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Argentine version of Google falls into “wrong” hands
- mderazon 5y agoHow did Google reclaim it ? What is the mechanism in DNS that allows someone to take ownership of someone else's domain and so quickly ? Is it just because it's Google ? or is there something that allows anyone who previously owned a domain to claim it back ?
- batch12 5y agoI wonder how long it would have taken to be noticed if he replicated DNS and sat on it for a while. Better yet, how long if he had redirected or cloned the site.
- throwaway3699 5y agoGoogle gets enough DNS traffic that I doubt you could just sit on it for very long. Not without an expensive bill.
- kuroguro 5y agoWouldn't most of it get cached downstream tho?
- 101008 5y agoBut what if you just point to original Google DNS servers?
- jaywalk 5y agoNot sure why you're getting downvoted. Setting the NS records to their original values would make the whole thing transparent unless you dug into the domain ownership.
- Forbo 5y ago> >According to the Open Data Córdoba group (which is dedicated to tracking expired Argentine domains) Google's domain had not expired and, in fact, the expiration date was in July. But the group too was unable to explain what had happened or why. Ouch. I think someone's going to have some explaining to do in the post-mortem.
- packetslave 5y agoYeah, MarkMonitor is not going to have a good time on this one (they're the company Google, and a bunch of other high-profile companies) use for domain management and tracking. They're supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
- emmelaich 5y agoIt's not known whether Google or the AR NIC made the mistake.
- kccqzy 5y agoMarkMonitor has been purchased by OpSecSecurity: https://www.opsecsecurity.com/resource/press-release/opsec-security-completes-acquisition-markmonitor-brand-protection https://www.opsecsecurity.com/resource/press-release/opsec-s... I wonder if this has anything to do.
- iancarroll 5y agoMarkMonitor's domain registrar component was not acquired (per the link).
- y-c-o-m-b 5y agoI see this kind of stuff happening all the time; some of them being high-profile sites too (e.g. "Keep America Great" got taken from Trump). Is there some website that monitors domain expiration and sends out alerts or is this mostly lone-actors? I'm always surprised by how quickly they move in on the domain
- folli 5y agoIt's called Domain drop catching or Domain sniping. There are tools available that do just that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching
- wrs 5y agoThere are many such services, which will not only alert you but automatically try to buy the domain for you. Search for “domain backorders”.
- y-c-o-m-b 5y agoOh wow even GoDaddy provides the service. Interesting. Thanks!
- lostlogin 5y agoKeeping it classy as always.
- sixothree 5y agoI would assume that would just give them more information for their domain broker services to raise the price of the domain.
- jfrunyon 5y agoSure, but so does doing a whois or an NS check. Plenty of registrars and registries are known to have abused such data in the past.
- 5y ago
- cyberlab 5y agoIf you're looking for domains potentially getting 'dropped' by Google, look no further: https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_Google_domains https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_Google_domains
- HowardStark 5y agoTook a quick glance and noticed that this article is claiming "duck.com" is owned by Google, even though it redirects to DuckDuckGo. That domain has Namecheap's Whois Guard enabled, so there's no registrant information. However, I'm still inclined to think that it isn't Google's domain since the NS records for "duck.com" point to "nsXX.quack-dns.com"...
- Sephr 5y agoiirc this was originally owned by Google and then given to DDG.
- butt__hugger 5y agoThis is correct. It used to redirect to Google.
- celestialcheese 5y agoduck.com was owned by google from an acquisition in 2010. It was sold to DDG in 2018 https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/12/18137369/duckduckgo-duck-com-google-acquisition https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/12/18137369/duckduckgo-duck...
- gtirloni 5y agoIn December 2018, it was reported that Google transferred ownership of the domain name Duck.com to DuckDuckGo. It is not known what price, if any, DuckDuckGo paid for the domain name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
- sneak 5y ago
- Rebelgecko 5y agoHow was he able to register the domain months before it was supposed to expire? Did he hack the registrar itself?
- judge2020 5y agoEither the registrar or the registry - the registry seems more likely as there are no requirements to running a country code TLD’s registry on account of ICANN not wanting to anger any government or seem like they have power over ‘government property’.
- jfrunyon 5y agoThere are also very little requirements to running a registrar...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sixothree 5y ago> The technical term for this type of manoeuvre is called “Cybersquatting” in English.
- canada_dry 5y agoYah. This gives him some bragging rights at most. If he hacked something, it'll be a different story though.
- 0xdba 5y agoNo, that's buying a domain in the hopes someone will want it in the future. This was "domain sniping".
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ThothIV 5y agoGoogle will sell you domains that it doesn't own. I've purchased .MX and .CO.UK domains from them just recently. I've purchased Thoth.zone, Thoth.mx and Thoth.pw from them. From networkingsolutions.com I've bought thoth.domains. It's a crazy turf war situation right now, given the broad international legal overlaps and so on and so forth.
- freddyym 5y agoThe domain google.gi is still for sale, because it can only be purchased by people who live in Gibraltar. See also, this post: https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy https://tinyprojects.dev/posts/i_bought_netflix_dot_soy
- oauea 5y agoWouldn't someone from Gibraltar be able to buy and lease it to Google?
- kortilla 5y agoYeah, but Google wouldn’t want any part of that type of arrangement. Better to let it go un-associated with the country than to depend on some other party that can extort at renewal time.
- hsbauauvhabzb 5y agoCan’t Domain name providers do pretty much the same thing? You’re only leasing a domain after all...
- thelean12 5y agoThey generally have a reputation to uphold so others don't just get up and leave. Some rando leasing it to you can do whatever they want without worrying about any of that.
- csomar 5y agoThere are 30k people in Gibraltar and probably most of them use the .com or .uk domain.
- permo-w 5y ago.co.uk
- 5y ago
- iso8859-1 5y agoGoogle has also failed to buy their Soviet domain name: http://google.su/ http://google.su/ And they even forgot about http://google.xn--vermgensberatung-pwb/ http://google.xn--vermgensberatung-pwb/
- julienreszka 5y agoSoviet union is dead, let's keep it that way
- SllX 5y agoCan you even buy .su domains anymore? I was under the impression that Russia was just sitting on it. EDIT: answered my own question. It is apparently actively used.
- Scoundreller 5y agofor the longest time, i thought .su meant sudan.
- worldofmatthew 5y agoThere are many more TLD that Google have not got.
- FridayoLeary 5y agosomebody actually posted it as an 'ask hn' last night! I'm actually physically hurting right now. I wonder how much google will pay to get their precious domain back.
- whitehouse3 5y agoCan't they forcefully take it? [0] [0]: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/cybersquatting-2013-05-03-en https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/cybersquatting-2013-05...
- FridayoLeary 5y agowhat is this then? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907303
- devrand 5y agoccTLDs are special as they are entirely delegated to the countries that they're assigned to. WIPO offers UDRP servicing for ccTLDs, but they need to opt-in to it [1]. Notably .ar (and .su as the other responder to your comment notes) is not part of that. Therefore the process is going to depend upon the specific country/agency overseeing the ccTLD. [1]: https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/cctld/ https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/cctld/
- guytpearson1 5y agoFun article, but they will get it back with relative ease. Happens all the time. Trademark domain.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoJust like that? A court order $4 dollar refund and have a nice day? That's a bit anticlimatic.
- techrat 5y agoNot everything ends up turning into a Michael Bay movie when being resolved.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoan important rule in life.
- amelius 5y agoIs it still a trademark violation if they use the domain to sell something completely unrelated, e.g. shoes?
- guytpearson1 5y agoThe problem with this is that Google isn't some generic term for something else. A lot of case law around this kind of stuff. Will get transferred back to Google in a heartbeat.
- why_Mr_Anderson 5y agoThis is still happening? It used to be very annoying decade or so ago, but I thought it was already solved/fixed/improved. Are there really no option to make a domain registration without expiration?
- devrand 5y agoThere's lot of different TLDs each with their own rules, fees, and registrars. It's hard to unify that landscape, particularly when a bunch of ccTLDs have very little infrastructure behind them. The closest you can really get is hiring a mark protection firm like MarkMonitor which themselves are registrars for a handful of TLDs (namely .com) and can basically indefinitely extend registrations for everything they have contracts for.
- goodcjw2 5y agoActually, it turns out http://google.ar/ http://google.ar/ might still be owned by someone else?
- yreg 5y agoThe article talks about google.com.ar, not google.ar. Secondary .ar domains are generaly not available.
- Franciscouzo 5y ago.ar domains have been available to the public since last year.
- Rohpakle 5y agoHowever, minutes later after the manoeuvre, it was confirmed that Google has already recovered the domain. I'm confused. It seems to me that this article just through some lines in it without further explanation.
- solids 5y agoNobody knows what happened. Last night someone posted on twitter that google.com.ar was not working, then another one posted a screenshot from the Argentinean domain provider highlighting that the domain was registered by a random guy. Few hours later google.com.ar started working again, probably a single phone call from Google resolved the issue.
- yosito 5y agoMeanwhile, I can't even figure out how to buy domains with my name in them from people who just buy them and sit on them.
- danielmeskin 5y agoIf you figure it out let me know.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- amelius 5y agoThe internet's implementation of name resolving is wrong. If you type "apple.com" you should get a disambiguation page saying "Did you mean the grocery store, the record company, or the computer company?" and from there you can reach the desired website. Somewhat like how it works in Wikipedia. Unlike land, names are not a scarcity and can be shared. So why pretend they are like land?
- throwaway3699 5y agoLand can be shared just like names, and the reality is there's only so many disambiguations one can learn. Even with that ability, consumers are only going to remember one apple.com.
- scubbo 5y agoThis is a very interesting statement. My gut reaction is "no, that's wrong!", but I can't quite articulate _why_ that's wrong - so, please consider this reply in the spirit of an auto-Socratic dialogue, rather than an argument intended to dissuade you. You're right that names themselves are not truly scarce*, but "convenience of being referenced by a name on the internet" most certainly _is_ a scarce resource. There can only be one "first resolved entity" - this is why companies invest in SEO**. So it seems like what you're actually arguing for (and apologies if I'm misrepresenting you here!) is a situation where it's not possible for the average internet consumer to directly reference a particular domain, but rather where all name-resolution queries _have to_ go through a hypothetical unbiased "top-level" search engine - one which indexes not documents, but domains. Is that right? If that's the case, then we've then opened up several other problems: - who decides the order in which those results get displayed? You may not think it matters, but I can promise you that NEO ("Name Engine Optimization") would then become a lucrative industry. Apple-the-computer-company certainly wouldn't stand for being the third result for apple.com - how do direct links and bookmarks work? - If there's some sub-identifier ("apple.computer.com" resolves directly), then who assigns those sub-identifiers? If ICAAN or a similar organization, then we're right back at the current situation, but one level deeper - the IT company for the Apple grocery store would be fighting (with their wallet) against the Apple Computer company. - If direct links only work via IP addresses, well, the average consumer wouldn't be delighted with that; nor would print advertisers trying to share a human-memorable address It's a tempting idea, for certain, but I can't see a way of implementing this that doesn't immediately give rise to the same problems one layer deeper. You've clearly thought about this more than I have, though, so I look forward to hearing more about it! * though to an extent, they are; since there can not practically be multiple items of a given name within a category - if every man was named John, then we would need some other way to distinguish them, and so "John<-identifier>" would _become_ their name ** where, here, the "name" is a search term rather than a specific one-to-one address - and, yes, I recognize that that's not _quite_ the same thing
- throwaway_kufu 5y agoI recently sold cryptocomicbook.com and decided to list some additional domains for sale, at the exact time I listed them a handful of ua.(TLDs) got listed for sale including ua.com and whoever listed them must have done it in bulk and given them all the same price ($76). So I bought the ua.com for $76, at that point the seller must have realized what happened and immediately changed the sales price of all the other TLDs from $76 (example ua.co went from $76 to a min of $48,000), the marketplace confirmed the seller was verified as the owner or had authority to sell ua.com. Of course after the fact the marketplace reversed the transaction, they oddly reconfirmed the seller was verified/legit (I thought they would say the seller got past their verification but wasn’t legit), and they have refused to confirm why if the seller was legit that they reversed the sale transaction.
- codezero 5y agoThey reversed it because it was an honest mistake and most people like to know that if they make the same mistake it can be undone.
- GordonS 5y agoI have to agree - although I'm surprised the registrant actually used common sense here, it was the fair thing to do.
- supergirl 5y agomaybe it was a bug in their system, so they were on the hook
- masswerk 5y agoIt may be worth noting that in most countries a contract essentially is established by the consensus of wills by the parties involved. An error in objecto ("I didn't mean the thing I accidentally said or listed") is a legitimate excuse and nullifies a contract. (The consensus didn't exist and thus the contract had never been established in the first place). (This is also a reason why marketplaces, where things "just happen", are, let's say, complicated, as they do not adhere to this legal tradition.)
- FridayoLeary 5y agocheck this out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907303 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907303
- SirSourdough 5y agoSounds like a little-used TLD that ICANN has been trying to phase out for decades. Google has individual sites for most of countries that would have initially been under the umbrella of the .su (USSR) TLD, and .su apparently has 2% of the usage of .ru where Google already has a site. Maybe they'll try to snap it up now that it's attracting a little attention but they probably just don't really care about it...
- FridayoLeary 5y agohe's running a website under the name of google. You can play it down, but that's pretty cool.
- Trias11 5y agoGoogle probably threatened to abuse poor guy with legal action. Similar to what MSFT did to the guy who totally legally registered mikerowesoft.com
- utopcell 5y agoThat is not how Google works.
- dannyphantom 5y ago> In the end, Microsoft and Mike Rowe came to an agreement. In exchange for transferring control of his domain name, the software maker has promised to help Rowe set up a new Web site; pay for a Microsoft certification course and subscription to the Microsoft Developer Network Web site; and pay for his family to visit Microsoft Research Tech Fest in Redmond, Wash., in March. To top it all off, he will get an Xbox with some games. From cnet: https://www.cnet.com/news/mikerowesoft-settles-for-an-xbox/ https://www.cnet.com/news/mikerowesoft-settles-for-an-xbox/ He did an AMA on reddit 11 years ago; he's apparently a full time poker player now. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ajsih/i_am_the_guy_who_owned_mikerowesoftcom_ama/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ajsih/i_am_the_guy_wh...
- schappim 5y agoI love this line from the article "but when everyone suspected that the server had crashed, as is often the case..." That must be a pretty big server!
- _acco 5y agoAmong other exploits, you could generate an SSL cert and harvest cookies. All visitors would have to do is load your site in their browser. Right?
- cube00 5y agoGoogle is pretty good about pinning their certificates so it's unlikely this would work, especially in Chrome where it's locked down even further.
- paxys 5y agoCertificate pinning has already been deprecated as a standard, and no browser supports it anymore. Google may be doing something else for their own properties on Chrome, but that is unlikely and definitely not widely known. Edit: After a few minutes of internet searching it turns out that while HPKP is deprecated Google does statically pin a set of certs into the Chrome build itself, their own sites presumably included.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- neonate 5y agohttps://archive.is/7nkiR https://archive.is/7nkiR
- QUFB 5y agoIt's not quite google.ar, but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with https://gnu.gl/ https://gnu.gl/
- jshmrsn 5y agoIf GNU Project ever wanted to run a free Google alternative, GNUgl at gnu.gl would be a great fit.
- QUFB 5y agoOnce they become a community project, rather than the rms fan club, I'll talk to them.
- livre 5y agoUntil a year or two ago (can't remember exactly) it wasn't possible to register a "naked" .ar domain and they were reserved for very special cases (government mostly). It had to be a .com.ar or .org.ar etc.
- yuchi 5y agoI once bought .org.it after some newspapaer misspelled our .it domain name as .org.it (which is a non-existant TLD) and I tried to regain the exposure. They didn’t let me through though… :(
- asimpletune 5y agoOnce I told my friend ja.red was available for $9, and after he bought it they told him it was a mistake and reversed the transaction.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5y agoOut of curiosity, I queried about 100 DoH servers (open resolvers) for "google.com.ar". Every A record returned contained an IP address registered to Google.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ro_bit 5y agoHow much does Google pay MarkMonitor for this to happen?
- CydeWeys 5y agoIt sounds like it might be a screw up at the registry end. Hard to say from the limited info available.
- wlonkly 5y agoMarkMonitor is surprisingly affordable (at scale). Their minimum buy is not cheap, but within that individual domains are, well, not retail price, but not far off either. They "make it up in volume" by giving you an incentive to keep your entire domain portfolio together, even when you really only care about MarkMonitor levels of care for a subset of them. Advanced features like registry lock and local presence are also affordable-but-not-cheap. (A lot of their more proactive brand and trademark management has been spun off to other divisions of Clarivate who acquired them some years ago.)
- bulutsuzku 5y agoHe bought it legally and google.com.ar should be down all the time he wants.
- sbassi 5y agoIt was wrong, not so wrong, since it could have been worse, like a scammer who could had setup a fake page. Instead, the person didn't even park the DNS, just left it without resolution. This helped everybody realize there was a problem.
- gonational 5y agoWait, didn't our version of Google also fall into the wrong hands?
- ThisWasTaken 5y agoI'd just make it redirect to duck.com or remake the site (Google.com) and change all the icons / buttons to ones drawn with paint.