more ownership over my domain name than I do my Google or Facebook account.

gowld 7y ago
Here's the problem: A big corp is never going to alienate 10% of its user base at large, enough to motivate a competitor. But they are highly incentivized to alienate 1% -- millions of people, as a cost-cutting measure. Or they might even alienate 20-40% of potential users, as long as those users are not wealthy or powerful enough to "matter" (see: chattel slavery). This is the history of society, of marginalization of the disabled or other outgroups. It's hard work to overcome that, often through force (Civil War) or the threat thereof (Americans with Disabilities Act).

alias_neo 7y ago

I hope to see someone come up with a bright solution to this in the near future and post it here. One of the most terrifying thoughts is that of losing domains to someone who points them at alternative mail servers thus gaining access to everything that uses email for verification.

marcosdumay 7y ago

This is not really ok. There must be a clear contact point for the affected people (not only namecheap). Also it was very bad on the transparency front. If they are taking down a domain, the operation is not secret anymore, so they can tell why. No telling you is bullshit. That being a German operation, I would expect much better on the democratic handling of it. And it being an international operation, India should have complained that it was badly done too. What would happen if namecheap didn't care?

derefr 7y ago
I think there is a clear point of contact, and it is your registrar. This is part of the reason a hierarchy of registrars exist, rather than each TLD just being one organization maintaining its own registry service: so that the people with ultimate authority (the TLD, in this case) can have personal relationships with representatives of “constituencies” of domains (the registrars), rather than necessarily-impersonal relationships with a flat collective of millions of individual accounts (the domain owners). By analogy: Google has necessarily-impersonal relationships with millions of Gmail users; but rather more personal relationships with far fewer GSuite and Google Cloud organization owners. If you were an employee of a company that uses either of those, and your service was breaking, you’d ask your GSuite organization-owner (i.e. the person Google has a personal relationship with) to contact them for you.
blunte 7y ago
I did not say it was ok. I think it's a bad system, and I think it's getting worse - company by company, and month by month. But when it comes to not telling someone, that's usually because there's some high level legal/law enforcement situation. In those cases, there is sometimes a reasonable argument for not alerting someone. The problem is that if there's no human oversight, innocent people sometimes get caught in the net.