8 ms·

.ga domain names soon to return to Gabonese management (from Freenom) [pdf]

137 points by zinekeller 3y ago

afnic_shitass 3y ago
Some notes about flushing GA zone: - Whois ga server address: WEB+WHOIS whois.nic.ga (use whois -h whois.nic.ga some.domain.ga). - Domains like TELE.GA got auto-transition. They were registered via Gandi (was not Freenom reseller? huh). Now they have whois "Date de création: 2023-06-05T00:00:00Z". Exactly at midnight. - Domain like GOOGLE.GA got VIP service. Engineer reported the problem at Mon Jun 5 02:33:22 UTC 2023 (https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2023-June/022083.html https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2023-Jun...). Less than 48 hours they've registered a new registrar(!) Markmonitor at ANINF (There is no such registrar in the list https://www.mon.ga/english.html https://www.mon.ga/english.html). Faster than light. - Domains like ASTI.GA spent around $25(year fee) + $50(corporate fee for manual processing) and registered domain via Gandi in a small window of time. - Registrar Netim: $18 till end of month, then $26 per year. - All other PAID ga domains squatted via Safe Names registrar around 2023-06-06 15:00. They pointed a delegation on one (sick!) NS server ns03.freenom.com So you can switch delegation at freenom's dashboard to "Use default nameservers (Freenom Nameservers)" and set up needed records (only A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, MX, LOC, NAPTR, RP). - You cannot register at Safe Names site: Error "Update Unsuccessful Please fix the missing or invalid Data". All data is filled in. Awesome businass. - All registered domains have 06.06.2023 - 06.06.2024, 1 year registration. - Same [s]sh..[/s] with ML zone. https://agetic.gouv.ml/note-dinformation-relative-au-rapatriement-de-la-gestion-technique-du-point-ml/ https://agetic.gouv.ml/note-dinformation-relative-au-rapatri... They wanted to switch at the end of March 2023, but nothing seems to have happened.
- Dedus 3y ago
  Wrote to safenames. Received an answer. Might be useful to someone. Thank you for reaching out and I can appreciate your concern over the apparent transfer of your ".GA" domain name. Safenames is one of the leading Corporate Domain Name Registrars and we have been instructed by Freenom to register and manage their ".GA" domains moving forwards. We are currently in the process of mapping registered domains to their current registrants which should start to be reflected on Whois lookups shortly. All customers, as a result of this change, will be receiving emails from both Safenames and Freenom in due course, explaining this in more detail. If you have any urgent questions, please contact Freenom and they will be happy to help.
  - afnic_shitass 3y ago
    They haven't answered me since June 6th. When did you write to them? It looks like some domains got PRIORITY BALI.GA was registered via 101domain.com (freenom's reseller?) and now squatted by Safe Names with proper NS delegation to ns1.101domain.com & ns2.101domain.com
    - Dedus 3y ago
      I wrote to them on June 7, they answered today
    - Dedus 3y ago
      My domain got old DNS records back. But in the freenom's account "Use default nameservers (Freenom Nameservers)"
- dangravell 3y ago
  I'm the owner of the above mentioned asti.ga . Free to help anyone, if I can. Note that a list of registrars is here: https://mon.ga/english.html https://mon.ga/english.html
rapnie 3y ago
Alright. May the .io tld follow suit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Controversy
- justinclift 3y ago
  Hmmm, that was nearly 10 years ago according to the wikipedia article. Wonder if the problem is still occurring?
  - tannhaeuser 3y ago
    Is it considered ok or wise to obtain new .io (and .sh) domains today? In addition to the controversies (and more generally, misappropriating ccTLDs for funny domain names to result in a passive income benefitting only very few) there could also be a Brexit issue coming up here. Not that I have heard or expect the Brit gov to play hardball or something, but I could see closing .io to non-Brits be in-line with other decisions; for example, British citizens/companies can't use .eu domains post-Brexit AFAIK, with a grace period.
    - tialaramex 3y ago
      Brexit was just a way to distract fools while picking their pockets, I don't see a real connection here.
    - input_sh 3y ago
      That's just how .eu has always worked? If you're not from the EU (okay EEA to be more precise), you can't have one. It was never open to those outside of it. It wasn't some "fuck you in particular" kind of deal you make it out to be, nothing changed in its requirements.
      - RobotToaster 3y ago
        Many made the (somewhat reasonable) assumption that it was for EUrope, not the European Union.
rurban 3y ago
Uh, let's see what will happen to the most abused free fishing domain, .TK as operated also by freenom. I use that and I am a bit worried by the spammers. Though freenom recently got better killing those.
- KronisLV 3y ago
  > Though freenom recently got better killing those. They recently got sued by Meta altogether and stopped registering new domains: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/sued-by-meta-freenom-halts-domain-registrations/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/sued-by-meta-freenom-hal...
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Shitty Facebook is playing double-standards considering they themselves host a large amount of malicious pages for various illegal activities.
lgvld 3y ago
Freenom sucks; sad they're gone, so many domains lost. But just to be exhaustive, Freenom was not the only place one were able to register a .ga domain: I still use a .ga domain registered a few years ago at France-DNS -- which merged with / was acquired by NETIM recently. Registering the domain through a "real registar" allowed me to get something more reliable (than a free domain on Freenom) as well as whois privacy. The official Gabonese whois/registar website [1] seems to be down at the moment but never seemed very legit/pro to me... [2] & [3] [1] http://www.my.ga/ http://www.my.ga/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220623223503/http://www.my.ga/en/index.html?lang=en https://web.archive.org/web/20220623223503/http://www.my.ga/... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20230423231601/http://www.my.ga/en/index.html?lang=en https://web.archive.org/web/20230423231601/http://www.my.ga/...
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  Why go through all this trouble vs just using a normal domain name on a gTLD? (Or your own country's ccTLD if widely used?) I've owned domains on .com, .net, and .org starting over two decades ago, and then more recently on new gTLDs like .dev, and never had a single problem. I don't see the appeal of hijacking poorly run ccTLDs for other purposes.
  - Beldin 3y ago
    One appeal I've seen is if a ccTLD matches the last 2 letters of your last name. You can then set up a mail adres first@lastna.me. Or a personal website at http://first.lastna.me/ http://first.lastna.me/ Not for everyone probably, but if it'd be easy for me, I'd go for it.
    - rd 3y ago
      My last name is Daga and I hated that 2 letter .ga weren’t allowed. Would’ve snapped up da.ga
      - lgvld 3y ago
        Actually 2/3 letters domains were accepted -- maybe not on Freenom though; you had to register on the official registry -- but were also prohibitively expensive.
manwithaplan 3y ago
> This server could not prove that it is aninf.ga; its security certificate is from aazerp.ga. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection. Sign of competence by the new management organisation.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Oh wow. That's for https://aninf.ga https://aninf.ga itself. So yeah, clearly no testing of their own infrastructure. :(
  - zakki 3y ago
    And the cert is expired.
coopey 3y ago
Freenom has been in decline for a while. It was great for a quick free domain for a temporary site - until all the phishers and spammers made the free extensions untrustworthy. Swapped to using subdomains of a short domain I own for the few domains I had left at Freenom, ready for this moment. I imagine .ml, .cf and .gq will be close behind.
- gl-prod 3y ago
  Everything on the internet is ruined by "the phishers and spammers" It's sad that we can't have nice things
graftak 3y ago
Just found out that my NAS is no longer available, didn’t get any heads up about the end of service. Naturally this happens when your on holiday, 2000km from home.
- fanf2 3y ago
  The .ga change is not happening until next week.
  - graftak 3y ago
    My domain has been purged from almost all dns providers so the bottom line is the same.
    - Arnt 3y ago
      I heard that several that million domains didn't have valid contact info. Was your domain one of those, perhaps?
      - dangravell 3y ago
        Mine certainly did, plus we supposedly had purchased the domain until 2030. NXDOMAIN today though! There's really no transparency about this, and I've no idea if my business has just been destroyed (or mortally wounded) overnight...
        Arnt 3y ago
        Really sucky that your registrar didn't write to you.
        dangravell 3y ago
        Thanks for your sympathy; par-for-the-course with Freenom, though.
        afnic_shitass 3y ago
veave 3y ago
[flagged]
- rhamzeh 3y ago
  Why is it ironic? That's how colonialism works. Rid the colony of resources, introduce tech and changes the local population has no experience with and make sure not to train them on it. Watch them attempt to get their freedom while at the same time being forced to come to you for help. On this particular issue, Gabon never had to administer this, so they never had a need for this skillset.
  - seszett 3y ago
    > Watch them attempt to get their freedom while at the same time being forced to come to you for help On the other hand, they obviously weren't forced to ask France to administrate their DNS, since they worked with Freenom for all this time (though maybe not the 30 years of so since .ga was allocated) until they just now turned to a French non-profit...
8organicbits 3y ago
I've been working in a project in the free subdomain space that may help some people impacted by Freenom's failure. https://www.getlocalcert.net https://www.getlocalcert.net offers free subdomains that are compatible with Let's Encrypt (including wildcard certs) but you've got to setup split-DNS on your local network as we don't allow public routing or email. My hope is that this enables free subdomains for private use while avoiding the mess of self-signed certs and the spammer/malware issues that appear to have killed Freenom and plague FreeDNS. Still in the early days, so there's some kinks getting worked out. I set up a number of ACME clients and web servers for demo just last week: https://github.com/robalexdev/getlocalcert-client-tests https://github.com/robalexdev/getlocalcert-client-tests
- 8organicbits 3y ago
  Oh and if you need a different sort of domain, this list seems most up to date: https://free-for.life/#/?id=domains https://free-for.life/#/?id=domains
codetrotter 3y ago
I remember back in the day, I had a free .tk domain. Good times. Apparently dot.TK was run by Freenom as well. I had a look in Wayback machine to see if they had a copy of my old site. But the first snapshot of the domain in the Wayback machine archive seems to have been after some random Chinese website started using the domain instead of me. Makes sense though that the Wayback machine does not have my pages in their archive, I was in upper secondary school at the time and the only people that visited my website was probably myself and a handful of my friends from school. I also went to dot.TK to see if it was possible to re-register my old .tk domain, but the search didn’t work. Guess if Freenom is giving up it may already be impossible to use dot.TK anymore.
- bibanez 3y ago
  I loved .tk domains. I used as them as hostnames for Minecraft servers. I would redirect play.[servername].tk to the server IP and the normal [servername].tk was the shop. Good times! Couldn't have learned more about DNS and domain names without them.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Yeah, despite all the (valid) concerns about spam and abuse of free domains, I think there's value in a "throwaway" TLD. I was grateful to be able to get free domains to play around with back when I was a broke teenager and couldn't justify a real domain.
    - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
      There’s still https://freedns.afraid.org/ https://freedns.afraid.org/
    - codedokode 3y ago
      > spam How can you spam by creating a free domain? Or did you mean that search engines currently rely on fact that it is expensive to have many domains and their ranking algorithms get broken with free domains? Maybe they should just change their algorithms then, for example, have human-moderated search. > and abuse of free domains What harm can you do with a free domain? I don't understand.
doublerabbit 3y ago
All it would take is everyone to shift DNS servers, to say a project like OpenNIC [1] and the internet would be freer of capitalistic data packets. [1] https://www.opennic.org/ https://www.opennic.org/
- gbxyz 3y ago
  "All"
- mikea1 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing - I didn't know about OpenNIC. It looks like an alternative to ICANN where the key distinguishing trait is that TLDs and domain names are awarded with a landrush model (whoever claims it first owns it.) If it gains popularity, I wonder how it will avoid squatting and after-market (i.e., after-registration) trading.
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    There are many root server alternatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
- bdcravens 3y ago
  "We only need the entire world to fight back against evil corporate interests" Sent from my iPhone
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > Sent from my iPhone This is a little on the nose for a "Yet you participate in society" comment[1] - you even mention the iPhone! 1. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
v3ss0n 3y ago
blancia.ga
KomoD 3y ago
Happy to hear, rather Gabonese management than Freenom, such an awful company in every way.
computatrum 3y ago
Is there anything to do if you "own" a .GA domain? I registered once a free .GA domain via freenom and would like to keep it.
valrix 3y ago
Whelp, there goes my personal site. DNS already stopped routing yesterday. Would've been great if the other registrars mentioned were actually allowing address transfers. Only one of them would allow a transfer and they wanted nearly $30/yr for it! For that much I'll just go get a .com for 1/3 the price...
afnic_shitass 3y ago
06.06 - PAID domains squatted by safenames (with 15 hrs delay) 12.06 - they pointed proper (before flushing) NS records. And broke it again, cause they took TOO old ns records (I've pointed to improper he.net servers once, with changing to proper in end) Nobody answers, so PRETY GOOD JOB SO FAR
- Dedus 3y ago
  Try to change NS records in the freenom's account
  - afnic_shitass 3y ago
    freenom is dead in this way. You cant do anything with GA domains via freenom.
angablue 3y ago
I've always been wanting to register a 2 letter domain on .ga though have never been able to. Their old site made it seems technically possible though every registrar I've tried fails in some way or another.

137 points by zinekeller 3y ago

Some notes about flushing GA zone: - Whois ga server address: WEB+WHOIS whois.nic.ga (use whois -h whois.nic.ga some.domain.ga). - Domains like TELE.GA got auto-transition. They were registered via Gandi (was not Freenom reseller? huh). Now they have whois "Date de création: 2023-06-05T00:00:00Z". Exactly at midnight. - Domain like GOOGLE.GA got VIP service. Engineer reported the problem at Mon Jun 5 02:33:22 UTC 2023 (https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2023-June/022083.html https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2023-Jun...). Less than 48 hours they've registered a new registrar(!) Markmonitor at ANINF (There is no such registrar in the list https://www.mon.ga/english.html https://www.mon.ga/english.html). Faster than light. - Domains like ASTI.GA spent around $25(year fee) + $50(corporate fee for manual processing) and registered domain via Gandi in a small window of time. - Registrar Netim: $18 till end of month, then $26 per year. - All other PAID ga domains squatted via Safe Names registrar around 2023-06-06 15:00. They pointed a delegation on one (sick!) NS server ns03.freenom.com So you can switch delegation at freenom's dashboard to "Use default nameservers (Freenom Nameservers)" and set up needed records (only A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, MX, LOC, NAPTR, RP). - You cannot register at Safe Names site: Error "Update Unsuccessful Please fix the missing or invalid Data". All data is filled in. Awesome businass. - All registered domains have 06.06.2023 - 06.06.2024, 1 year registration. - Same [s]sh..[/s] with ML zone. https://agetic.gouv.ml/note-dinformation-relative-au-rapatriement-de-la-gestion-technique-du-point-ml/ https://agetic.gouv.ml/note-dinformation-relative-au-rapatri... They wanted to switch at the end of March 2023, but nothing seems to have happened.

Dedus 3y ago
Wrote to safenames. Received an answer. Might be useful to someone. Thank you for reaching out and I can appreciate your concern over the apparent transfer of your ".GA" domain name. Safenames is one of the leading Corporate Domain Name Registrars and we have been instructed by Freenom to register and manage their ".GA" domains moving forwards. We are currently in the process of mapping registered domains to their current registrants which should start to be reflected on Whois lookups shortly. All customers, as a result of this change, will be receiving emails from both Safenames and Freenom in due course, explaining this in more detail. If you have any urgent questions, please contact Freenom and they will be happy to help.
- afnic_shitass 3y ago
  They haven't answered me since June 6th. When did you write to them? It looks like some domains got PRIORITY BALI.GA was registered via 101domain.com (freenom's reseller?) and now squatted by Safe Names with proper NS delegation to ns1.101domain.com & ns2.101domain.com
  - Dedus 3y ago
    I wrote to them on June 7, they answered today
  - Dedus 3y ago
    My domain got old DNS records back. But in the freenom's account "Use default nameservers (Freenom Nameservers)"
dangravell 3y ago
I'm the owner of the above mentioned asti.ga . Free to help anyone, if I can. Note that a list of registrars is here: https://mon.ga/english.html https://mon.ga/english.html

rapnie 3y ago

Alright. May the .io tld follow suit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Controversy

justinclift 3y ago
Hmmm, that was nearly 10 years ago according to the wikipedia article. Wonder if the problem is still occurring?
- tannhaeuser 3y ago
  Is it considered ok or wise to obtain new .io (and .sh) domains today? In addition to the controversies (and more generally, misappropriating ccTLDs for funny domain names to result in a passive income benefitting only very few) there could also be a Brexit issue coming up here. Not that I have heard or expect the Brit gov to play hardball or something, but I could see closing .io to non-Brits be in-line with other decisions; for example, British citizens/companies can't use .eu domains post-Brexit AFAIK, with a grace period.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    Brexit was just a way to distract fools while picking their pockets, I don't see a real connection here.
  - input_sh 3y ago
    That's just how .eu has always worked? If you're not from the EU (okay EEA to be more precise), you can't have one. It was never open to those outside of it. It wasn't some "fuck you in particular" kind of deal you make it out to be, nothing changed in its requirements.
    - RobotToaster 3y ago
      Many made the (somewhat reasonable) assumption that it was for EUrope, not the European Union.

rurban 3y ago

Uh, let's see what will happen to the most abused free fishing domain, .TK as operated also by freenom. I use that and I am a bit worried by the spammers. Though freenom recently got better killing those.

KronisLV 3y ago
> Though freenom recently got better killing those. They recently got sued by Meta altogether and stopped registering new domains: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/sued-by-meta-freenom-halts-domain-registrations/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/sued-by-meta-freenom-hal...
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Shitty Facebook is playing double-standards considering they themselves host a large amount of malicious pages for various illegal activities.

lgvld 3y ago

Freenom sucks; sad they're gone, so many domains lost. But just to be exhaustive, Freenom was not the only place one were able to register a .ga domain: I still use a .ga domain registered a few years ago at France-DNS -- which merged with / was acquired by NETIM recently. Registering the domain through a "real registar" allowed me to get something more reliable (than a free domain on Freenom) as well as whois privacy. The official Gabonese whois/registar website [1] seems to be down at the moment but never seemed very legit/pro to me... [2] & [3] [1] http://www.my.ga/ http://www.my.ga/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220623223503/http://www.my.ga/en/index.html?lang=en https://web.archive.org/web/20220623223503/http://www.my.ga/... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20230423231601/http://www.my.ga/en/index.html?lang=en https://web.archive.org/web/20230423231601/http://www.my.ga/...

CydeWeys 3y ago
Why go through all this trouble vs just using a normal domain name on a gTLD? (Or your own country's ccTLD if widely used?) I've owned domains on .com, .net, and .org starting over two decades ago, and then more recently on new gTLDs like .dev, and never had a single problem. I don't see the appeal of hijacking poorly run ccTLDs for other purposes.
- Beldin 3y ago
  One appeal I've seen is if a ccTLD matches the last 2 letters of your last name. You can then set up a mail adres first@lastna.me. Or a personal website at http://first.lastna.me/ http://first.lastna.me/ Not for everyone probably, but if it'd be easy for me, I'd go for it.
  - rd 3y ago
    My last name is Daga and I hated that 2 letter .ga weren’t allowed. Would’ve snapped up da.ga
    - lgvld 3y ago
      Actually 2/3 letters domains were accepted -- maybe not on Freenom though; you had to register on the official registry -- but were also prohibitively expensive.

manwithaplan 3y ago

> This server could not prove that it is aninf.ga; its security certificate is from aazerp.ga. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection. Sign of competence by the new management organisation.

justinclift 3y ago
Oh wow. That's for https://aninf.ga https://aninf.ga itself. So yeah, clearly no testing of their own infrastructure. :(
- zakki 3y ago
  And the cert is expired.

coopey 3y ago

Freenom has been in decline for a while. It was great for a quick free domain for a temporary site - until all the phishers and spammers made the free extensions untrustworthy. Swapped to using subdomains of a short domain I own for the few domains I had left at Freenom, ready for this moment. I imagine .ml, .cf and .gq will be close behind.

gl-prod 3y ago
Everything on the internet is ruined by "the phishers and spammers" It's sad that we can't have nice things

graftak 3y ago

Just found out that my NAS is no longer available, didn’t get any heads up about the end of service. Naturally this happens when your on holiday, 2000km from home.

fanf2 3y ago
The .ga change is not happening until next week.
- graftak 3y ago
  My domain has been purged from almost all dns providers so the bottom line is the same.
  - Arnt 3y ago
    I heard that several that million domains didn't have valid contact info. Was your domain one of those, perhaps?
    - dangravell 3y ago
      Mine certainly did, plus we supposedly had purchased the domain until 2030. NXDOMAIN today though! There's really no transparency about this, and I've no idea if my business has just been destroyed (or mortally wounded) overnight...
      - Arnt 3y ago
        Really sucky that your registrar didn't write to you.
        dangravell 3y ago
        Thanks for your sympathy; par-for-the-course with Freenom, though.
      - afnic_shitass 3y ago

veave 3y ago

[flagged]

rhamzeh 3y ago
Why is it ironic? That's how colonialism works. Rid the colony of resources, introduce tech and changes the local population has no experience with and make sure not to train them on it. Watch them attempt to get their freedom while at the same time being forced to come to you for help. On this particular issue, Gabon never had to administer this, so they never had a need for this skillset.
- seszett 3y ago
  > Watch them attempt to get their freedom while at the same time being forced to come to you for help On the other hand, they obviously weren't forced to ask France to administrate their DNS, since they worked with Freenom for all this time (though maybe not the 30 years of so since .ga was allocated) until they just now turned to a French non-profit...

8organicbits 3y ago

I've been working in a project in the free subdomain space that may help some people impacted by Freenom's failure. https://www.getlocalcert.net https://www.getlocalcert.net offers free subdomains that are compatible with Let's Encrypt (including wildcard certs) but you've got to setup split-DNS on your local network as we don't allow public routing or email. My hope is that this enables free subdomains for private use while avoiding the mess of self-signed certs and the spammer/malware issues that appear to have killed Freenom and plague FreeDNS. Still in the early days, so there's some kinks getting worked out. I set up a number of ACME clients and web servers for demo just last week: https://github.com/robalexdev/getlocalcert-client-tests https://github.com/robalexdev/getlocalcert-client-tests

8organicbits 3y ago
Oh and if you need a different sort of domain, this list seems most up to date: https://free-for.life/#/?id=domains https://free-for.life/#/?id=domains

codetrotter 3y ago

I remember back in the day, I had a free .tk domain. Good times. Apparently dot.TK was run by Freenom as well. I had a look in Wayback machine to see if they had a copy of my old site. But the first snapshot of the domain in the Wayback machine archive seems to have been after some random Chinese website started using the domain instead of me. Makes sense though that the Wayback machine does not have my pages in their archive, I was in upper secondary school at the time and the only people that visited my website was probably myself and a handful of my friends from school. I also went to dot.TK to see if it was possible to re-register my old .tk domain, but the search didn’t work. Guess if Freenom is giving up it may already be impossible to use dot.TK anymore.

bibanez 3y ago
I loved .tk domains. I used as them as hostnames for Minecraft servers. I would redirect play.[servername].tk to the server IP and the normal [servername].tk was the shop. Good times! Couldn't have learned more about DNS and domain names without them.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Yeah, despite all the (valid) concerns about spam and abuse of free domains, I think there's value in a "throwaway" TLD. I was grateful to be able to get free domains to play around with back when I was a broke teenager and couldn't justify a real domain.
  - Tijdreiziger 3y ago
    There’s still https://freedns.afraid.org/ https://freedns.afraid.org/
  - codedokode 3y ago
    > spam How can you spam by creating a free domain? Or did you mean that search engines currently rely on fact that it is expensive to have many domains and their ranking algorithms get broken with free domains? Maybe they should just change their algorithms then, for example, have human-moderated search. > and abuse of free domains What harm can you do with a free domain? I don't understand.

doublerabbit 3y ago

All it would take is everyone to shift DNS servers, to say a project like OpenNIC [1] and the internet would be freer of capitalistic data packets. [1] https://www.opennic.org/ https://www.opennic.org/

gbxyz 3y ago
"All"
mikea1 3y ago
Thanks for sharing - I didn't know about OpenNIC. It looks like an alternative to ICANN where the key distinguishing trait is that TLDs and domain names are awarded with a landrush model (whoever claims it first owns it.) If it gains popularity, I wonder how it will avoid squatting and after-market (i.e., after-registration) trading.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  There are many root server alternatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
bdcravens 3y ago
"We only need the entire world to fight back against evil corporate interests" Sent from my iPhone
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Sent from my iPhone This is a little on the nose for a "Yet you participate in society" comment[1] - you even mention the iPhone! 1. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

v3ss0n 3y ago

blancia.ga

KomoD 3y ago

Happy to hear, rather Gabonese management than Freenom, such an awful company in every way.

computatrum 3y ago

Is there anything to do if you "own" a .GA domain? I registered once a free .GA domain via freenom and would like to keep it.

valrix 3y ago

Whelp, there goes my personal site. DNS already stopped routing yesterday. Would've been great if the other registrars mentioned were actually allowing address transfers. Only one of them would allow a transfer and they wanted nearly $30/yr for it! For that much I'll just go get a .com for 1/3 the price...

afnic_shitass 3y ago

06.06 - PAID domains squatted by safenames (with 15 hrs delay) 12.06 - they pointed proper (before flushing) NS records. And broke it again, cause they took TOO old ns records (I've pointed to improper he.net servers once, with changing to proper in end) Nobody answers, so PRETY GOOD JOB SO FAR

Dedus 3y ago
Try to change NS records in the freenom's account
- afnic_shitass 3y ago
  freenom is dead in this way. You cant do anything with GA domains via freenom.

angablue 3y ago

I've always been wanting to register a 2 letter domain on .ga though have never been able to. Their old site made it seems technically possible though every registrar I've tried fails in some way or another.