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I had a personal website where the URL was literally my full legal name. The domain would be of no interest to anyone other than me. I let it lapse around 2019
by suby 5y ago
I had a personal website where the URL was literally my full legal name. The domain would be of no interest to anyone other than me. I let it lapse around 2019 because I didn't want to pay for renewal, and figured I'd be fine leaving the site offline.
Immediately upon letting it lapse it's bought by someone who I believe lives in Russia. They took my website, rehosted an old version found on archive.org, and then put advertisements on the site. It was not rehosted well, half of the links were broken. I wouldn't be surprised if he tried to embed malware on there too.
I emailed the hosting company (DigitalFyre) with a DMCA request to get it taken down. Their support assured me they'd take it down but they never did.
After a year of it being up the domain expired and I bought it back just to prevent someone else from doing the same. I figured it wouldn't be profitable for them so I made the decision to wait them out early on.
I'm thinking the entire process is automated, where they'll buy up expired domains, rehost archived versions, and hope for either the previous owner to purchase it back or for ad revenue to make it worthwhile.
Absolute scum of the earth.
- downandout 5y agoThe DMCA is treated as a joke by these companies. I helped a friend, who was being doxed on a domain comprised of his full legal name, where they were using photographs and other content that belonged to him, file a DMCA takedown request with Digital Ocean. They did absolutely nothing about it, other than sending a notification to the perpetrator that a complaint had been filed. These laws, like DMCA and the CDA, really need to be modified to impose more legal liability on service providers over situations like this. I know that many people on HN frown upon this view, but the gaping holes in these laws are enabling digital terrorism, extortion/blackmail, stalking, harassment, and copyright violations with no recourse for the victims.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- PaywallBuster 5y agoShould follow up with DO after a period (say 72h). A company that big would be in trouble to ignore DCMA notices. Could also try contacting upstream providers if worth the trouble.
- kota2 5y agoWhat is the recommended way to find out the hosting company of a website, and then the upstream ISP's, when contacting the offending site host does no good? Thanks in advance.
- chrsig 5y agoAnother consideration: we shouldn't be relying on copyright law to protect against doxing. Online privacy rights should be their own thing, and treated much more harshly than copyright infringement.
- cto_of_antifa 5y agoThen we could go from digital ocean doing nothing to the cops doing nothing.
- downandout 5y agoThat would be great, but unfortunately cops don't seem to care, even under rather egregious circumstances. My friend went to both the FBI and local police, after the person that controls the website said they would take it down in exchange for $100K. Textbook blackmail. Yet they never did anything about it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- roosgit 5y agoSpeaking of expired domains, in your case the domain might have not been valuable enough (not enough backlinks). But I recently saw two websites put up for sale, one was claimed to be making $4000/mo and the other $1000/mo. Both from Amazon affiliate links. The weird thing is that neither website was in the same niche as to what it was "reviewing". For example, the resort website had a post about the "best tomato chopper". Some of the old content was kept though(taken from archive.org), probably to look more "legit" to Googlebot.
- sjg007 5y agoI've seen this too. It's endemic.