6 ms·
You think that fraud is just going to go away because .tk is gone?
by jackblemming 3y ago
You think that fraud is just going to go away because .tk is gone?
- jamespo 3y agoprobably not, but very little of value has been lost
- _mlbt 3y agoI would disagree, I remember as a kid in the late 90s being able to host a website on one of the free hosting providers and then pairing it with a free domain name just made the whole thing that much more special. $10 or so a year for a paid domain name isn't a ton of money, but it can be for a kid with no credit cards and parents that aren't convinced as to why you "need" a domain name.
- bombcar 3y agoThe problem is that "free for kids" is also "free for scammers" and it's hard to square that circle.
- kdmccormick 3y agoWould be really cool if public schools provided a free domain and basic hosting for any interested middle/high school student.
- cube00 3y agoGood luck considering we can't even pay teachers properly.
- kdmccormick 3y agoCost would be negligible compared to a teacher's salary. (1 teacher / 20 students) * ($50k / teacher-yr) = $2500 per student per year to fund teacher salary. Compare that to $40/yr domain+hosting, which maybe 10% of students will use. $4/student-yr will not be the diffence between paying teachers probably or not.
- lxgr 3y agoThat budget only works if you don't care about content moderation or abuse management at all – or did you expect teachers to just do that on the side?
- where-group-by 3y agoI don't think that would be a good idea. It would introduce an admin burden on the schools related to moderating/monitoring the sites. And they would more than likely overstep in one way or another, when enforcing their rules.
- kdmccormick 3y agoI was thinking state-administered. Public school enrollment would just be the precondition to access the program. But sure, yeah, there'd be some admin time spent managing it. As with anything, there are plenty of reasons not to do it. It struck me as a low cost-to-impact ratio thing that could get kids into tech, but reasonable minds could disagree.
- bombcar 3y agoThe only way it would work is if it was literally handled by the government, and the associated 1st amendment rules applied (so it wouldn't be moderated unless it was actually shut down by a court case). It would result in rampant wildness and people complaining, but if you didn't do it that way the burden would be too high.
- lxgr 3y agoAnother way of looking at this is that scammers can probably afford to spend $5-10 on a TLD since it's just a cost of doing "business" to them, but many kids can't. I was very happy about free TLDs back in the day as a teenager, since I could just try things out before having to convince my parents to let me use their credit card to register a proper domain name.
- Caligatio 3y agoIt's infinitely easier to spend $0 vs $0.01 if you're trying to be anonymous online. The criminals can certainly afford it but that also almost certainly means interacting with financial systems that leave a paper trail.
- lxgr 3y agoI doubt that that's any kind of obstacle to criminals. At a quick glance, many registrars and hosters seem to accept crypto, and anyone can buy prepaid Visa and Mastercard cards anonymously for cash for the ones that don't.
- knodi 3y agowe're not in the 90s anymore. Many free subdomains options such as gitpages or full on free app (heroku) exists now.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]