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Mali Government takes back .ml domain, brings down one of largest Lemmy servers
- Hellohey 3y agoFound this newest update about the .ml domain which addresses below issues people are facing; Have you got domain moved status from cloud flare? Is cloud flare still showing pending nameserver change status? Is your emails no longer coming through? Is your website no longer working? Wondering when the government will restore access? Here is the link to it https://cltchighereducation.com/mali-government-update-regarding-domains/ https://cltchighereducation.com/mali-government-update-regar...
- raspyberr 3y agoDoesn't this situation keep occuring? Feels like it's no longer surprising
- juujian 3y agoWhat other instances did I miss?
- rubatuga 3y ago.tk
- joecool1029 3y agoThey didn't take back their ccTLD nor is it unavailable. The (Dutch) company Freenom managing it was sued by Facebook for not policing their free domains used in phishing attacks. This is a very different case. I would point out maybe it's not a super great idea to pick a ccTLD in a country with a decade long war internally. I've seen Haiti's (.ht) used a decent amount (notably as a secondary for sourcehut, sr.ht) and would think this one is a particularly vulnerable one as well.
- RobotToaster 3y agoSimilar happened with .af I think.
- jeroenhd 3y agoml/tk/gq were all resold by Freenom, which was sued by Facebook. I'm pretty sure this is all part of the same domain name saga.
- brrtbrrt 3y agoRightly so - don't peruse country-specific TLDs for your app or service vanity BS. This especially concerns .io!
- ARandomerDude 3y ago> Rightly so Why?
- Pet_Ant 3y agoBecause TLDs are supposed to mean things.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoBut how will they signal to the world their devout adherence to Marxist-Leninist principles?!?!
- rvnx 3y agoThey can use .su domains
- NovemberWhiskey 3y agoI think the premise is something like "you wouldn't incorporate your startup in a West African dictatorship, why would you let the same country govern your domain name?"
- gnulinux 3y agoBecause TLD is the property of a sovereign. A sovereign that does not report to the US Government. For US business to use their property as their face to the world (such as pm.me) they need to understand and accept that they're putting their business fate in the hands of a sovereign. Things like OP (X Government takes back .xy TLD) happen, people need to pay attention to power, and geopolitics.
- 3y ago
- NewJazz 3y agoUsing ccTLDs when you have no relationship with the country is just asking for trouble. Comes across as naive and unprofessional, although I've seen many serious infrastructure built upon .co and .io names.
- Storm-Bringer 3y agoOr .me like Proton Mail (pm.me)…
- rvnx 3y agoSays a lot when you had to make a choice between a beautiful domain name, or having to trust the government of Montenegro for all your lifetime for a super sensitive e-mail service. At least Montenegro is managing their own ccTLD, not like some mysterious islands (.io, .pw, etc).
- qingcharles 3y agoBut Montenegro has had hundreds of years of sovereign instability, i.e. it has been swallowed several times by other entities. I guess it was on .yu until the 21st century. It's probably stable for now, but nothing to say it won't get swallowed again and lose its TLD.
- ericpauley 3y agoMontenegro is part of NATO. I would argue that mitigates the instability issue.
- DropInIn 3y agoIf we're going back hundreds of years then there's no ccTLD that is worthy, not the US not any commonwealth nation, nowhere....
- neilv 3y agoMailfence.com offers `mf.me`. Mailfence could go even further by offering email addresses under `@ba.mf.me`. If someone secured the `.mf` ccTLD, they could grab other Pulp Fiction fans who want to be `<name>@bad.mf`.
- WoahNoun 3y agoMore worryingly, typos to US military addresses from external address will now be routed to Mali. From Matt Levine this week: >Millions of US military emails have been misdirected to Mali through a “typo leak” that has exposed highly sensitive information, including diplomatic documents, tax returns, passwords and the travel details of top officers. >Despite repeated warnings over a decade, a steady flow of email traffic continues to the .ML domain, the country identifier for Mali, as a result of people mistyping .MIL, the suffix to all US military email addresses. >The problem was first identified almost a decade ago by Johannes Zuurbier, a Dutch internet entrepreneur who has a contract to manage Mali’s country domain. >Control of the .ML domain will revert on Monday from Zuurbier to Mali’s government, which is closely allied with Russia. When Zuurbier’s 10-year management contract expires, Malian authorities will be able to gather the misdirected emails. The Malian government did not respond to requests for comment. >“Much of the email flow is spam and none is marked as classified,” and apparently if you work in the US military and you email someone else in the US military, the system prevents this typo. But if you are an outside contractor, or an Army officer emailing from your personal account, all bets are off. “Around a dozen people mistakenly requested recovery passwords for an intelligence community system to be sent to Mali.”
- rvnx 3y agoA solution would be Google + Amazon + Microsoft + Whatever security company to be block outgoing emails going to army.ml/navy.ml and the problem is solved. This is one of the rare good sides of having near-monopolies.
- neilv 3y agoRelated HN: “Typo leak” exposes millions of US military emails to Mali web operator (ft.com) | 150 points by cafemachiavelli 4 days ago | 70 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36756201
- firen777 3y ago>Control of the .ML domain will revert on Monday from Zuurbier to Mali’s government, which is closely allied with Russia... Is this the reason why lemmy.ml and lemmygrad stay up?
- Terr_ 3y ago> brings down one of the largest Lemmy servers To repeat a past comment with a little bit of "I Told You So" cynical feeling: > I think the barrier [to joining] would be lower if I knew I could migrate my identity to another instance if the first one became sketchy or shut down or de-federated. > Instead AFAICT I have to choose not just what community to join and where the content will initially live, but also which of these random groups to trust with my identity indefinitely going forward.
- rglullis 3y agoYour identity can be separate from the community servers.
- xenomachina 3y agoHow?
- rglullis 3y agoYou can follow a community from any software that speaks ActivityPub. So you can be on Mastodon and post/comment to any Lemmy community. Alternatively, if you want to use lemmy's interface, you can create your own instance and use it only to subscribe to remote communities. This way, your identity is one place but the commuities is in another.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoThe unfortunate problem being that anything beyond downloading a program and making an identity is too high of a bar for the average person on the Internet. So as long as this friction of choice exists within AP software, mass adoption is impossible and authoritarian social media like Meta and Reddit will continue to thrive.
- rglullis 3y agoThen it's our job to: - lower the bar by improving the software - supporting those that want to try but still are struggling to migrate - actively rejecting participation in the legacy networks to reduce the value of that network (https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...)
- wccrawford 3y agoI noticed the first 2 Lemmy servers that I signed up for are also down today. They aren't on a .ml domain, though. I noticed that lemmy.ml was still up, but it has some error messages as I was browsing, too. I can't imagine this is all related, but maybe?
- jeroenhd 3y agoThis specific problem should only directly influence the .ml domain, but it's possible other instances are overloaded because of .ml shutting down. Lemmy.ml still seems to work for me, I wonder why that is exactly. Perhaps the administrators have bought the domain from .ml's new owners?
- neurostimulant 3y agoThat one was probably related to the recently discovered bug where deleting a users with thousands of posts will lock out the database, thus causing a self-DOS. And since the deletion will propagate to other instances, other federated instances might be down too depending on how much federated contents that must be deleted in that instance.
- wccrawford 3y agoAh, I hadn't heard of that. It looks like one of my 2 servers is back up again, but the other continues to have issues. I think it's probably unrelated because the errors have been changing over the past day, and they usually come back immediately.
- ssivark 3y agoMaybe actually a good thing in the long run — would be great for an application aiming for a federated architecture to be reasonably robust to things of this sort.
- eikenberry 3y agoWhy doesn't everyone run their own Lemmy server and federate? Seems to me this would be the only way to avoid all the various server problems.
- paxys 3y agoBecause not everyone wants to host and maintain a server?
- rglullis 3y agoIt doesn't have to be "everyone", but imagine how much healthier the internet would be if 0.1% of the users of any social media network self-hosted and went on to provide the services for their friends/family. To add to that, imagine if every small business that wants/needs to have a web presence (basically, everyone) could have many different hosting providers where they could have their own Mastodon server, Web Page, online support and calls via Matrix, etc. This doesn't need to cost more than $50/month, i.e, probably less than what people pay in their cellphone bill. Just that would make - almost by definition - that no server would house more than 1000 people. It would be completely resilient.
- cybercatgurrl 3y agoi self-host my presence but being responsible for my friend’s social media presence too is too much responsibility for me to bear if i fuck up and it goes down for a day
- rglullis 3y ago- Why? It's social media, not a pacemaker alarm. Your friends will survive just fine if you have a day of downtime. - Nothing stopping the possibility of having redundancy though relays. nostr actually has this by design. If one node goes down, the service might get degraded but never interrupted. - "self-hosting" does not necessarily mean the act of hosting it yourself. One could, e.g, use a service provider like elest.io, yunohost or my own [0] to run the services. You'd still be responsible for the basic administration, but you'd have actual professional support for uptime, software maintenance, backup, etc. [0]: https://communick.com https://communick.com
- voytec 3y ago.ga TLD was "nationalized" as well[1] after the fall of Freenom [1] https://www.afnic.fr/wp-media/uploads/2023/05/ga-domain-names-soon-to-return-to-Gabonese-management-1.pdf https://www.afnic.fr/wp-media/uploads/2023/05/ga-domain-name...
- c-linkage 3y agoSide note: its best not to put easter eggs in your app, especially when you think no one will see them. Visiting the link with scripts disabled gives me a "damon is g*y" banner. Not only can the message be construed as hate speech (could be an inside joke but I'm not "inside") but it could also be that you outed someone who didn't want to be out.
- boondoggle16 3y ago[flagged]
- c-linkage 3y agoI didn't say that I found it to be hate speech, only that it could be interpreted as such.
- bshipp 3y agoWhat is it then?
- valianteffort 3y agoI see it more often being used in place of dumb/wild. I think it's pretty rare that people use it to refer to someone as a homosexual.
- FireInsight 3y agoI don't know what better term to use for people using the term associated with a sexual minority as a term with a negative connotation on people not affiliated with said minority. And "dumb/wild" is just one tame usage, sometimes "gay" is used as an even more generic "this person/thing/action is bad"-word.
- valianteffort 3y agoThe point is that it has nothing to do with homosexuals.
- allarm 3y agoI wonder if the same can happen to .sh - it’s widely used by Schleswig-Holstein (a German state), but originally it’s a tld for the Saint Helena islands.
- Symbiote 3y agoSince that's ultimately under control of the British government, and there are no disputes about the status of the island, it should be very safe.
- josephcsible 3y agoWhy doesn't ICANN or IANA have a rule against TLD operators unilaterally and suddenly stealing other people's subdomains?
- CameronNemo 3y agoBecause ICANN does not have sovereignty over ccTLDs, which are considered nation-state assets. The customer protections are much better for generic TLDs.
- marcthe12 3y agoccTLD which this is the part is supposed to be under full control of the government of the owning country. It is supposed to be for local used. So such TLDs are equivalent of opening a shop in the country so they are free to do so.
- NikkiA 3y agoOddly lemmy.ml is still running, perhaps they arranged some deal?
- grammarxcore 3y agoWhere can I find any information about the handoff? There’s been a slew of stories about the mil->ml typo and a few claims on the fediverse about the government taking back domains. I can’t search it without just getting articles about the typo (and nothing else). So far I haven’t actually found anything that announces a change in ownership (aside from some different names on IANA).
- dekatron 3y agoA bit more context from [1]: > The contract between Freenom and the Malinese government that gave Freenom technical control over the domain extension and give out the domains for free, has expired on Monday July 17. The contract was not renewed, which means that the control of the .ml domain extension is returned back to the government of Mali. [1] https://forum.infinityfree.net/t/all-ml-domains-are-down-due-to-registry-transfer/79379 https://forum.infinityfree.net/t/all-ml-domains-are-down-due...
- Storm-Bringer 3y agoI have to admit I didn’t do any research and assumed that .me was available to anyone because I noticed it around the same time domains such as .app, .blog, etc. came out. Honestly thought it was supposed to mean something like ‘Hey it’s me’. So I registered <surname>.me for me to use <name>@<surname>.me as email address. My surname with generic domains such as .com, .net, etc was already registered and didn’t feel like registering my full name. This is pure laziness, didn’t want to use something like hello or contact @<fullname>.com as email.
- asyx 3y agoSame here. I do have .dev as well though if things go south.
- somedude895 3y agoOh shoot, I always give out my @pm.me for simplicity's sake. Guess I should start using protonmail.com instead
- xslvrxslwt 3y agoI reassure you that my former schoolmate whose now a president of MNE (.me) country won't touch your @pm.me domain lol