41 ms·
Tell HN: Google drops blogspot.in, breaking hundreds of thousands of permalinks
When searched within India, Google's Blogspot points to username.blogspot.in as opposed to username.blogspot.com (also in search engines). Most permalinks users use to share are country specific which also reflect on Google Search.
Looks like blogspot.in was picked up by a non Google entity.
Domain Name: blogspot.in
Registry Domain ID: DE2DC9C0E8E694C28ADEF0F444F121B45-IN
Registrar WHOIS Server:
Registrar URL: www.domainming.com
Updated Date: 2020-06-29T20:00:06Z
Creation Date: 2020-06-24T20:00:05Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2021-06-24T20:00:05Z
Domain Status: inactive http://www.icann.org/epp#inactive
There is a ceritificate for the blogspot.in along with other blogspot.* domains. Would they end up revoking all the certificates if challenged?
https://crt.sh/?q=blogspot.in
- notRobot 6y agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablogspot.in https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ablogspot.in 480,000 results for me. All broken. Wow.
- nix23 6y agoI see 4’720’000 results, even more WOW ;)
- saurik 6y agoI now have "About 5,080,000 results (0.15 seconds)" (so more _and faster_ than previous results, lol); clearly our interest in this search term has attracted the attention of SEO bots ;P.
- ktrl 6y ago>480,000 results for me I see 4,540,000 results. Many old links on Hacker News are also broken: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=blogspot.in&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- arto 6y ago"About 4,910,000 results (0.26 seconds)"
- codegladiator 6y agoAbout 53,80,000 results (0.22 seconds)
- rplnt 6y agoWhat region are you in that this is how the number is formatted?
- dgellow 6y agoI would guess Japan. Looks like the "man" concept they have to group numbers by 10k. Edit: it seems to be also the case in other east asia countries, see this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad#East_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myriad#East_Asia
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y agoJapan and China use regular Western comma grouping for Latin numerals. The myriads are used only when using Japanese/Chinese numerals: １万円 for 10,000 yen, ２億円 for 200,000,000.
- dgellow 6y agoThanks, I didn't know the formatting was following rules of Latin/Roman numerals. I remember having difficulties when learning to group numbers by 10k (with the -man suffix) during japanese courses more than a decade ago, I always assumed that was used everywhere.
- dgellow 6y agoDownvoted for a wrong guess? That's a bit harsh...
- 6y ago
- coronadisaster 6y agoI get 388 results: https://i.imgur.com/rPWUUUW.png https://i.imgur.com/rPWUUUW.png
- frumiousirc 6y agoI see a somewhat ironic message from that google search https://i.imgur.com/dxnJi28.png https://i.imgur.com/dxnJi28.png
- raverbashing 6y agoTo be honest I never got why Blogger bothered with a country specific domain when visiting a blog This sounded like a problem waiting to happen I understand onboarding your customers using a custom domain per country but not just switching (to the domain of the visitor, not of the blog even!)
- dannyw 6y agoLocal domains get higher CTRs and hence rankings on Google. Blogspot is an acquired Google property, hence they actually needed to care about SEO instead of just forcing their results up through rich snippets and widgets.
- sairamkunala 6y agosource: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711?hl=en https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711?hl=en but other country specific URLs current redirect to .com
- OrangeKnucles 6y agoCould be for banning certain blogs in certain countries. So the *.in blog would be banned but the same .com blog would continue functioning.
- rplnt 6y agoNo only it was problem waiting to happen, it's extremely annoying to the end-users to be redirected all around with forced languages based just on their IP. But that's what google does all over the place...
- cldellow 6y agoGoogle has said that this is to comply with local laws that may require censoring certain kinds of content: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711?hl=en https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711?hl=en
- Santosh83 6y agoApart from the massive list of broken bookmarks, am also wondering what is the risk of the new owners attempting some kind of phishing fraud on unsuspecting non-technical users? Really surprised by Google dropping the ball like this...
- kellengreen 6y agoBut are we surprised?
- sp332 6y agoWell, yes. Google usually makes an announcement before they shut domains off.
- thereyougo 6y agoSomeone in Google going to have a very hard day that's for sure.
- chubs 6y agoThis is one of the main reasons I tried garnering interest around a blogging app idea I had: If you blog with a third party service, eventually your blog will go away due to an acquihire, company shutdown, merger, or whatever happened in this instance (google forgot to renew a domain?). If you want to write seriously with a multi-decade perspective, you need to host it yourself, and I wanted to make that easy to manage for an average Joe. Unfortunately I haven't had any luck gathering interest! Technical people understand the idea but just roll their own using eg Jekyll; and Non-technical people don't get the idea, or dont seem to care. The idea is here: http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/ http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/ Anyway if anyone has advice i'm all ears :)
- onli 6y agoI wouldn't do this as desktop app. That way you are fighting the existing ecosystem. Instead have a webservice that eats the RSS feed of an existing blog and mirrors it, also keeping track of uploaded images, and then when need be spins up a blog instance on digitalocean. Wouldn't know how to price that, and with RSS often containing just a few items you'd need to think about that when setting up the blog. Though maybe blogspot supports range requests for RSS?
- netsharc 6y agoThe other day I followed an HN link and downloaded https://www.zettlr.com/ https://www.zettlr.com/ . It's "basically" a manager of Markdown files, and its syntax highlighting was compatible with the Hugo Markdown syntax. For a minute I wondered if I could take the source code of the editor and make it understand my Hugo-specific shortcodes (I put up a lot of pictures so I have homebrew {{ <gallery> }} and {{ <figure> }} shortcodes), but that's in my ever-extending "To Do Someday" list. The idea would be: it would read the Markdown as I write it, let Hugo render it, and return the HTML to be rendered in the editor window. Looking at your editor, it really looks like Zettlr (I'm guessing they're both Electron apps). I guess you have 2 almost separate problems: the editor and the hosting. On the topic of hosting, I guess if a "blogger" can get his own domain name, the actual infrastructure can be swapped under it (and the data republished from the local machine), as long as the reader can load the blog using the known URL, it's fine.
- napolux 6y agoAnd that's why you should own your own domain.
- speedgoose 6y agoI don't know, I didn't pay for some time and now it's parked by a bot.
- phendrenad2 6y agoMan those domain squatter bot companies, they aren't even interested in selling the domain back in some cases. I don't understand the business model. Maybe they're buying google pagerank score.
- speedgoose 6y agoIn my case, I think it's related to SEO.
- alltakendamned 6y agoad income generated by traffic to page (either organic or typos) exceeds the cost of the domains. then scale to 10s of thousands.
- toast0 6y agoI stopped renewing my domain (4 letter .org) in college, but I was able to get it back a couple years later when the new person didn't pay (or did a chargeback or something... it became available in the middle of the term).... I guess just keep checking.
- balladeer 6y agoMy firstname.com domain gets renewed by a lawyer every year. Last 12 years. Through a local web host/domain registrar whose customers are mostly the people who where their customers two decade ago (because they were probably one of the 2-3 companies back then) and don't know better to move elsewhere. He doesn't even reply to emails. Not sure he checks them. The domain is not being used for anything. Mails, forwarding, websites - nothing. Nada! It's not even his name. Let's say the domain is "johnsonmon.com" and his name is "John Mark". I wonder whether it's for some client of theirs. Every year it gets renewed for one year at a price that's around twice the second highest price among local registrars here (guessing based on that registrar's current renewal price).
- blntechie 6y agoMost likely they claim the domain back quickly? Yes? But that’s a massive mess up by Google. I know blogspot is not any at focus product for them but still it should hurt.
- dman 6y agoIt is not a new phenomenon, I am still grouchy about how Deja was handled. :(
- mcv 6y agoJust another reason to always, always claim your own domain. If you rely on someone else's domain, you have no control over it. Although it must be said: even your own registered domain can be lost. Generally due to you not paying attention, but I believe it has also happened that a registrar fucked up and sold a customer's domain to someone else. Maybe we need better regulation for this sort of thing. If you get a new phone subscription with a different phone provider, the phone providers are required (in the EU at least) to allow you to keep your phone number, because so many things are tied to it. The same is true for email addresses and websites. Breaking this can cause serious problems to people.
- YetAnotherNick 6y agoNo, this is not the reason. You would have much more likely chance being kicked by the registrar/card not accepted/country ban/forgot password/domain hacked/forgetting to renew and myriad of other reason than medium/google forgetting to renew their domain. This event is extremely unlikely.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoYour probably right. If 1+ billion internet users had their own domain names, we'd never hear the end of the Never use your own domain for anything ever horror stories.
- arkitaip 6y agoOr there might be a very robust infrastructure in place to prevent that from happening because there is now a multi-billion dollar market that companies want to serve.
- quickthrower2 6y agoWell I assume the comment is aimed at HN people not everyone in the world.
- syshum 6y agoYes because google never kills off services... Never ohh wait https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- jeswin 6y agoThere's clearly no fail-safe (even moderately so) solution to this problem on the centralized internet. Yet more reason for Secure Scuttlebutt, Dat and IPFS to exist.
- dredmorbius 6y agoHow specifically do those solve this issue?
- heavyset_go 6y agoIPFS wouldn't solve this problem.
- pmlnr 6y agoGoogle is slowly becoming the destroyer of the (old) internet. (See amp, removal of urls, etc) I'm fairly certain I don't like really the new internet, even if some of the url re-representations are reasonably nice.
- Shorel 6y agoJust remember Deja News.
- scarface74 6y agoCounterexample: AWS announced that they were going to disable links to files hosted on S3 that used a deprecated format. But after much outcry about how many links would be broken, they [1] back tracked. https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=6776 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=6776 [1] Should I be saying “we” now that I have been working for AWS for less than a month? I’m not use to being identified as an employee at BigTech.
- dredmorbius 6y agoAWS bare links are a cesspit and are increasingly blocked by firewalls. The sunset will occur one way or the other.
- dredmorbius 6y agoAcknowledged (post-Bezos acquisition) at the Washington Post in 2014: "Amazon is a hornet’s nest of malware" Of the 10 sites that pump out malware most frequently, four are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) — including the number one site, download-instantly.com, according to a threat report published Wednesday by the IT security firm Solutionary. The report comes a week after we learned that hackers allegedly used Amazon's cloud hosting solution as a platform for a botnet that scraped personal information from potentially millions of LinkedIn subscribers.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/01/16/amazon-is-a-hornets-nest-of-malware/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/01/16...
- rudolph9 6y agoUse content addressing. There are still many rough edges to be worked through but IPFS and others don’t get enough attention when stuff like this comes up on HN.
- puranjay 6y agoWhy would an organization like Google ever even drop a domain? A 10 year domain registration is what - $150?
- jefftk 6y agoMy bet is that it's a complicated mistake. (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)
- toomuchtodo 6y agoI suppose I'll go start looking for other google domains that heavily impact internet users if they expire, and are close to expiration, and just pay the ~$100 to renew them for another 10 years and write the cost off as public service [1]. [1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/000118/1443242.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/000118/1443242.shtml
- crazygringo 6y agoObviously it's not a cost issue, ha. And for all we know it was a 10 year registration... that ended now. In fact, the less frequent renewals are, the more likely the business process intended to take care of them isn't working anymore. (The employee left, the spreadsheet was lost, the e-mail address alerts are sent to isn't monitored anymore, etc.) Organizationally, handling infrequent yet critical tasks is actually a hard problem.
- donalhunt 6y agoThe original reason for the per-country domains was to allow Google to "continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law." It arose around the question "Does a judge in country A have the ability to censor content in country B?". Google has long argued that a judge does not have this authority. https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711 https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/2402711 https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/31/2761454/google-blogger-automatic-redirect-censorship-cctld https://www.theverge.com/2012/1/31/2761454/google-blogger-au...
- pc86 6y ago> Google has long argued that a judge does not have this authority. Google, and anyone with a functioning brain stem. Jurisdictions exist for a reason, and with a number of exceptions somewhere in the low single digits (and maybe zero), all jurisdictions end at the borders of a country.
- quickthrower2 6y agoKind of. Countries have jurisdictions within them, such as states and there is the EU of course, and then countries make treaties with each other so there can be influence across countries.
- vikramkr 6y agoInfluence but not jurisdiction. Outside of crimes against humanity/universal jurisdiction, I cant think of a situation where a country A would have jurisdiction over an event that happens in another country B involving nobody of nationality A. Even in the EU there's a lot of guidelines and processes for figuring out which member country gets jurisdiction over cases.
- reaperducer 6y agoI cant think of a situation where a country A would have jurisdiction over an event that happens in another country B involving nobody of nationality A Trade sanctions. Banking regulations. It happens all the time.
- gruez 6y agoask hn: how could this have happened? According to https://www.domain.com/blog/2018/11/01/domain-name-expirations-what-you-need-to-know/ https://www.domain.com/blog/2018/11/01/domain-name-expiratio..., there's supposed to be a 30 + 30 days grace period following domain expiry, where the original registrant can claim the domain. Was blogspot.in really down for 60 days and nobody noticed?
- jsploit 6y agoLast crawl on Internet Archive, which used to hit blogspot.in almost daily, was May 21. [0] Domain deletion processes vary per TLD. For .in it appears to be a 30 day grace period + 5 day hold period. [1] [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200521111932/http://blogspot.in/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200521111932/http://blogspot.i... [1] https://www.registry.in/registrants-faq https://www.registry.in/registrants-faq
- rurban 6y agoWas it on purpose because of India's crazy censorship lately, or just oversight?
- ifmpx 6y agoLikely due to the disruption caused by the pandemic.
- crazygringo 6y agoHonestly the whole notion of losing your domain if you accidentally don't pay is pretty silly. A domain in usage is obviously meant to continue, even if an organization misses a process to renew. Far better would be that a domain is yours in perpetuity until you explicitly cancel it. If you don't pay, you get bills, or it goes to collections, or the domain temporarily stops resolving or something... but you shouldn't lose it. (If a person passes away, their estate figures out what to do with it.) The notion that if you forget to pay, 60 days later it's gone (poof), just seems like a dumb policy in the first place. And for those wondering how a business forgets to renew, it's pretty easy: the employee (A) in charge of managing renewals is let go, and so is their manager (B) at around the same time, so the manager (B) doesn't transfer responsibility from (A) to a new person, and their manager (C) doesn't realize the original employee two levels down (A) never had their responsibility transferred, because that was B's job.
- fragmede 6y agoIMO I'd like a required timeout for "lost domains" before a new owner is able to pick it up would help this situation, unless given the transfer code from the old owner.
- rtsil 6y agoThere is. It's called a redemption period, and lasts 30 days. Many registrars also offer a grace period of a similar length before that.
- cj 6y agoThis would be too easily abused by domain squatters, I think. Maybe instead increase the 60 days to 90 or 120? But increasing to "forever" is unrealistic. I'm in the minority of people when I say this, but I'm in favor of making domain ownership enough of a burden to reduce the number of domains registered and never used vs. making them extremely cheap and easy to own. There are so many great domains that are registered and not in use. When starting a company these days, it's difficult to find a decent .com without paying thousands of dollars to a squatter or compromising with a TLD like .io
- WClayFerguson 6y agoIPFS will fix this. Permanently and forever. Move to Web3. The Big Tech firms are providing the incentive towards Web3/IPFS apparently not just by their rampant political censorship but also by breaking links. Everything about Big Tech monopolies is just harmful to the web. People are fed up with it.
- agentdrtran 6y agoIs IPFS easy enough for normal people to use yet?
- WClayFerguson 6y agoIPFS isn't really something end users work with directly. Apps and platforms (like the one I'm building: https://quanta.wiki https://quanta.wiki) use IPFS behind the scenes. The main characteristic the end user will need to know is that is is IPFS and is therefore uncensorable, decentralized, and secure.
- contr-error 6y agodang, is this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23769393 causing this post to erroneously show up in https://news.ycombinator.com/ask https://news.ycombinator.com/ask?
- oefrha 6y agoAny submission that’s not a link or Launch (reserved for YC companies) is put under the Ask banner, “Ask HN:” in the title is customary but not required, so no, it’s not erroneous.
- creeble 6y agoGoogle doesn't use a service like Markmonitor or one of the dozens of other professional asset management companies to register their domains? Huh.
- Abishek_Muthian 6y agoIt doesn't seem like Google had forgotten to renew the domain, may be blogspot is next on line?[1] [1]https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com
- ummonk 6y agoYeah going by https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/risky-blogspotin-domain-for-sale-after-google-fails-to-renew-it/ https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/google/risky-blogspoti... it sounds like they had ample warning.
- 6510 6y ago<sarcasm> People are easier to control if they don't talk. Average Joe should not have a say in anything, he should not have a voice at all. So you give him a bit of toilet paper to write his stuff on and toss it in the loo.
- 6510 6y agoWe see this dark pattern all over. How should one reason about it? A large part of the book burning is without intend. Or are we indoctrinated to support it? IMHO everything that doesn't cost anything to preserve should be preserved.
- jermier 6y agoI'm surprised no-one mentioned Mark Monitor[0] (no affiliation). A lot of big brand corporations use it to protect their intellectual property. Can you imagine, for example, someone getting their hands on `apple.com` or `icloud.com`. They could wreak havoc since a lot of iDevices use those two domains in order to function and you could pwn many devices if you were determined enough. I imagine MM solves the 10-year time window problem by ensuring the domain lives well on into the future. It's what they do. [0] https://www.markmonitor.com https://www.markmonitor.com
- devrand 6y agoYeah, and I checked a few whois history sites and the domain had been registered with Mark Monitor as the registrar. That's a major mistake on their [MarkMonitor's] part. Edit: clarified that I meant the error seems to be on MM's side.
- neonate 6y agoWhat's the major mistake? I don't follow.
- nertzy 6y agoI read it as that blogspot.in was registered via Mark Monitor and that MM made a big mistake here.
- devrand 6y agoCompanies hire MarkMonitor to safeguard their protected marks, which generally involves registering these marks under basically every TLD available. MarkMonitor themselves is an ICANN registrar so companies generally don't need to worry about renewals: MarkMonitor just handles it (how it actually gets billed back likely depends upon the contract). So unless Google explicitly told MarkMonitor to release the domain, this seems like MarkMonitor dropped the ball.
- kyrra 6y ago
- mitchtbaum 6y agoI would probably use Switcheroo Redirector extension if I needed a quick fix, but I'll keep you posted with better solutions. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switcheroo-redirector/cnmciclhnghalnpfhhleggldniplelbg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/switcheroo-redirec...
- bhartzer 6y agoA great example of why domain owners need domain name insurance. Domain insurance protects the owner from the loss of the domain, from UDRPs, expiring domains, failed renewals, stolen domains, etc. If it's a high-value domain (or if one that you just can't lose), then there other options, such as a registrar lock, or simply registering it for 100 years (i.e., Network Solutions), or even forever (Epik offers a forever domain registration). But that doesn't protect the domain owner from losing it via UDRP, lawsuit, Trademark issue, or having it stolen from them.
- Sebb767 6y ago> or even forever I highly doubt this is going to be the case. Even those 100 year registrations could easily bankrupt a company with a steep domain price hike or some inflation. I mean, it's okay if one wants to be secure, but investing several thousand dollars in a company for a promise that's very likely going to be broken is - in my opinion - not a good strategy. Especially when you can invest the same money into a 10-year registration with yearly renewal (to stay at 10 years) and sufficient monitoring.
- conroydave 6y agomore like semipermalinks, amirite
- khemu123 6y agoThanks a lot! Yes, Open Live Writer sounds very similar to what I'd be making. To be honest I hadn't heard of it. https://futuremirror.info https://futuremirror.info
- domainerin 6y agoThe registrar "domainming"(domainming.com) of .in domains, is the biggest abuser of nixi policies. NIXI specifically says that registrars themselves cannot participate in dropcatching and selling, but the owner of domainming Mr. Salim, goes on with his business unperturbed. I am sure like how the Indian registrar mitsu was banned by NIXI for violation of policies, the same way I am certain that law will catch up with domainming.
- 4nth3m 6y agothat's ridiculous
- DailyNewsTv 6y agoAnyone Wants to Publish your News Article Visit www.ndtv4u.com