Oh man. The infinite loops of impossible verification by large companies that should know better are massive pain peeve of mine.
This goes right to the top for me, along the ubiquitous "please verify your account" emails with NO OPTION to click "that's NOT me, somebody misused my email". Either people who do this for a living have no clue how to do their job, or, depressingly more likely, their goals are just completely misaligned to mine as a consumer and it's all about "removing friction" (for them).
duxup 19 minutes ago [-]
Oh man we had a person leave unexpectedly who controls our Apple organization for our dev accounts. I'm several months into me making requests, getting responses at least a week later for each email where the responder ... didn't really read my message. Then they ask for documents ... but they forgot to send me the secure link ... another week+ for them to do what they said they were going to do. Now one of my documents didn't include a sentence they needed ...
One of the requests was for a business card ... I haven't had a business card made with my name on it in 20 years.
The amazing thing is that I bet scammers working this system can get through this faster than I can.
At this point they should just give me control because no way would some scammer fail this much at this ungodly process.
rationalist 4 hours ago [-]
Someone constantly adds my Gmail address as their Gmail account's backup address.
I constantly remove it whenever Gmail sends me the notification.
I can't help but think there is some method for the other person to steal my Gmail account if I never remove my email as their backup.
tecleandor 56 minutes ago [-]
My Gmail account is a funny word in Spanish that I got when there was still plenty of names available.
I get TONS of emails of people trying to join services that use my address as a "fake email".
Romario77 4 hours ago [-]
I logged in several times to other people's accounts and reset their passwords. But it's too tiring, people keep adding my email.
I hope it's because I have small simple email and not because they want to steal it.
nativeit 3 hours ago [-]
You’re confessing to several actual felonies here, may want to change strategies.
kstrauser 3 hours ago [-]
“…and so I made him the owner of my account, and he used that to remove himself from it!”
“We’ll be right over.”
thatguy0900 44 minutes ago [-]
You forgot the part where he reset their email he didn't own and change their passwords so they couldn't get back into it
kstrauser 12 minutes ago [-]
I think you’re misreading this. OP has an email account. Someone else signed up for some website that doesn’t verify that you own the address before allowing you to log in and use the service. If the site did verify it, the user wouldn’t have been able to log in because OP would have been getting the verification emails, and not the user.
Later, after OP told the user and they failed to change their address, OP logged into the site and changed their password, putting an end to the spam they were receiving from the user’s actions.
I don’t have an ethical qualm with this. He didn’t want to sign up for the service. Someone else signed his email address up for it. Legally, I can’t imagine that being prosecutable.
tracker1 1 hours ago [-]
You give someone ownership of something and they used that ownership...
krickelkrackel 51 minutes ago [-]
It's like leaving your bike in the street, with no lock. Still theft, but you'd be up for a part of the responsibility.
tracker1 29 minutes ago [-]
No, it's like giving someone a set of keys to your car, and they take it for a drive.
kstrauser 7 minutes ago [-]
I think it’s more like you registered the car in their name. Now they’re allowed to use it, and also responsible for the thing which they didn’t want.
Consider that the “imposter” starts uploading child porn or something, and it’s on an account registered to your address. I think it’s perfectly A-OK to tell the service that it’s not be using the thing and I want them to close the account someone created in my name.
c22 29 minutes ago [-]
It's more like leaving your bike in someone else's garage.
ntoskrnl_exe 2 hours ago [-]
I'm curious if this would really be considered unlawful access, since only pure idiocy and no hacking/scamming/etc were involved.
volkercraig 1 hours ago [-]
It would be in Canada, but our "misuse of computer" charge is overly broad and never been well tested.
charlieyu1 55 minutes ago [-]
On the other hand, in Hong Kong it would be straight to jail. Someone was sent a link by the airlines, he changed a couple of characters and it ended up showing another person’s data. The guy voluntarily reported the vulnerability and all he got was a criminal charge and found guilty
jama211 51 minutes ago [-]
No harm done no one is gonna prosecute this
cft 26 minutes ago [-]
In what jurisdiction? He's in Russia
delecti 3 hours ago [-]
Have you tried sending them emails asking/telling them to stop?
kstrauser 3 hours ago [-]
I’m a different person, but this happens to me, too. I have the kstrauser@yahoo.com email address because I signed up for it like 25 years ago. I log in every 6 months to see what the few other kstrausers in the world have signed me up for.
Not jsmith, but kstrauser. Not Gmail, but Yahoo. And I still get banking docs, and HOA meeting minutes, and birthday party invitations, and Facebook logins, and other bizarre random stuff.
I have so many questions. I’ve typoed my address before and had to correct it. That’s understandable. But to wholly invent one and say, yep, that looks good even though I’ve never used it before, I’m sure it’ll be fine! I just don’t get it.
Izkata 2 hours ago [-]
I had one that person seemed to think their @twitter name was the same thing as my gmail address. Haven't seen it in a while, maybe they figured it out after I told their kid's teacher they had the wrong person...
tracker1 57 minutes ago [-]
There are times where you just can't... someone uses my email address in person at tractor supply co. and I'm getting a ton of marketing email I can't usnsub to.
I've had this happen several times... There's a lawyer I used for a dispute a few years ago, and they now have another "First Last" name that matches mine, and he keeps emailing me... my reply, "Wrong Michael, again..."
It's kind of annoying all around... I need to get off my butt and get a few things shifted, then just start relying on my own MTA again, instead of forwarding *@mydomain to my gmail to. I'll still wildcard the domain, but to a single mailbox on my own mta.
I'm not sure how bad the spam might get though... I've had a test account on my mta for a couple years and it hasn't really recived any... my wildcard accounts either... I use the wildcard so I can do things like walmart@mydomain, to see if/where an email address is sold/leaked from regarding spam.
Mordisquitos 2 hours ago [-]
That may be what they're hoping for, using a similar modus operandi as those WhatsApp/IM messages from strangers who text you with things in the vein of ‘Hey, it was great meeting you at the conference’ or ‘Did Martha like your flowers?’ etc.
They may well be looking for targets.
lawrencejgd 2 hours ago [-]
>You write an email that says "Hey, can you please stop using my email address?"
>You send it to johnsmith@gmail.com
>You receive a new message, it says "Hey, can you please stop using my email address?"
>You're johnsmith@gmail.com, you only know that's the address that's being used
PD: I know that if he resets the password he can get the other address, but this scenario was funny in my head.
-Fu 10 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
MereInterest 22 minutes ago [-]
> Oh man. The infinite loops of impossible verification by large companies that should know better are massive pain peeve of mine.
I got hit by this from google.
1. Gmail added requirement for 2FA on my primary email address. Since I had no phone number on file, it instead used my recovery email address. Thankfully, I still had the password for my recovery email address, and could continue to (2).
2. Gmail added requirement for 2FA on my recovery email address. Since I had no phone number on file, it instead used by recovery's recovery email address. Thankfully, I still had the password for my recovery's recovery email address, and could continue to (3).
3. SBC Communications no longer exists, as it merged with AT&T in 2005. Email addresses at `sbcglobal.net` were maintained up until around 2021-ish, when they started purging any mailboxes that had been idle for more than 12 months.
Fundamentally, this was google's fault for misusing a recovery email for 2FA. Unfortunately, the only way to fix it would be to contact AT&T, asking them to pretty please update the email settings for somebody who hadn't been a paying customer for two decades.
integralid 5 hours ago [-]
No need to look for malicious intentions, this is just a feature that costs money so it's very low (or zero) priority for profit driven organisations.
I wonder if finding people responsible and spamming then with their own service emails would make the team care enough to fix this. But of course that's mostly dubious, probably illegal, and shouldn't be a responsibility of some vigilante hacker
b112 5 hours ago [-]
If bartenders are legally (including criminally!) liable in some jurisdictions for their customers, then certainly a chain of legal liability can exist in other industries.
CydeWeys 30 minutes ago [-]
What are you envisioning exactly?
b112 20 minutes ago [-]
Am I supposed to envision something?
When pointing out that legal parallels exist, to enact a solution, must I envision that solution?
Pxtl 2 hours ago [-]
Yes but bartenders overserving is a crime done by a working-class person and not a wealthy business.
justinclift 4 hours ago [-]
> No need to look for malicious intentions, this is just a feature that costs money so it's very low (or zero) priority for profit driven organisations.
Malicious in-attention then, by the profit driven org? :)
wat10000 4 hours ago [-]
What is the word for harming other people in order to make more money for yourself, if not "malicious"?
loloquwowndueo 5 hours ago [-]
With AI these days it’d cost almost zero money. /s
AtreidesTyrant 1 hours ago [-]
happens with apple products all the time
duped 2 hours ago [-]
A chronic problem is the idea that if something can't be automated with a human in the loop then it simply can't be done at scale. Technologists will do anything except employ humans to solve social problems.
jagged-chisel 54 minutes ago [-]
s/technologists/venture capitalists/
cucumber3732842 3 hours ago [-]
The point of the system is what it does.
They can't just say "we don't want to deal with small timers who will not pay us big bucks doing nonstandard things" without pushback but they can write the policy so that a huge fraction of those use cases fall into some crack that can only be got out of by incurring the kind of expense that's a non-starter for those users. Your municipal code is rife with examples of this.
plagiarist 4 hours ago [-]
I prefer "please verify your account" to "thanks for joining" by a lot. The former presumably does not verify when I ignore it. The latter should be illegal but somehow isn't.
I do wish there was a requirement for some sort of "no" button that would stop sending sign up requests entirely.
Aachen 3 hours ago [-]
Any idea what the incentive is for them to put in an email address they can't access?
I run a few websites that accept an email address (all noncommercial, I have no interest in spamming anyone). One of them is the "contact me" feature on my personal website. To prevent spam, I had people just put in their email address and it'll automatically email them my email address. This works perfectly to this day, haven't got a single spam email on any of the addresses I've handed out, but the ratio of emails sent out to received is probably 50 to 1. Why would anyone put an email address in there if not to contact me? I've been wondering if it's used by mail bombing services, idk if that's a thing but I know of the concept of annoying someone by signing them up for a hundred newsletters. My site doesn't send recurring emails, though, and it doesn't allow putting more than two email addresses per month in, per /24 IPv4 block (and even more strict on v6). It's useless for mail bombing services but the (presumed) bots keep submitting a steady rate of maybe 2 new email addresses per day, each time from a new ISP in a random country. No email addresses is ever submitted twice. No rhyme or reason to it. If anyone can make sense of this, that might help me in stopping the abuse
prmoustache 53 minutes ago [-]
> The former presumably does not verify when I ignore it.
That doesn't prevent a huge majority of them from sending you notification emails all the time even if you never verify.
> Either people who do this for a living have no clue how to do their job,
how naive. most of the world work to survive, not because its their dream vocation. they probably dont care as much as you do
ksdme9 19 seconds ago [-]
On a side note, thanks for wisp. I was looking for something like it so I could use it to quickly test the web builds of my tauri mobile app.
iamnothere 5 hours ago [-]
The registrar relying on Google Safe Browsing as a “trigger” for suspension is the most horrifying thing I’ve seen in a while. This basically makes the entire TLD unviable for serious use.
mzajc 3 hours ago [-]
.online is one of the many TLDs that charge a dollar for registration but bump the price to $30-$35 for renewal. So far, this seems like a good signal to tell apart serious TLDs and ones just preying on customers who sort by cheapest (or capitalizing on one-off phishing domains).
volkercraig 1 hours ago [-]
I had a .fun domain that I was using to host a small project and they pulled that on me, I just let it expire and killed the project.
RHSeeger 5 hours ago [-]
The followup from that would appear to be don't use any domain that Radix controls.
This is the real story. This is 100% a problem with Radix. Safe browsing targets the website not the domain. No reason a registrar should be suspending an entire account over something a company reports. Black-holing the A and CNAMEs on a subdomain? Maybe..... But even then I don't think it's the registrars place to do that. Freezing the entire account? Absolutely not.
NewJazz 2 hours ago [-]
Blackholing the a and cnames would prevent getting off the safe browsing list, as mentioned in the blog post.
NewJazz 2 hours ago [-]
Registry, not registrar
iamnothere 40 minutes ago [-]
Thanks, yes, even worse! The registry should act on only legal orders IMHO.
WmWsjA6B29B4nfk 4 hours ago [-]
Who said serious use is their business model though.
merek 5 hours ago [-]
The TLD owner in this case was Radix, which also owns
They seem to be almost always associated with scam sites.
So, might as well to block entire TLDs and never buy a domain under those TLDs
jeroenhd 4 hours ago [-]
These alternative domains are quite popular with the fediverse and other hobbyist-run groups. Affordable domains with somewhat recognisable names still available.
Scam websites will use any TLD in my experience. Based on the ones that made it to my Google search results, .it and .info are the TLDs I should be blocking. When I search for "free roblox cash", most websites are .com. "Free robux" also brings forth a few .ca websites. "Free steam gift card" leads to .org and .com.
prmoustache 50 minutes ago [-]
> Affordable domains with somewhat recognisable names still available.
Aren't they only affordable for the first year though?
erinnh 38 minutes ago [-]
I don’t know about most of them, but I’ve used .pw for many years for most of my domains as pw is really cheap even on renewal.
kstrauser 3 hours ago [-]
My all time favorite Fediverse domain is jorts.horse. That’s the most delightfully random thing.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 27 minutes ago [-]
this looks exactly like every mastodon instance I ever saw.
funnily enough, good.store which sounds like a made up example of a scam is actually a nonprofit ran by john green and his brother hank green
Yizahi 4 hours ago [-]
Only .info is missing for the bingo :)
dist-epoch 4 hours ago [-]
Because they are very cheap. If you are a scammer, why pay $5 for a domain when you can buy one of these for $1.
I use them when I need a random domain.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
> Because they are very cheap.
When I first bought an .online, it was not cheap
ectospheno 3 hours ago [-]
Despite blocking 66 TLDs and all IDN ccTLDs on my home dns I didn’t have these blocked. Guess I’ll consider it. Once you have the hagezi rpz files including threat information feed though you really have blocked most silliness.
AshamedCaptain 5 hours ago [-]
> The domain ... has been suspended due to its blacklisting on Google Safe Browsing
Et voilà ... ! this is precisely the slippery slope I warned about a decade ago. The indirect censorship becomes direct censorship, defeating all the arguments about the morality of such a list. And:
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.
Yet more monopolistic power to Google.
jeroenhd 4 hours ago [-]
This is 100% on Radix, not on Google. Google and Microsoft can (and probably should) have a registry of known-abusive websites. False positives are inevitable, so these should be taken with a grain of salt, but in most cases they're correct. Their lists are a lot more reliable than those from the "traditional" antivirus/anti-scam vendors that will list anything remotely strange to pump up their numbers.
The external people treating these lists as absolute truths and automatically taking domains down are the ones at fault here. Google didn't grab power, Radix gave it to them without asking.
AshamedCaptain 2 hours ago [-]
Exactly what we predicted would happen (someone would eventually put "too much faith" on this list) has literally happened, and your defense is still "well it's not Google's fault, it's a 3rd party's!". Obviously the point is not that Google was going to do it, but that others would , analogue to the process known as "self-censorship".
flaminHotSpeedo 46 minutes ago [-]
Self censorship requires a threat or risk of detriment if the party doesn't self censor, right? Where is that here?
What Radix does has no impact on Google, and I don't see how Google would be incentivized to pressure Radix. So I don't see how to make the leap blaming Google for Radix's incompetence. Yes, Google should recognize the risk of this happening, but they'd have to balance that against the rewards (or at least what they consider rewards)
axus 1 hours ago [-]
I read your comment as agreeing with the article: "Never buy a .online domain".
And Google has the right to publish a list, there should be more lists not less. But Google was at fault for not correcting their blacklist. Until the article appeared on Hacker News, this was not 0% on Google. A small, correctable mistake, but they deserved a tiny bit of blame.
overfeed 1 hours ago [-]
> But Google was at fault for not correcting their blacklist.
If all it takes to be taken from the blacklist was to temporarily delete the NS record - the list would be useless against malware.
kelvinjps10 2 hours ago [-]
Wym mean external people aren't these lists integrated to the browsers? I'm sure if you try to open a website from this list your browser won't let you and I'll put a big warning sign
lazide 3 hours ago [-]
What is to stop Google et. al. from also adding a lot of excess domains to pump up there numbers?
What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?
jeroenhd 3 hours ago [-]
Google doesn't sell their list to you. They give it to you for free. Using their list costs them money. Pumping up numbers gains them nothing but the headache of PR issues when they get a false positive.
Spyware filters used to boast about how many domains they filter out because they wanted you to buy their filters instead of someone else's. By the time they hit a false positive, they've already sold a year's subscription to that customer.
The incentives are different.
crote 3 hours ago [-]
Step 1: Get everyone to use your free internet filter
Step 2: Alter filters to mark newly-registered domains and low-traffic websites as "potentially harmful".
Step 3: Charge a lot of money for "business verification" - which gives them a fancy badge somewhere and incidentally makes their website trustworthy in the eyes of your filter.
Step 4: Profit!
The Big Tech cartel has been doing this pretty successfully with email (see the weekly "Don't self-host your email" posts), why should we assume they are doing anything different with browser-based website blocking?
encom 2 hours ago [-]
>pretty successfully with email
Indeed. I was going to register an account somewhere the other day, and the signup form had a list of acceptable email domains. Gmail, Protonmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Icloud... a few others. It's not the first time that's happened to me. Sad.
EDIT: Didn't even include Fastmail, who's pretty big after all. They host MX for my domain, so I could have "circumvented" it that way with their disposable address feature, but nope.
hedora 2 hours ago [-]
I've found that, whenever considering Google's actions and incentives, you need to remember two things:
- They make almost all their money on advertising
- They have deep ties to the US intelligence agencies (To the point that a Google employee managed the appointment calendar for our Secretary of State a few years ago!)
So, how would these incentives apply to their Internet blacklist?
- If you are parking lots of Google ad spam, they are taking a cut of your revenue, so they have an incentive to take you off the list (evidence and testimony from the antitrust trial documented ongoing fraud in every layer of Google's vertical ad monopoly)
- If you are hosting something the intelligence agencies dislike / are neutral to / like, that'll impact your presence on the list.
Macha 3 hours ago [-]
Not true. Commercial or large scale use requires you to use their Web Risk API instead which is a paid service
cortesoft 3 hours ago [-]
> Pumping up numbers gains them nothing but the headache of PR issues when they get a false positive
There is also the headache of PR issues when they get a false NEGATIVE. “Google didn’t protect grandma from this scam website!”
bonestamp2 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody sees Google's numbers except Google... in other words, the numbers are not a sales tool for Google like they are for anti-virus/blocking companies. So, there's no reason for Google to pump up their numbers, it would just be extra work to make their product worse which wouldn't make sense.
phoric 3 hours ago [-]
Google wants you to use it. If it blacklists excess domains that hold legitimate sites, their product gets worse. If they blacklist illegitimate sites, their product gets better.
cwnyth 3 hours ago [-]
This argument would hold more weight if Google didn't have a history of making their own products worse and then getting rid of them.
zenapollo 3 hours ago [-]
Cute. That is the commenter’s whole point about monopolies. Google is on record making their product worse to squeeze revenue. We’ve been living in the enshitification economy.
simsla 3 hours ago [-]
There is a financial incentive to make the search results worse. (More searches, more ads, more money.)
There is no incentive for adding false positives to lists of malicious websites.
crote 3 hours ago [-]
Sure, until their "smart filters" start considering GCP-hosted websites as pre-verified and small self-hosted websites as malicious. You know, like they have been doing with email?
Chrome is big enough that a website owner can't afford a false positive on their malware list, just like they can't afford to have all their email end up in spam for all Gmail users.
Due to their near-monopoly Google also has no incentive to avoid adding false positives to their blocklist - provided they don't accidentally block high-profile targets. And if a CxO is screaming over your shoulder that your website has been blocked, arguments about "false positives" aren't very compelling: they'll just demand you move off the "shitty basement provider" and switch to "proper hosting, like the Google Cloud"...
squeefers 3 hours ago [-]
> We’ve been living in the enshitification economy.
that whiny bullshit about somebody elses website? you dont have to rely on a website or app. either you need their monopoly because you cant do it yourself, or you have options.... in both cases the whining is not needed
lazide 3 hours ago [-]
Same as for those antiviruses.
thesuitonym 3 hours ago [-]
Nothing, but they haven't done it so far, and they don't really have any incentive to do so.
It doesn't really matter that it's Google. It could have been Microsoft, or PAN, or McAfee or some fly-by-night vendor. The problem was Radix taking the list as iron-clad truth and disabling the domain without any notification or way to resolve the issue.
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
Google’s allowed to have an opinion. But that doesn’t mean that the registrar should be suspending the domain immediately in response. These two mechanisms should be decoupled.
account42 4 hours ago [-]
Google should not be allowed to make libelous statements without consequences.
acoustics 3 hours ago [-]
How is any kind of antivirus or threat detection software supposed to operate on this standard?
Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.
And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.
kevin_thibedeau 2 hours ago [-]
You document your claims with concrete evidence of fraud. That will be your libel defense. No evidence means you bear the full responsibility of a fuckup.
acoustics 2 hours ago [-]
At internet scale, this would roughly be equivalent to not doing any warning or detection at all.
Scalable systems need to use heuristics to catch threats. Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged.
There is a policy argument as to the right balance of concerns here. But there is a clear trade-off to make.
rtsam 3 hours ago [-]
I think that is the idea. They shouldn't exist without a prompt mitigation path.
In other words, if you can't deal with the false positives in a timely manner. You SHOULD be liable for the damages.
I can't build a budget car put together in an unsafe manner. Then complain I can't compete due to all the peoples cars crashing and blowing up and suing me.
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
(IAAL but this is not legal advice.)
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
grayhatter 3 hours ago [-]
> Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
No, it's not.
You're welcome to cite case law if you want to insist. Otherwise, unsafe (in the context of infosec) has a definition of likely or able to cause harm or malfunction. Something that is provable or falsifiable with evidence.
jcalvinowens 2 hours ago [-]
Isn't "oops we made a mistake" actually a valid defense to libel in most US states? I thought you had to prove it was intentional to some extent? Or reckless/negligent IANAL
horsawlarway 2 hours ago [-]
Google takes no action to review the reports that their warnings are false until you sign up for Google products (namely - registering the site in their search console).
I reported a falsely flagged site repeatedly for weeks with absolutely no action from them.
Mozilla and Microsoft both did actually remove the warnings after the reports (Edge and Firefox stopped displaying the warning). Google did not. Google strong armed me into registering for google products, like a fucking bastard of a company.
This was the moment I went from "I don't love google anymore" to "Google can get fucked".
I wish them bankruptcy and every damn legal consequence that is possible to enforce.
jcalvinowens 1 hours ago [-]
I'm not defending google, I'm just wondering if claiming libel is barking up the wrong legal tree.
rtsam 2 hours ago [-]
"I believed it to be true" is a defense. But negligence isn't. In fact, that is usually what you want to prove, that they acted on things that a reasonable person (or a person that is supposed to be skilled in that field) can see is not true.
ifh-hn 3 hours ago [-]
Whether that's true or not is irrelevant if it's defined by law differently. Even without case law and precedent you'd still have to test it in court, which for libel can be prohibitively expensive.
For clarity I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but what means sense to the layperson (including experts in a particular field) is sometimes at odds with what the law says.
ThunderSizzle 4 hours ago [-]
Google is stating in a position of authority. It's therefore being stated as at least a professional opinion with the equivalent weight of fact, or representing facts.
If the opinion is meant to be just another opinion, then it shouldn't cause any blacklisting of any sorts anywhere.
account42 4 hours ago [-]
Not to mention that the whole point of the list is for blocking in e.g. web browsers. Claiming it is just an opinion would be like a mobster claiming they didn't actually order a hit.
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
> If the opinion is meant to be just another opinion, then it shouldn't cause any blacklisting of any sorts anywhere.
I agree with this! The registrar should not have triggered a suspension because of this. They're not obligated to, and the two processes should be decoupled.
MadameMinty 4 hours ago [-]
The registrar should ignore reports of abuse, especially if coming from an authoritative source with vast resources that's been collecting reports on its own?
No.
The source should be more careful. It's the equivalent of a renowned newspaper printing warning a restaurant being unsafe to visit. Should the customers' willingness to visit be magically decoupled from this opinion?
ryandrake 3 hours ago [-]
It's like a renowned newspaper saying the restaurant is unsafe, and then also the restaurant's landlord taking it at face value and locking the doors without further investigation. Both can be wrong.
RobotToaster 3 hours ago [-]
Depends on jurisdiction. In the UK it's not an absolute defence, you still have to prove it's an opinion a "reasonable person" could come to based on facts.
horsawlarway 2 hours ago [-]
As someone who has also been bit by this, and with the only possible resolution being that I sign up for google services and register my site with them in the google search dashboard...
Fuck Google.
This is absolutely libel. They put a big fucking red banner on top of my site, telling the world that it's unsafe, using all the authority they have as one of the largest tech companies in the world.
In my case - it was a jellyfin instance I'd stood up to host family videos of my kids for my parents.
It was not compromised, and showed only a login page. I reported it as a false flag repeatedly, for weeks, with Google doing jack fucking shit.
Only after signing up in their search console and registering the site did the warning disappear.
They are abusively forcing people into their products. Fuck Google.
In case it wasn't entirely clear - Google can get fucked. Fuck Google.
otterley 58 minutes ago [-]
There’s nothing wrong with your dislike of Google. No matter how much you dislike them, though, the word “libel” has a meaning that should be respected. To opine that a site is unsafe is simply not libelous.
hackerman_fi 4 hours ago [-]
How is it any more of an opinion to "mark" a website as "unsafe" than say, "contains CSAM"?
dspillett 4 hours ago [-]
“contains CSAM” is likely an unarguable fact.
“unsafe” is a term that is both broader and more vague, so I would consider it opinion unless backed up by appropriate facts (like “contains CSAM”, “contains malware”, and so forth).
kmoser 2 hours ago [-]
> “contains CSAM” is likely an unarguable fact.
Except when it isn't. CSAM may be easier to define and identify than pornography, but there still exists material that treads a moral grey area.
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
One is disprovable, the other is not.
ses1984 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe libel is the wrong term, but erroneously marking a website as unsafe can lead to damages.
otterley 48 minutes ago [-]
Only if it’s intentional (or maybe grossly negligent).
master-lincoln 3 hours ago [-]
That depends on jurisdiction. E.g. in South Korea true statements can constitute defamation too
tshaddox 3 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a spurious distinction. Pretty sure you can’t say “Person X is a murderer” and then say “well I’m only expressing my opinion, and in my opinion if you do something that annoys me that qualifies as murder.”
habinero 1 hours ago [-]
Nope, not in the US. It is perfectly legal to say, for example, "Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer" despite him being acquitted. You're entirely free to disagree with the result, that is an opinion. Any opinion based on public knowledge is ok. It doesn't even have to be reasonable or rational.
What you can't do is imply non-public knowledge, aka "I heard from my cousin who works in law enforcement that Kyle murdered a hobo when he was 12 but the records were sealed", or state specific facts that can be proven true or false: "Kyle murdered a hobo on September 11, 2018 out back of the 7-11 in Gainesville, FL"
The standard for libel/slander is much, much higher than people think. It's extremely difficult to meet them, and for public figures, it's almost impossible.
1 hours ago [-]
roger110 4 hours ago [-]
In my opinion, a .online domain is unsafe. 99% of people only visit ".com"s unless they clicked a scam link. Completely blocking the site is overkill, but the browser should warn you about it like it does with non-SSL sites.
master-lincoln 3 hours ago [-]
thanks for the laugh. Even if you only meant people from the US this is likely not true. What about government websites at .gov? 99% never visit them?
In other countries local TLDs are of course normal (e.g. .it for Italy, .za for South Africa, .cn for China...) and not only used for scam links.
LoganDark 3 hours ago [-]
What? I find myself on .net-s and .org-s all the time. For example... Wikipedia is .org. Do 99% of people not visit Wikipedia?
mystraline 4 hours ago [-]
They should be held legally culpable for libellous claims they make.
I dont care if their pre-LLM ai says "thingy bad". They are responsible for the scripts or black boxes they control. I dont care if they dont give a reason.
Claiming bad/malicious/etc site is 100% libel. And doubly so, anybody who has been forced to agree to a ToS with binding arbitration should have it removed for libel.
The words in your link do not support the words in your comment. Don't be snarky unless you are certain you're correct.
> a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.
They falsely marked the site unsafe[1] on a published list[2], the results weren't checked and couldn't be appealed[3] and OPs site was taken down[4].
habinero 1 hours ago [-]
It does. "Unsafe" is not a fact, it's an opinion.
rtsam 40 minutes ago [-]
"When Google marks a site as "unsafe" or "dangerous" in Chrome or search results, it is a factual finding based on automated detection of specific, technical security threats, rather than a subjective opinion. These warnings are triggered by Google’s Safe Browsing technology, which scans billions of URLs daily to protect users from malicious content"
Opinions and facts in a legal context usually comes down to who is saying what. Someone personally says "this soup is bad" on a review site = opinion. A news site plastering it on their front page = fact.
A person saying something as an individual is usually considered an opinion. A company doesn't have that same protection.
habinero 14 minutes ago [-]
Nope. Not correct. Companies have the same 1A rights, too.
In the US, it really doesn't matter who says it, the only thing that matters is who it's being said about.
If you are a "public figure" -- which is a much broader category in 1A law than you think -- then in order to prove defamation, you have to prove the thing was false _and_ that the person saying it knew it was false at the time. Not that they were mistaken, not that they were careless, not that they knew later, they deliberately lied and knew they lied as they said it.
If your next question is "how do you prove what someone was thinking", then yes. That is the reason it's nearly impossible.
MadameMinty 3 hours ago [-]
Sounds textbook to me.
creddit 4 hours ago [-]
How was this Google’s fault? Seems clearly like Radix’s fault.
hamdingers 4 hours ago [-]
If a newspaper publishes a false story about a business and someone takes it upon themselves to attack the business, it's partially the newspaper's fault.
WhyNotHugo 2 hours ago [-]
If a newspaper publishes a story about a business and someone takes it upon themselves to attack the business, the attacker is at fault, regardless of the veracity of the newspapers claims.
rtsam 2 hours ago [-]
I am in Canada, but I think it is the same in the US? A newspaper can be responsible here. For example, if they say "people should riot" and a riot happens, the newspaper could be responsible for all actions that resulted the same as if they were the ones doing the crime.
Same with if they become aware of defamation and fail to retract and make a statement. But newspapers will generally also thoroughly investigate themselves to make sure what they are publishing is true.
account42 4 hours ago [-]
It's both's fault. Google for making false and clearly damaging statements (libel) and Radix for acting on them.
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
(IAAL but this is not legal advice.)
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
rtsam 4 hours ago [-]
I always wonder what the settlement and damages would be if google marked Amazon as a phishing site for even a few minutes.
The problem is that these gatekeepers of the internet respond to false statements of facts/opinions by so called professionals.
I had cloudflare mark a worker as phishing because a AI "security company" thought my 301 redirect to their clients website was somehow malicious. (url redirects are normal affiliate things)
If the professionals don't understand the difference and cloudflare and google blindly block things, this is scary.
otterley 50 minutes ago [-]
There is a potentially different cause of action, tortious interference with business relationships. It does require that the defendant intended to interfere in a way that would cause harm to the plaintiff, though. Proving Google intended such harm would be difficult and expensive.
retired 1 hours ago [-]
Marking a website as "unsafe" in Chrome is equal to standing in front of the door of a small restaurant and blocking 71% of people going inside. Everyone first has to agree that they will enter the restaurant at their own risk.
That is more than an opinion. Chrome has a monopoly and should act accordingly. Blocking entry to a website should be a last resort, not just because someone didn't add their website to the whitelist.
ThunderSizzle 4 hours ago [-]
It's being stated as fact, not as an opinion.
jolmg 4 hours ago [-]
(IANAL) It's not about how it's stated, but whether it can be objectively proven to be true or false. "unsafe" refers to the likelihood of something bad happening in the future. You can't prove that something bad will happen in the future, so it's opinion.
saghm 4 hours ago [-]
Also not a lawyer, but that makes intuitive sense. If I say "that food tastes bad", it's phrased as a fact, but a "reasonable person" (which is in fact a legal test used for some things, although I admit I'm not sure about libel) knows that there's an implicit "...to me" qualifier because the concept of taste itself is inherently subjective. My instinct is that while there are some things everyone would agree on as unsafe, it pretty quickly turns into a judgment call, and it probably makes sense to allow even ill-informed opinions that are made in good faith rather than malice or negligence. The question then becomes whether there's sufficient evidence to conclude something like that, and while the bar is lower for a libel claim than something criminal, it's still not obvious this would be provable here.
ryandrake 3 hours ago [-]
"Unsafe" is just a terribly vague word, too. As a layman, I wouldn't even know what that means with respect to a web site. What's "unsafe" about it? Is it going to shoot my dog? Is it going to drain my bank account? Is it going to give my computer a virus? Saying a web site is "unsafe" really isn't providing any interesting information, and it shouldn't be acted upon by pretty much anyone.
otterley 1 hours ago [-]
I agree that it’s not specific, but I disagree that it should be blindly ignored. It’s not like they have no reason whatsoever for their opinion.
jmye 4 hours ago [-]
This seems like a distinction without difference, given everyone in the ecosystem takes that "opinion" as true fact, including the market-leading browser produced by the "opinion"-haver.
I get that's mostly what corporate lawyers argue about, but it's functionally dishonest in this case.
4 hours ago [-]
dizhn 5 hours ago [-]
That is the bit that jumped at me immediately too. Why would a registrar take it upon itself to suspend a domain that another entity entirely blacklisted as part of their own completely opaque process? Who is Google? God?
On the flip side of the coin I cannot get a site removed that is a blatant rip off of one of our websites being actively used for invoice redirection fraud.
avaer 4 hours ago [-]
It's like being unable to get a passport because Microsoft has you on The List, and Microsoft needs to see your passport to check why you're on the list.
Considering that getting a domain is a normal part of business these days, this kind of thing should be illegal. Not to mention, why does Google have any say in this?
riddlemethat 4 hours ago [-]
You know it's getting bad out there when corporations act like the government.
dizhn 4 hours ago [-]
It's like the domain registrar is acting like a vassal state. I don't think Google actually has any say in their decision.
bandrami 4 hours ago [-]
> Why would a registrar take it upon itself to
Because keeping Google happy or at least not bothered is an existential priority for registrars
dizhn 3 hours ago [-]
I am suspecting something like this too but what is the mechanism by which Google would have influence on the registrar? As far as they are concerned the domain is gone from their index.
rustyhancock 4 hours ago [-]
Well until a human can verify.
Which likely is slow without a poke it's reasonable to base the decision on whats available.
That's just how reputation works.
dizhn 4 hours ago [-]
It doesn't sound reasonable to me at all. Why would we think that the reasons google blacklists a domain would align perfectly with reasons a domain name would be suspended? In the end they don't seem to agree already since the domain was unsuspended. Who knows why it was blacklisted by google? Even the decision to unsuspend it looks arbitrary.
redeeman 4 hours ago [-]
and anyone that trusts googles judgement here clearly needs a reputation of their own
RockRobotRock 2 hours ago [-]
That's like a business being dissolved because it got a bad rating from BBB. Absolutely insane.
the_arun 3 hours ago [-]
Should domain name matter? Or this applicable to any domain?
3 hours ago [-]
TiredOfLife 2 hours ago [-]
Where did you do the warning?
5 hours ago [-]
bjt 2 hours ago [-]
It's not about the .online TLD being "weird". The problem is that it was free. That's going to attract a swarm of fraudsters, spammers, etc, and then turn into a strong "this is probably fraud" signal in all kinds of fraud scoring systems.
There are lots of domains out there other than .com that are just fine.
fckgw 1 hours ago [-]
.online, .top, .xyz. info and .shop are some of the top TLDs that scammers use, precisely because of their rock bottom registrar fees that make them attractive for sites that have a shelf life of a few hours or a few days before being blocked. As a result, many places have a blanket "suspicious" flag for fresh domains under these TLDs.
If you plan on building a legit site, do not use any of these cheap TLDs.
al_borland 37 minutes ago [-]
Paying through the nose for a .com that is remotely memorable and easy to spell is not a great path forward for a hobbyist or someone who simply wants their own domain for email.
I know someone with a .org domain, and even they have a ton of issues with false flags on their emails due to not coming from a big email provider. They’ve been blacklisted a couple times and regularly get flagged as spam. I’m surprised he hasn’t given up after dealing with this stuff for 25 years.
These new TLDs, I thought, were supposed to open up more options for regular people to get a domain that is semi-decent. Instead they’re essentially useless. Some of the prices are also still insane, due to assumed “premium” status or domain squatters.
There has to be a better way to police this stuff.
garganzol 1 hours ago [-]
Probably this is what's happened here. Either the OP's domain was previously used for shady activities, or the almost-free stigma puts the whole .TLD in the grey list of high-risk assets. Probably is also explains the nuclear behavior of the registrar (suspension).
Free is good, but sometimes it's not.
pverheggen 4 hours ago [-]
I wonder if Radix has unknowingly created a negative feedback loop here. From Google's perspective, the DNS records disappear shortly after being flagged by Safe Browsing, which their heuristics may interpret as scammy behavior.
petterroea 4 hours ago [-]
Side note: My empirical experience is that vanity domains are disliked by some enterprise security systems. I have a friend who owns a .homes domain which ended up being blocked by quad9 as well as the enterprise security system of a friend's work for ~half a year. The block cleared by itself.
I had the same experience while buying another TLD. For ~1 month, certain people whose ISP "helpfully" had "safe browsing" features, simply blocked us outright. For being new and different.
The learning for me was that new domains are no longer trusted, and seemingly some vanity domains get even more strict treatment.
mavamaarten 3 hours ago [-]
Even (uncommon) country TLD's too. I own a .vg domain which is a perfect match with the initials of my last name. My mails end up in spam quite often too, despite having set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC and all that stuff correctly. It's just not common so some security systems block it.
Avamander 2 hours ago [-]
It's not just about being common, it's also about the share of abuse coming from such domains.
mghackerlady 2 hours ago [-]
Fortinet blocks new domains by default so I can never check out cool new projects on the front page when I'm procrastinating nowadays :(
roger110 4 hours ago [-]
Because the entire security mechanism of the www today is "look at the domain name to make sure it matches." And the TLD is at the end where people might miss it.
2 hours ago [-]
defraudbah 4 minutes ago [-]
never buy anything than com domain
especially country level domains, they are not regulated and your register can ignore whatever requirements they have to fullfil
We struggled a lot when we opted for the .online domain for https://pinggy.io urls
yanis_t 5 hours ago [-]
I still remember how Google banned my entire account without providing a reason for a small Android app (more than 12 years ago). To this day I have no idea why, it was absolutely green-area fit tracker or something. There was absolutely no way to know the reason or unblock my account. Turned me away from Android development forever.
jkestner 5 hours ago [-]
A relative’s business has had Google reviews frozen for years. Search results show the bad rating after some former customer and spouse left bad reviews several years ago. Appeal went into a black hole. Running a small business is at the pleasure of Silicon Valley.
littlecranky67 4 hours ago [-]
Same shit happend to me - got my google account blocked overnight and locked out of most of my digital life. Learned my lesson and ungoogled asap.
peanut-walrus 1 hours ago [-]
It sucks so much that there is no standard way of linking additional domains to your main one and inheriting the reputation.
Want to set up a new domain for whatever purposes (conference, new product, etc)? Be prepared to spend the first half a year fighting the various blacklists before people can actually reliably connect.
Would make so much sense if you could just have a .well-known/other-domains.txt (or something something DNS) with a list of domain names that should be considered just as trustworthy as your main domain.
It's not even about .online or other weird TLDs, it's just that the domain is new and therefore "not trustworthy". Even worse if you need to use your existing branding on the new domain - instantly flagged as a phishing site everywhere.
pil0u 5 hours ago [-]
One conclusion is:
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately.
I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
And yes, you probably should, if only to pre-register your ownership thereof if google ever decides to nuke you from orbit
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
But if Google decides to nuke me from orbit, and my domain is registered there, the nuke can cross between my domain and my Google account.
swiftcoder 5 hours ago [-]
Well, yeah, that's digital monopolies for you. I guess one can always create a dedicated google account to register each site with
cube00 2 hours ago [-]
It doesn't work, there was a Google employee here mentioning they assign a degree of separation to each account, any accounts that are deemed "close", are included when the ban hammer falls.
Serenacula 4 hours ago [-]
Google ties your accounts together on the backend though if they realise they're related, so this isn't as easy as it sounds.
joelccr 5 hours ago [-]
If it's already in the Console when it gets blacklisted, you can appeal it without having to 'verify' ownership of the domain that, in this case, you no longer control the DNS of, because you completed that process when adding it to Console.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
> I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
Google's way of tying real identifies of people to domains, without making it explicit.
Basically, your domain will be weirdly treated by a bunch of entities, none the less Google themselves, if you don't add your domain there (or some other Google property).
Especially with less common TLDs, like .online, they really want to be able to tie it to some identity, so unless you add it there, eventually your domain ends up on some sort of blacklist, in the case of the author it seems they used the "Google Safe Browsing" blacklist to get the author to involve Google somehow.
qingcharles 3 hours ago [-]
Open a fake Google account under your dog's name using a VPN? It doesn't have to be tied to your own every day Goog acct. Any old account will do.
ssiddharth 5 hours ago [-]
To request a formal review, you must be a verified owner in Search Console.
techcode 5 hours ago [-]
Can't answer if you should add them or not...
But if you do - you would get some notifications from Google about that website/domain.
I've only ever seen emails of the "There's an increase in 4xx/5xx errors on site/page(s)"
Macha 3 hours ago [-]
I also get “there were crawl errors”, which upon investigation are for pages that never existed (and I’ve owned the domain for 20 years, so its not a previous owner/operator thing)
By adding your site to there you can get data on how many clicks & impressions your site received on google, what keywords it ranks for etc.
You can also request Google to index your site on GSC as well.
You should probably add your websites to GSC.
shit_game 5 hours ago [-]
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.
I'm not particularly familiar with SEO or the massive black box that is Google Search - is this really as critical as the author makes it seem? I have both .lol and .party domains, both through porkbun (and the TLDs seem to be administrated by Uniregistry and Famous Four Media, respectively), and both are able to be found on Google Search. It seems like this preemtive blacklisting would be the result of some heuristics on Google's end; is .online just one of the "cursed" TLDs like .tk?
swiftcoder 5 hours ago [-]
> is this really as critical as the author makes it seem?
It is critical in the sense that if you want to appeal the decision in a case like this, it will go much better if you pre-verified that you own the domain.
(I don't think it has much effect on google search placement at all)
kyle-rb 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I'm guessing the TLD was the main signal, based on other comments linking to a thread about "Pinggy", who was also using a .online. The fact that Namecheap is giving them out for free means they probably are more scammy on average.
I've also never added domains to Google Search Console and haven't had blacklisting issue other than with a free .ml (another "cursed" TLD) site that was by default assumed to be spam by Facebook Messenger.
It's unfortunate that this category exists, but I don't share the OP's .com purism; I've used a mix of TLDs and even the cheap ones like .fyi and .cc haven't come under extra scrutiny as far as I can tell.
__MatrixMan__ 4 hours ago [-]
We need to rethink the web so that fewer third parties are involved in things that seem on the surface to be an A-B conversation. To say nothing of the trustworthiness of those parties, having them involved at all is needlessly brittle.
bhartzer 59 minutes ago [-]
Are you 100 percent certain that the domain name wasn't registered before and then got on the blacklist because of prior misuse?
It's quite possible that the domain you chose was registered previously and dropped because the previous owner misused it and burned that domain. The .ONLINE extension has been around for several years now.
ssiddharth 17 minutes ago [-]
I can't be 100% sure but googling showed nothing. My site was up for almost 6 weeks with no issues. I used the domain for Apple's review process too. No issues at all.
NewJazz 24 minutes ago [-]
I feel like google should be sophisticated enough to tell when a domain has expired and gone up for auction/resale?
thayne 1 hours ago [-]
Google should really be seeing some anti-trust action for requiring you to create an account with them on their search console in order to contest being added to a blacklist used by all the major browsers.
2 hours ago [-]
trey-jones 3 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry that the author got bitten by this. But .com purism is funny to me. I only buy GTLDs for personal projects, and I've never had a problem before. But then, I've never bought .online.
zadikian 4 hours ago [-]
But was this because it's .online? I got one and it was fine.
The only issue was the usual trap with all Namecheap domains: They tell you it's all set, and it works, until they randomly email you a week later asking for email verification. If you don't do that promptly, they suspend your domain until you trigger a resend. Which is easy to fix but also strange.
NewJazz 2 hours ago [-]
The blog post details that the TLD registry, Radix, decided that getting put on Google's safe browsing list means they put a serverhold on your domain, which prevents you from getting off the safe browsing list.
So yes, this appears to be a TLD- (or at least registry-) specific issue.
MattSayar 3 hours ago [-]
Took me a minute to realize Sid isn't associated with 0xide.computer. Clever domain name!
Getting Google to index my personal site has been a pain. Every other search engine works fine, but ever since I switched the images on my site to .webp (a format created by Google!), my site's content just doesn't get indexed anymore. I've given up since web search traffic matters less and less these days with LLMs, and it only really bothers me when I'm trying to search for my own articles.
ssiddharth 7 minutes ago [-]
Ha, thank you. I spent more time than I'm willing to admit to come up with it.
I use my older, much longer domain for email and identity (it used to be #3 on SERP for "Sid"). This one is just for giggles so I can blog in peace without affecting the main one.
eappleby 5 hours ago [-]
Unfortunate story. It wasn't clear to me that the .online TLD led to Google blacklisting the site. Why did you think that was connected?
dathinab 5 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't Google Safe Search backlisting the side (I mean that also is a problem, but a very different one).
The problem is the vanity domain registrar Radix using that as a reason to _put the whole domain on hold, including all subdomains, email entries etc._
This means:
- no way to fix accidental wrong "safe search" blacklisting
- if it was your main domain no mails with all the things it entails
- no way to redirect API servers, apps etc. to a different domain. In general it's not just the website which it's down it's all app, APIs, or anything you had on that domain
Google Safe search is meant to help keep chrome users safe from phishing etc. it is fundamentally not designed to be a Authority Institute which can unilaterally dictate which domains are no longer usable at all.
Like basically what Radix did was a full domain take down of the kind you normally need a judge order for... cause by a safe browsing helper service misfiring. That is is RALLY bad, and they refuse to fix their mistake, too.
You normally don't have _that_ level of fundamentally broken internal processes absurdity with the more reputable TLD operators (which doesn't mean you don't have that in edge cases, but this isn't an edge case this is there standard policy).
Avamander 2 hours ago [-]
At the same time given the already terrible reputation of such vanity TLDs, being this hard on abuse might be the only survivable way.
That's not me saying there shouldn't be a warning and a recourse, but the time-to-profit for domain abuse is really short so anti-abuse actions have to be quick.
NewJazz 22 minutes ago [-]
This isn't being hard on abuse though, this is being lazy and incompetent.
NikolaNovak 5 hours ago [-]
My understanding from the article is that because the registrar for this domain is using Google safe browsing for their domain suspension, something that a) shouldn't be the case and b) isn't the case for other, perhaps more mainstream TLDs
eappleby 6 minutes ago [-]
Right. Sounds more like a registrar problem than a TLD problem. They should change the article title to "Never buy a domain from Radix"
nguyenkien 5 hours ago [-]
The registrar suspense domain because it on Google blocked list. And Google refuse to review the ban because he can't prove he own that domain (because it suspended :D).
palad1n 5 hours ago [-]
Are there any other TLDs that are of this ilk or are we saying nothing but .com will ever do? Or .org, perhaps?
Macha 3 hours ago [-]
.com, .org have legacy contracts eliminating the shenanigans they can pull. .org did try get out of restrictions on hiking the price on renewals, but weren’t successful. So all my domains are either .com, .org or the TLD for the country where I live (of course, how trustworthy your local ccTLD is varies)
kristofferR 5 hours ago [-]
It's not exactly the same, but a lot of owners of weird TLDs have got hit with insane renewal fees,.hosting went from $20/y to $300/y overnight.
Also, some TLDs directly speculate on having very low prices for the first year or two, then 10x it on year 2 or 3.
ectospheno 2 hours ago [-]
Buy all 10 years you can when you get the domain. Renew yearly. When they pull silliness like this you have at least 9 years to migrate.
DetroitThrow 5 hours ago [-]
I would love a list of Radix TLDs or registrars who do this Safe Browsing ban with no appeal.
Also, go figure Namecheap works with these morons.
> Freenom’s terms of service allowed them to “cancel” a free domain at any time without warning. Users reported for years that as soon as their free site started getting significant traffic (and becoming valuable), Freenom would reclaim the domain and fill it with ads, effectively hijacking the user’s hard work.
palad1n 5 hours ago [-]
Oh, sh!t, I used to own a .tk! Have no idea what happened to it.
sznio 5 hours ago [-]
At least for the last few years of Freenom, you could only get a domain for up to a year. Once that lapsed, they parked it and you had to pay to extend it further.
kotaKat 5 hours ago [-]
Some of these TLD also get thrown under weird arbitrary blacklists by security vendors.
Sorry, can’t buy a frame.work laptop because that’s a “Malicious TLD”, according to the folks at ZScaler.
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
blenderob 5 hours ago [-]
Why was the domain blacklisted though? What can we do to prevent blacklisting in the first place?
xp84 5 hours ago [-]
Most definitely nothing, as no sentient humans are probably involved in the process except possibly malicious people that report a site in bad faith.
voidUpdate 4 hours ago [-]
If the domain is being given away for free, it will be used a lot for scams etc, so a lot of systems will just start blocking it immediately. When I got my first domain, I used one of the free TLDs and my university blocked it completely due to it being a scam. Not for any of the content on it, just the TLD being commonly used by scammers
zadikian 4 hours ago [-]
Probably cause of things like "southwest.online"
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
That’s my question. I’ve launched many fresh websites that have not been marked as unsafe by Google. If they were habitually doing this, there would be far more reports of it.
I suspect there is something the author is not telling us.
bilkow 3 hours ago [-]
Even if the false-positive rate is very small (e.g. 0.01%), you probably won't be affected, but more than a hundred thousand of websites would be and that would still be an issue. I have no idea how big is the false-positive rate.
There are many of reports of the same happening to other sites, some of the top ones (you can find many more by searching HN for "google safe browsing"):
From false alarm to something previous owner did. Remember domain is recycled.
ssiddharth 5 hours ago [-]
The domain has no history as far as I could search and the site was up for almost 6 weeks with no issues before it was nuked. I used it with Apple's review process!
kccqzy 4 hours ago [-]
The big scary red warning page should at least tell you it’s phishing or malware or something else. OP didn’t have a screenshot of that. You can easily go to a safe browsing test site yourself at testsafebrowsing.appspot.com and find that Google does divulge the category of the blacklisting.
OP says:
> no gore or violence or anything of that sort
That’s not even the right criteria. OP is confused about Google Safe Browsing vs Safe Search.
ssiddharth 4 hours ago [-]
I just wanted to cover all the bases. The site has one outgoing link to the App Store and 3 screenshots.
kccqzy 4 hours ago [-]
That sounds like a competitor of yours manually submitting your site to Google for “impersonating” them or something. Anyone can submit URLs to Google to suggest it be blocked: https://safebrowsing.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/ Perhaps some overworked underpaid analyst had a lapse of judgement. I’m sorry that this happens to you.
Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago [-]
wait, this actually makes things sound even worse because anyone who might not like your product can add it to google and google can sometimes be none the wiser and then add it to phishing link which could then lead to their domains (ie. any TLD's hosted by radix.website) being lost in void essentially unless you have verified the domain in google analytics and even then I would consider this whole situation to be so messy.
At this point, NEVER buy any radix.website TLD domains.
I am seeing pinggy had the same issue with their .online domain and this actually definitely caused hurt to their business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40195410 (I saw this post from their comment in here referencing it)
also I don't recommend using a .xyz domain for email sending. These domains are often marked as spam, and some email providers don’t support them.
siliconunit 4 hours ago [-]
tried to roll my own email server on a .xyz domain...basically a big no go, couple of emails went through, then nothing, just a black hole. Thanks corpos and the safety theatre.
bombcar 4 hours ago [-]
Call me a luddite but if it isn't one of the original big TLDs, a country TLD, or similar, I just don't trust it for anything serious.
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago [-]
I believe that .de domains are pretty cool (written another comment about it) but .de are $3.25 for registration and .de is the second most common after .com so from webatla, I see approx 16 million domains.
I don't think that they could ban emails from .de for what its worth.
Personally I like .in domains too. Makes more sense to me because I am well Indian and we all use it quite frequently/sort of intutitively know fwiw but if I just want a domain for email purposes for cheap. Honestly, .de could be good.
https://tld-list.com/ [Try seeing the cheapest renewal rate with top level TLD and ignore .storage which costs 465$ for registration smh]
Some other domains like .top exist as well in this league imo but .de is one of the best if you can find a relevant domain in .de
bradgessler 51 minutes ago [-]
I got og.plus that expands to OpenGraphPlus.com.
At first I was stoked to have a two letter domain, but then I looked into it and learned these companies will get you hooked with a low initial price, then jack up the prices as the domain becomes established.
Quite the grift. My plan is to tread lightly on that domain and be ready to back away from it when the rent seekers move in.
You’d think there would be some sort of rules to the neutrality of these TLD administrators, but nope.
The second time around I wised up and go ogplus.net for an API domain instead of ogplus.media. I’ll take neutrality over vanity any day.
_el1s7 4 hours ago [-]
This is one of the pains of centralization. And honestly, it could happen with any TLD.
4 hours ago [-]
ocdtrekkie 5 hours ago [-]
A great reminder even if you aren't a Google customer, Google's love of banning people with no notice or recourse will still screw you over.
ssiddharth 5 hours ago [-]
I'm shocked there was no notification, or alert, of any kind. One moment you're there, the next, you're gone and no one will talk to you. Insanity.
Citizen_Lame 5 hours ago [-]
That’s not fair. Google has no hesitation in banning its own customers either. Combine this with private equity vultures (namecheap) and shitty registrar, you are always one AI token away from being banned.
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago [-]
Yea regarding namecheap/spaceship (their sort of subsidiary company). I once created a tool which could find me a cool short .de domain out of curiosity and I tried using namecheap bulk's domain feature.
It said that https://aid.de was available. I was out of the moon happy (silly me) thinking that its such a good domain or something.
Then I saw aid.de available in namecheap for around 2$ ish but for some reason I took a bath and hten later it showed 10$ ish.
Okay, I then went to spaceship and it also showed me aid.de available. I then took my card and signed up
Well the transaction took place but got refunded. It said that there was an issue or something and got insta refunded
Silly me, thought that the payment had issues and decided to do payment again. This time though my refund had to wait 10 days to come back because of international laws.
Now I had only very little amount stuck btu I can see someone losing substantial money/having it stuck
I contacted their support and they told me that both namecheap/spaceship have a bug where some domains show available when they aren't.
I haven't checked but since the amount was like 1-2$ now but this whole thing really soured my relationship with namecheap/spaceship.
For context, before this, I also had a hate/love relationship with namecheap because once I bought a domain with them using crypto and also bought their vpn which was like 20 cents basically
It had auto renewal on and my domain costed 1$ but crypto payment requires 10$ minimum and the VPN charged me money from that.
Luckily I had spotted before the 2nd month and to be honest, like only 1 month 10 days or something and I urged the namecheap company to do what's right (in that moment because a lapse of judgement had been made from my side/error and I hoped that namecheap could realize it and do "right" instead given that the cost was only around 10$ fwiw)
After waiting for many days, they finally did what's right and gave me my credits back as a one off thing and I then turned off their domains.
I also used a crypto swap thing to convert b/w usdc and btc (what namecheap accepts) and I had an issue of doing two times payment after the timeperiod of btc payment (15 mins) but they also fixed that issue by adding the credits manually when I raised the issue.
Their customer support at times can be good but the platform itself is a little shady in my opinion. For the VPN thing if I remember correctly, the auto renew was written with grey and I genuinely didn't read it without my specs.
I am gonna keep my domain with namecheap that I have and if I get deals from namecheap/spaceship then use them, but for individual domains without deals, hell no.
I know that many people don't like the centralized nature of cloudflare but cloudflare is a good thing for domains :/
I personally just buy domains from wherever's there's a deal right now as some domains I have are some that I keep for only 1 year or similar.
To be honest, if I want to pick a domain-thing, I'd rather pick the one which is the cheapest or if not, then the one which only sells domains
I just looked at porkbun and they only sell domain related things and at best mail (they also have a deal with proton which can be interesting to many)
Porkbun is also cheap so I think I would recommend porkbun/cloudflare.
I haven't decided if I will transfer my domains from namecheap or not but their customer service is nice but the same can't be said for their service sometimes in my opinion.
e40 5 hours ago [-]
Shit, didn’t know that namecheap was acquired by PE! Very sad news. Is there any registrar left that isn’t crap?
jgwil2 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure how you feel about them as a company, but I use Cloudflare because they sell domains at cost.
Citizen_Lame 5 hours ago [-]
Porkbun is not bad, Gandi has fallen as well.
4 hours ago [-]
rationalist 4 hours ago [-]
Dynadot
hyperionultra 4 hours ago [-]
Having .online already 5 years. No problems with email or website. Don’t understand that blog post. More problems can be with .xyz
basilikum 5 hours ago [-]
This sounds like something ICANN should prevent. Is this not against ICANN rules? These fuckers ban emoji domains, maybe they should ban registries from arbitrarily stealing domains with no recourse. Maybe write to them and see if they can move something.
Tepix 5 hours ago [-]
I blame both the registry and Google.
If you were a lawyer, you could have fun with this.
Btw, perhaps unrelatedly, we had a domain marked as unsafe by Google as well for no particular reason.
CodeCompost 5 hours ago [-]
Last year, my registrar wanted €64,99 to extend an online domain which I had created for fun.
No thanks.
ryan42 5 hours ago [-]
yeah same here. I canceled my account on name.com because I had previously obtained a .art domain maybe for ~15-20 USD / yr. Then they wanted $50 USD a year to extend it. No thanks, dropped the domain and moved to namecheap
account42 4 hours ago [-]
If the price increase was from the registrar and not the registry you should have been able to move to a different registrar with saner prices.
mythrwy 3 hours ago [-]
Namecheap does the same thing though, at least they did with an .online domain I have.
drcongo 5 hours ago [-]
Google have way too much power to mess people's lives up. Especially for an organisation with basically zero customer support.
fortran77 3 hours ago [-]
Never use a “free” domain is a better rule. Even if there were no technical or administrative issues, nobody trusts them.
kkl 2 hours ago [-]
I could also buy that the free domains were ran up by scammers which could have caused some of the hair trigger Safe Browsing denylisting.
dzonga 3 hours ago [-]
why not just buy a .co.xx (country) or simply .com / .net
and if hectic maybe .io
OutOfHere 3 hours ago [-]
The logic doesn't automatically extend to other TLDs unless they too are owned by the same firm. Alternative TLDs are often preferable because they're so much cheaper than wasting money on a .com, etc.
Macha 3 hours ago [-]
Most alternative tlds are more expensive than .com after first year teaser rates expire though
OutOfHere 2 hours ago [-]
There are various gTLD that are cheaper. For example, .top is great and among the cheapest. It however is falsely maligned by those with small brains who stereotype things.
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago [-]
I like .top domains as well but .de might make more sense.
Considering .top domains have cheap registration and renewal. To me, it does feel as if .top are very speculative. I liked to search random things in tld-list to find unique-word.<any tld> so like random.top but my past experience says that .top domains are bought quite a lot/very speculative.
If possible I like .de but I think that .top are fine too. Both are great for what its worth.
> It however is falsely maligned by those with small brains who stereotype things.
I didn't know about this, can you please elaborate more about it?
OutOfHere 2 hours ago [-]
> I didn't know about this, can you please elaborate more about it?
Those with small brains who stereotype things often claim that .top is used only for scams, and that if a site is using .top, it means they're a scam site. In making this foolish assertion, they confuse P(A|B) with P(B|A). To continue, see the ChatGPT share 699f272e-475c-8012-ae9a-a89bd136fd01
> it does feel as if .top are very speculative
Sure, they can be, but again it's no reason to stereotype. They can be or become whatever they want to be.
Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago [-]
https://tld-list.com/ Try looking at this website with cheapest renewal rate and removing second country TLD (so only Top level)
In my opinion, .de , .ovh , .uk or personally my country's .in (yes OVH has their own TLD that you can use)
.de is one of the more interesting domains to me personally even though I am not german.
account42 4 hours ago [-]
> Update: Within 40 minutes of posting this on HN, the site has been removed from Google's Safe Search blacklist. Thank you, unknown Google hero! I've emailed Radix to remove the darn serverHold.
I wouldn't party too soon - from my experience getting something removed from Google's libel machine doesn't mean the same process that put it there in the first place is fixed and it you will most likely go through the same thing again and again.
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.
This is just another way how Google has inserted themselves as the gatekeeper of the web.
ranger_danger 5 hours ago [-]
One time I bought a .dev domain, which is/was run by Google, and after missing the renewal deadline by less than 24 hours, the renewal price jumped from less than $30, to $800.
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago [-]
Is this even legal?
dangus 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t know that the advice is solid in terms of never buying an alternate TLD.
swiftcoder 5 hours ago [-]
There are always the actual country TLDs, which (mostly) have specific regulations governing their use, and an actual government body to appeal to in case of unsolvable issues like this
metalliqaz 3 hours ago [-]
Top of HN. Well, I guess you could say that Radix's strategy to give away domains backfired spectacularly.
3 hours ago [-]
cmsp12 5 hours ago [-]
honestly all of these weird tld are expensive in the long term i dont see the point of getting them
elAhmo 4 hours ago [-]
Another case of Google extorting users and showing mafia-like behaviour.
mystraline 5 hours ago [-]
So, how is this not libel by Google? The claim was that you were running an "unsafe site". Its their job to prove that, and not just "black box says so".
And you have system and reputational damages.
Go for small claims suit, $5000. It'll cost more than that for their attorney to go to your jurisdiction.
otterley 4 hours ago [-]
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Claiming a website is “unsafe” is an opinion.
(IAAL, but this is not legal advice. Consult a licensed attorney for legal advice.)
dathinab 4 hours ago [-]
because google safe browsing is only supposed to display a "not safe to browse" warning when using chrome browsers (and maybe some other browsers) wich you can (theoretically) dismiss(1)
it's not meant to have any other consequences
so basically what happens is that because of hearsay of google thinking you site is not bad Radix does what normally should involve a judge order (taking down the whole domain)
(1): Yes that still would cause damages on any site with customers, but like way less and way more fixable then what happened here.
moralestapia 5 hours ago [-]
This is libel, indeed.
tucnak 5 hours ago [-]
The .com purist advice is sound but you're not getting four-letter domain names that way, and in some ccTLD zones you can still.
I was price-gouged out of owning a single, rare .icu domain when renewal fee for it went from 20 usd to 220 usd overnight, just for this one domain... I'm pretty sure it's not Gandi, but the TLD opetator, because other .icu domains I've had were fine. I decided to eventually abandon them all anyway. Moved away from Gandi later when they started doing gouging of their own, too.
What is HN's opinion on Dynadot?
palad1n 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, what the heck happened to Gandi? It used to be my go-to, but nowadays... yikes!
timpera 5 hours ago [-]
They got sold to private equity, unfortunately. I switched to Bookmyname (by Scaleway) for some TLDs, and Infomaniak for others.
aitchnyu 5 hours ago [-]
Can we trust Cloud registrars like Bookmyname/Scaleway, Amazon Route 53, Cloudflare more than Namecheap, Gandi and co?
timpera 4 hours ago [-]
I think that it's a good thing when domains aren't their main source of income. It gives them more incentive to provide good, stable experience and pricing.
Macha 3 hours ago [-]
More than what Gandi was? No.
More than what Gandi is now? 100%
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago [-]
Wait, If I remember correctly, I think its possible to now buy domains from scaleway directly within their interface
Could be very interesting for the people who love/host on scaleway.
Scaleway is a good company fwiw imo.
Citizen_Lame 5 hours ago [-]
Private equity cancer, same as Namecheap.
anilakar 4 hours ago [-]
Reddit's r/namecheap is also full of horror stories.
squeefers 3 hours ago [-]
sorry but you cant have a domain if google ban it? how does this work?
icase 4 hours ago [-]
“never buy a non-.(com|net|org) domain”
ftfy
bombcar 4 hours ago [-]
I agree, but if I ever get a chance at .edu, .mil, or .gov I'm gonna take it.
5 hours ago [-]
soco 5 hours ago [-]
Enshittification at its peak (or is it at its peak already?)
FroshKiller 5 hours ago [-]
There is no peak, because it's a hole, and we can always dig deeper.
wangzhongwang 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
wordsnaking 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
twapi 5 hours ago [-]
OP shouldn't blame .online registry operator Radix.
post-it 4 hours ago [-]
It's literally 100% Radix's fault?
hobs 4 hours ago [-]
Because? It seems like the blame is very squarely on their shoulders.
nickweb 5 hours ago [-]
Hot Take: the proactive action of the registrar here is probably more beneficial than the number of false positives captured. If the registrar is aware that Google is hot on blocking potentially harmful sites, it's right that they take action expeditiously.
The bigger problem is the unbanning - for which there should be a better system, probably that should take the form of the registrar having a short grace period to aid in the Google stuff (DNS verification etc.) with additional checks by the registrar to make sure it's not being used for spam/malicious content.
The other point being why was Google banning you so quickly? This is the opaque part. Was the site reported? Was there some URL hijinks? That's the thing you'll probably never find out.
If the registrar tracks this information, a possibly helpful course of action would be to notify or warn the domain owner that they are on the list.
In the modern adversarial web, I do not want a registrar that proactively disables my domain because of some third party report.
forgotaccount3 5 hours ago [-]
> The bigger problem is the unbanning
The was my first thought as well. Yes, using the Safe Browsing list feels wrong, but I don't know enough to speak definitively in that regards. However wouldn't a relatively simple solution be that if a registrar is choosing to use some third party's list of banned DNS entries that the registrar then also implement sufficient unblocked components that will allow people to be unbanned from that third party?
> Add a DNS TXT or a CNAME record.
I haven't had a use-case for a TXT record come up yet, but isn't it low risk enough to allow domain owners to continue to configure TXT records even if the registrar wants to ban configuring other record types? Then the person in the article could prove ownership and could then get off of the third party ban list that the registrar was utilizing.
ndriscoll 4 hours ago [-]
DNS can be thought of as a distributed KV store with built in caching suitable for low write high read use cases, so TXT makes sense for that. e.g. basic feature flagging can be accomplished that way with basically no work to set it up assuming you were already using DNS.
basilikum 4 hours ago [-]
The registry cannot ban individual record types. That is not how DNS works.
The registry only maintains a list of NameServers associated with the domain (and records for DNSSEC zone signing). Registries have nothing to do with regular records. They only record who defines those records.
roblabla 5 hours ago [-]
There is _some amount_ of justification to ban TXT. There have been a few cases of C2 servers using DNS to send instructions to malware, so letting TXT slip through the cracks would still allow for that.
Now whether this downside justifies the massive problem it causes on false positives...
jerf 4 hours ago [-]
TXT can't be banned. There are several RFCs that require TXT records, such as DKIM configuration, DMARC configuration, and it is extensively used for verification by things like AWS SES, Microsoft Office, and all kinds of things. It's built into many standards and used by all kinds of other entities for all kinds of perfectly legitimate things.
dathinab 4 hours ago [-]
yes, but in that cases we are on the "this (should) involve a criminal investigation" level not on a "Google Safe Search" doesn't trust you level
dathinab 4 hours ago [-]
they didn't "just" take down the site, they took down the whole domain
Even google safe search isn't blocking you site per-se, it just adds a very annoying "this site is not safe" dialog you can "somehow" bypass (but most people wont and don't know how).
Like if this where the main site of a company (which it very much could be) this would also have taken down mail, all APIs, all Apps relying on such APIs.
so no this is absurdly unreasonable actions
that they seem to neither know nor care that this makes it impossible to "fix" false positives with google isn't helpful put this in the area of high levels of negligence which can get you into a lot of trouble in the EU
Rendered at 19:04:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
This goes right to the top for me, along the ubiquitous "please verify your account" emails with NO OPTION to click "that's NOT me, somebody misused my email". Either people who do this for a living have no clue how to do their job, or, depressingly more likely, their goals are just completely misaligned to mine as a consumer and it's all about "removing friction" (for them).
One of the requests was for a business card ... I haven't had a business card made with my name on it in 20 years.
The amazing thing is that I bet scammers working this system can get through this faster than I can.
At this point they should just give me control because no way would some scammer fail this much at this ungodly process.
I constantly remove it whenever Gmail sends me the notification.
I can't help but think there is some method for the other person to steal my Gmail account if I never remove my email as their backup.
I get TONS of emails of people trying to join services that use my address as a "fake email".
I hope it's because I have small simple email and not because they want to steal it.
“We’ll be right over.”
Later, after OP told the user and they failed to change their address, OP logged into the site and changed their password, putting an end to the spam they were receiving from the user’s actions.
I don’t have an ethical qualm with this. He didn’t want to sign up for the service. Someone else signed his email address up for it. Legally, I can’t imagine that being prosecutable.
Consider that the “imposter” starts uploading child porn or something, and it’s on an account registered to your address. I think it’s perfectly A-OK to tell the service that it’s not be using the thing and I want them to close the account someone created in my name.
Not jsmith, but kstrauser. Not Gmail, but Yahoo. And I still get banking docs, and HOA meeting minutes, and birthday party invitations, and Facebook logins, and other bizarre random stuff.
I have so many questions. I’ve typoed my address before and had to correct it. That’s understandable. But to wholly invent one and say, yep, that looks good even though I’ve never used it before, I’m sure it’ll be fine! I just don’t get it.
I've had this happen several times... There's a lawyer I used for a dispute a few years ago, and they now have another "First Last" name that matches mine, and he keeps emailing me... my reply, "Wrong Michael, again..."
It's kind of annoying all around... I need to get off my butt and get a few things shifted, then just start relying on my own MTA again, instead of forwarding *@mydomain to my gmail to. I'll still wildcard the domain, but to a single mailbox on my own mta.
I'm not sure how bad the spam might get though... I've had a test account on my mta for a couple years and it hasn't really recived any... my wildcard accounts either... I use the wildcard so I can do things like walmart@mydomain, to see if/where an email address is sold/leaked from regarding spam.
They may well be looking for targets.
>You send it to johnsmith@gmail.com
>You receive a new message, it says "Hey, can you please stop using my email address?"
>You're johnsmith@gmail.com, you only know that's the address that's being used
PD: I know that if he resets the password he can get the other address, but this scenario was funny in my head.
I got hit by this from google.
1. Gmail added requirement for 2FA on my primary email address. Since I had no phone number on file, it instead used my recovery email address. Thankfully, I still had the password for my recovery email address, and could continue to (2).
2. Gmail added requirement for 2FA on my recovery email address. Since I had no phone number on file, it instead used by recovery's recovery email address. Thankfully, I still had the password for my recovery's recovery email address, and could continue to (3).
3. SBC Communications no longer exists, as it merged with AT&T in 2005. Email addresses at `sbcglobal.net` were maintained up until around 2021-ish, when they started purging any mailboxes that had been idle for more than 12 months.
Fundamentally, this was google's fault for misusing a recovery email for 2FA. Unfortunately, the only way to fix it would be to contact AT&T, asking them to pretty please update the email settings for somebody who hadn't been a paying customer for two decades.
I wonder if finding people responsible and spamming then with their own service emails would make the team care enough to fix this. But of course that's mostly dubious, probably illegal, and shouldn't be a responsibility of some vigilante hacker
When pointing out that legal parallels exist, to enact a solution, must I envision that solution?
Malicious in-attention then, by the profit driven org? :)
They can't just say "we don't want to deal with small timers who will not pay us big bucks doing nonstandard things" without pushback but they can write the policy so that a huge fraction of those use cases fall into some crack that can only be got out of by incurring the kind of expense that's a non-starter for those users. Your municipal code is rife with examples of this.
I do wish there was a requirement for some sort of "no" button that would stop sending sign up requests entirely.
I run a few websites that accept an email address (all noncommercial, I have no interest in spamming anyone). One of them is the "contact me" feature on my personal website. To prevent spam, I had people just put in their email address and it'll automatically email them my email address. This works perfectly to this day, haven't got a single spam email on any of the addresses I've handed out, but the ratio of emails sent out to received is probably 50 to 1. Why would anyone put an email address in there if not to contact me? I've been wondering if it's used by mail bombing services, idk if that's a thing but I know of the concept of annoying someone by signing them up for a hundred newsletters. My site doesn't send recurring emails, though, and it doesn't allow putting more than two email addresses per month in, per /24 IPv4 block (and even more strict on v6). It's useless for mail bombing services but the (presumed) bots keep submitting a steady rate of maybe 2 new email addresses per day, each time from a new ISP in a random country. No email addresses is ever submitted twice. No rhyme or reason to it. If anyone can make sense of this, that might help me in stopping the abuse
That doesn't prevent a huge majority of them from sending you notification emails all the time even if you never verify.
Relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/1279/
Yeah, I get the same regularly.
how naive. most of the world work to survive, not because its their dream vocation. they probably dont care as much as you do
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40195410
.store .online .tech .site .fun .pw .host .press .space .uno .website
https://radix.website/
So, might as well to block entire TLDs and never buy a domain under those TLDs
Scam websites will use any TLD in my experience. Based on the ones that made it to my Google search results, .it and .info are the TLDs I should be blocking. When I search for "free roblox cash", most websites are .com. "Free robux" also brings forth a few .ca websites. "Free steam gift card" leads to .org and .com.
Aren't they only affordable for the first year though?
I use them when I need a random domain.
When I first bought an .online, it was not cheap
Et voilà ... ! this is precisely the slippery slope I warned about a decade ago. The indirect censorship becomes direct censorship, defeating all the arguments about the morality of such a list. And:
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.
Yet more monopolistic power to Google.
The external people treating these lists as absolute truths and automatically taking domains down are the ones at fault here. Google didn't grab power, Radix gave it to them without asking.
What Radix does has no impact on Google, and I don't see how Google would be incentivized to pressure Radix. So I don't see how to make the leap blaming Google for Radix's incompetence. Yes, Google should recognize the risk of this happening, but they'd have to balance that against the rewards (or at least what they consider rewards)
And Google has the right to publish a list, there should be more lists not less. But Google was at fault for not correcting their blacklist. Until the article appeared on Hacker News, this was not 0% on Google. A small, correctable mistake, but they deserved a tiny bit of blame.
If all it takes to be taken from the blacklist was to temporarily delete the NS record - the list would be useless against malware.
What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?
Spyware filters used to boast about how many domains they filter out because they wanted you to buy their filters instead of someone else's. By the time they hit a false positive, they've already sold a year's subscription to that customer.
The incentives are different.
Step 2: Alter filters to mark newly-registered domains and low-traffic websites as "potentially harmful".
Step 3: Charge a lot of money for "business verification" - which gives them a fancy badge somewhere and incidentally makes their website trustworthy in the eyes of your filter.
Step 4: Profit!
The Big Tech cartel has been doing this pretty successfully with email (see the weekly "Don't self-host your email" posts), why should we assume they are doing anything different with browser-based website blocking?
Indeed. I was going to register an account somewhere the other day, and the signup form had a list of acceptable email domains. Gmail, Protonmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Icloud... a few others. It's not the first time that's happened to me. Sad.
EDIT: Didn't even include Fastmail, who's pretty big after all. They host MX for my domain, so I could have "circumvented" it that way with their disposable address feature, but nope.
- They make almost all their money on advertising
- They have deep ties to the US intelligence agencies (To the point that a Google employee managed the appointment calendar for our Secretary of State a few years ago!)
So, how would these incentives apply to their Internet blacklist?
- If you are parking lots of Google ad spam, they are taking a cut of your revenue, so they have an incentive to take you off the list (evidence and testimony from the antitrust trial documented ongoing fraud in every layer of Google's vertical ad monopoly)
- If you are hosting something the intelligence agencies dislike / are neutral to / like, that'll impact your presence on the list.
There is also the headache of PR issues when they get a false NEGATIVE. “Google didn’t protect grandma from this scam website!”
There is no incentive for adding false positives to lists of malicious websites.
Chrome is big enough that a website owner can't afford a false positive on their malware list, just like they can't afford to have all their email end up in spam for all Gmail users.
Due to their near-monopoly Google also has no incentive to avoid adding false positives to their blocklist - provided they don't accidentally block high-profile targets. And if a CxO is screaming over your shoulder that your website has been blocked, arguments about "false positives" aren't very compelling: they'll just demand you move off the "shitty basement provider" and switch to "proper hosting, like the Google Cloud"...
that whiny bullshit about somebody elses website? you dont have to rely on a website or app. either you need their monopoly because you cant do it yourself, or you have options.... in both cases the whining is not needed
It doesn't really matter that it's Google. It could have been Microsoft, or PAN, or McAfee or some fly-by-night vendor. The problem was Radix taking the list as iron-clad truth and disabling the domain without any notification or way to resolve the issue.
Libel suits can be financially catastrophic, so even a tiny false positive rate could present risk that disincentivizes producing such software at all.
And a threat detection mechanism that has a 0.0% false positive rate is conservative to the point of being nearly useless.
Scalable systems need to use heuristics to catch threats. Needing concrete evidence in every case means that an enormously higher amount of malicious resources will not be flagged.
There is a policy argument as to the right balance of concerns here. But there is a clear trade-off to make.
In other words, if you can't deal with the false positives in a timely manner. You SHOULD be liable for the damages.
I can't build a budget car put together in an unsafe manner. Then complain I can't compete due to all the peoples cars crashing and blowing up and suing me.
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
No, it's not.
You're welcome to cite case law if you want to insist. Otherwise, unsafe (in the context of infosec) has a definition of likely or able to cause harm or malfunction. Something that is provable or falsifiable with evidence.
I reported a falsely flagged site repeatedly for weeks with absolutely no action from them.
Mozilla and Microsoft both did actually remove the warnings after the reports (Edge and Firefox stopped displaying the warning). Google did not. Google strong armed me into registering for google products, like a fucking bastard of a company.
This was the moment I went from "I don't love google anymore" to "Google can get fucked".
I wish them bankruptcy and every damn legal consequence that is possible to enforce.
For clarity I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but what means sense to the layperson (including experts in a particular field) is sometimes at odds with what the law says.
If the opinion is meant to be just another opinion, then it shouldn't cause any blacklisting of any sorts anywhere.
I agree with this! The registrar should not have triggered a suspension because of this. They're not obligated to, and the two processes should be decoupled.
No.
The source should be more careful. It's the equivalent of a renowned newspaper printing warning a restaurant being unsafe to visit. Should the customers' willingness to visit be magically decoupled from this opinion?
Fuck Google.
This is absolutely libel. They put a big fucking red banner on top of my site, telling the world that it's unsafe, using all the authority they have as one of the largest tech companies in the world.
In my case - it was a jellyfin instance I'd stood up to host family videos of my kids for my parents.
It was not compromised, and showed only a login page. I reported it as a false flag repeatedly, for weeks, with Google doing jack fucking shit.
Only after signing up in their search console and registering the site did the warning disappear.
They are abusively forcing people into their products. Fuck Google.
In case it wasn't entirely clear - Google can get fucked. Fuck Google.
“unsafe” is a term that is both broader and more vague, so I would consider it opinion unless backed up by appropriate facts (like “contains CSAM”, “contains malware”, and so forth).
Except when it isn't. CSAM may be easier to define and identify than pornography, but there still exists material that treads a moral grey area.
What you can't do is imply non-public knowledge, aka "I heard from my cousin who works in law enforcement that Kyle murdered a hobo when he was 12 but the records were sealed", or state specific facts that can be proven true or false: "Kyle murdered a hobo on September 11, 2018 out back of the 7-11 in Gainesville, FL"
The standard for libel/slander is much, much higher than people think. It's extremely difficult to meet them, and for public figures, it's almost impossible.
In other countries local TLDs are of course normal (e.g. .it for Italy, .za for South Africa, .cn for China...) and not only used for scam links.
I dont care if their pre-LLM ai says "thingy bad". They are responsible for the scripts or black boxes they control. I dont care if they dont give a reason.
Claiming bad/malicious/etc site is 100% libel. And doubly so, anybody who has been forced to agree to a ToS with binding arbitration should have it removed for libel.
No it isn't. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/defamation
Please, use words correctly.
> a plaintiff must show four things: 1) a false statement purporting to be fact; 2) publication or communication of that statement to a third person; 3) fault amounting to at least negligence; and 4) damages, or some harm caused to the reputation of the person or entity who is the subject of the statement.
They falsely marked the site unsafe[1] on a published list[2], the results weren't checked and couldn't be appealed[3] and OPs site was taken down[4].
Opinions and facts in a legal context usually comes down to who is saying what. Someone personally says "this soup is bad" on a review site = opinion. A news site plastering it on their front page = fact.
A person saying something as an individual is usually considered an opinion. A company doesn't have that same protection.
In the US, it really doesn't matter who says it, the only thing that matters is who it's being said about.
If you are a "public figure" -- which is a much broader category in 1A law than you think -- then in order to prove defamation, you have to prove the thing was false _and_ that the person saying it knew it was false at the time. Not that they were mistaken, not that they were careless, not that they knew later, they deliberately lied and knew they lied as they said it.
If your next question is "how do you prove what someone was thinking", then yes. That is the reason it's nearly impossible.
Same with if they become aware of defamation and fail to retract and make a statement. But newspapers will generally also thoroughly investigate themselves to make sure what they are publishing is true.
It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
The problem is that these gatekeepers of the internet respond to false statements of facts/opinions by so called professionals.
I had cloudflare mark a worker as phishing because a AI "security company" thought my 301 redirect to their clients website was somehow malicious. (url redirects are normal affiliate things)
If the professionals don't understand the difference and cloudflare and google blindly block things, this is scary.
That is more than an opinion. Chrome has a monopoly and should act accordingly. Blocking entry to a website should be a last resort, not just because someone didn't add their website to the whitelist.
I get that's mostly what corporate lawyers argue about, but it's functionally dishonest in this case.
On the flip side of the coin I cannot get a site removed that is a blatant rip off of one of our websites being actively used for invoice redirection fraud.
Considering that getting a domain is a normal part of business these days, this kind of thing should be illegal. Not to mention, why does Google have any say in this?
Because keeping Google happy or at least not bothered is an existential priority for registrars
Which likely is slow without a poke it's reasonable to base the decision on whats available.
That's just how reputation works.
There are lots of domains out there other than .com that are just fine.
If you plan on building a legit site, do not use any of these cheap TLDs.
I know someone with a .org domain, and even they have a ton of issues with false flags on their emails due to not coming from a big email provider. They’ve been blacklisted a couple times and regularly get flagged as spam. I’m surprised he hasn’t given up after dealing with this stuff for 25 years.
These new TLDs, I thought, were supposed to open up more options for regular people to get a domain that is semi-decent. Instead they’re essentially useless. Some of the prices are also still insane, due to assumed “premium” status or domain squatters.
There has to be a better way to police this stuff.
Free is good, but sometimes it's not.
I had the same experience while buying another TLD. For ~1 month, certain people whose ISP "helpfully" had "safe browsing" features, simply blocked us outright. For being new and different.
The learning for me was that new domains are no longer trusted, and seemingly some vanity domains get even more strict treatment.
especially country level domains, they are not regulated and your register can ignore whatever requirements they have to fullfil
We struggled a lot when we opted for the .online domain for https://pinggy.io urls
Want to set up a new domain for whatever purposes (conference, new product, etc)? Be prepared to spend the first half a year fighting the various blacklists before people can actually reliably connect.
Would make so much sense if you could just have a .well-known/other-domains.txt (or something something DNS) with a list of domain names that should be considered just as trustworthy as your main domain.
It's not even about .online or other weird TLDs, it's just that the domain is new and therefore "not trustworthy". Even worse if you need to use your existing branding on the new domain - instantly flagged as a phishing site everywhere.
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately.
I don't understand. What is Google Search Console, and should I add all my domains there right now?
And yes, you probably should, if only to pre-register your ownership thereof if google ever decides to nuke you from orbit
Google's way of tying real identifies of people to domains, without making it explicit.
Basically, your domain will be weirdly treated by a bunch of entities, none the less Google themselves, if you don't add your domain there (or some other Google property).
Especially with less common TLDs, like .online, they really want to be able to tie it to some identity, so unless you add it there, eventually your domain ends up on some sort of blacklist, in the case of the author it seems they used the "Google Safe Browsing" blacklist to get the author to involve Google somehow.
But if you do - you would get some notifications from Google about that website/domain.
I've only ever seen emails of the "There's an increase in 4xx/5xx errors on site/page(s)"
Was called webmastertools before.
You can also request Google to index your site on GSC as well.
You should probably add your websites to GSC.
I'm not particularly familiar with SEO or the massive black box that is Google Search - is this really as critical as the author makes it seem? I have both .lol and .party domains, both through porkbun (and the TLDs seem to be administrated by Uniregistry and Famous Four Media, respectively), and both are able to be found on Google Search. It seems like this preemtive blacklisting would be the result of some heuristics on Google's end; is .online just one of the "cursed" TLDs like .tk?
It is critical in the sense that if you want to appeal the decision in a case like this, it will go much better if you pre-verified that you own the domain.
(I don't think it has much effect on google search placement at all)
I've also never added domains to Google Search Console and haven't had blacklisting issue other than with a free .ml (another "cursed" TLD) site that was by default assumed to be spam by Facebook Messenger.
It's unfortunate that this category exists, but I don't share the OP's .com purism; I've used a mix of TLDs and even the cheap ones like .fyi and .cc haven't come under extra scrutiny as far as I can tell.
It's quite possible that the domain you chose was registered previously and dropped because the previous owner misused it and burned that domain. The .ONLINE extension has been around for several years now.
The only issue was the usual trap with all Namecheap domains: They tell you it's all set, and it works, until they randomly email you a week later asking for email verification. If you don't do that promptly, they suspend your domain until you trigger a resend. Which is easy to fix but also strange.
So yes, this appears to be a TLD- (or at least registry-) specific issue.
Getting Google to index my personal site has been a pain. Every other search engine works fine, but ever since I switched the images on my site to .webp (a format created by Google!), my site's content just doesn't get indexed anymore. I've given up since web search traffic matters less and less these days with LLMs, and it only really bothers me when I'm trying to search for my own articles.
I use my older, much longer domain for email and identity (it used to be #3 on SERP for "Sid"). This one is just for giggles so I can blog in peace without affecting the main one.
The problem is the vanity domain registrar Radix using that as a reason to _put the whole domain on hold, including all subdomains, email entries etc._
This means:
- no way to fix accidental wrong "safe search" blacklisting
- if it was your main domain no mails with all the things it entails
- no way to redirect API servers, apps etc. to a different domain. In general it's not just the website which it's down it's all app, APIs, or anything you had on that domain
Google Safe search is meant to help keep chrome users safe from phishing etc. it is fundamentally not designed to be a Authority Institute which can unilaterally dictate which domains are no longer usable at all.
Like basically what Radix did was a full domain take down of the kind you normally need a judge order for... cause by a safe browsing helper service misfiring. That is is RALLY bad, and they refuse to fix their mistake, too.
You normally don't have _that_ level of fundamentally broken internal processes absurdity with the more reputable TLD operators (which doesn't mean you don't have that in edge cases, but this isn't an edge case this is there standard policy).
That's not me saying there shouldn't be a warning and a recourse, but the time-to-profit for domain abuse is really short so anti-abuse actions have to be quick.
Also, some TLDs directly speculate on having very low prices for the first year or two, then 10x it on year 2 or 3.
Also, go figure Namecheap works with these morons.
.store, .online, .tech, .site, .fun, .pw, .host, .press, .space, .uno, .website
not sure about other registrars
https://prezkennedy.com/2026/01/15/the-free-domain-trap-the-...
> Freenom’s terms of service allowed them to “cancel” a free domain at any time without warning. Users reported for years that as soon as their free site started getting significant traffic (and becoming valuable), Freenom would reclaim the domain and fill it with ads, effectively hijacking the user’s hard work.
Sorry, can’t buy a frame.work laptop because that’s a “Malicious TLD”, according to the folks at ZScaler.
I suspect there is something the author is not telling us.
There are many of reports of the same happening to other sites, some of the top ones (you can find many more by searching HN for "google safe browsing"):
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33526893
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802366
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675015
OP says:
> no gore or violence or anything of that sort
That’s not even the right criteria. OP is confused about Google Safe Browsing vs Safe Search.
At this point, NEVER buy any radix.website TLD domains.
I am seeing pinggy had the same issue with their .online domain and this actually definitely caused hurt to their business https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40195410 (I saw this post from their comment in here referencing it)
I don't think that they could ban emails from .de for what its worth.
Personally I like .in domains too. Makes more sense to me because I am well Indian and we all use it quite frequently/sort of intutitively know fwiw but if I just want a domain for email purposes for cheap. Honestly, .de could be good.
https://tld-list.com/ [Try seeing the cheapest renewal rate with top level TLD and ignore .storage which costs 465$ for registration smh]
Some other domains like .top exist as well in this league imo but .de is one of the best if you can find a relevant domain in .de
At first I was stoked to have a two letter domain, but then I looked into it and learned these companies will get you hooked with a low initial price, then jack up the prices as the domain becomes established.
Quite the grift. My plan is to tread lightly on that domain and be ready to back away from it when the rent seekers move in.
You’d think there would be some sort of rules to the neutrality of these TLD administrators, but nope.
The second time around I wised up and go ogplus.net for an API domain instead of ogplus.media. I’ll take neutrality over vanity any day.
It said that https://aid.de was available. I was out of the moon happy (silly me) thinking that its such a good domain or something.
Then I saw aid.de available in namecheap for around 2$ ish but for some reason I took a bath and hten later it showed 10$ ish.
Okay, I then went to spaceship and it also showed me aid.de available. I then took my card and signed up
Well the transaction took place but got refunded. It said that there was an issue or something and got insta refunded
Silly me, thought that the payment had issues and decided to do payment again. This time though my refund had to wait 10 days to come back because of international laws.
Now I had only very little amount stuck btu I can see someone losing substantial money/having it stuck
I contacted their support and they told me that both namecheap/spaceship have a bug where some domains show available when they aren't.
I haven't checked but since the amount was like 1-2$ now but this whole thing really soured my relationship with namecheap/spaceship.
For context, before this, I also had a hate/love relationship with namecheap because once I bought a domain with them using crypto and also bought their vpn which was like 20 cents basically
It had auto renewal on and my domain costed 1$ but crypto payment requires 10$ minimum and the VPN charged me money from that.
Luckily I had spotted before the 2nd month and to be honest, like only 1 month 10 days or something and I urged the namecheap company to do what's right (in that moment because a lapse of judgement had been made from my side/error and I hoped that namecheap could realize it and do "right" instead given that the cost was only around 10$ fwiw)
After waiting for many days, they finally did what's right and gave me my credits back as a one off thing and I then turned off their domains.
I also used a crypto swap thing to convert b/w usdc and btc (what namecheap accepts) and I had an issue of doing two times payment after the timeperiod of btc payment (15 mins) but they also fixed that issue by adding the credits manually when I raised the issue.
Their customer support at times can be good but the platform itself is a little shady in my opinion. For the VPN thing if I remember correctly, the auto renew was written with grey and I genuinely didn't read it without my specs.
I am gonna keep my domain with namecheap that I have and if I get deals from namecheap/spaceship then use them, but for individual domains without deals, hell no.
I know that many people don't like the centralized nature of cloudflare but cloudflare is a good thing for domains :/
I personally just buy domains from wherever's there's a deal right now as some domains I have are some that I keep for only 1 year or similar.
To be honest, if I want to pick a domain-thing, I'd rather pick the one which is the cheapest or if not, then the one which only sells domains
I just looked at porkbun and they only sell domain related things and at best mail (they also have a deal with proton which can be interesting to many)
Porkbun is also cheap so I think I would recommend porkbun/cloudflare.
I haven't decided if I will transfer my domains from namecheap or not but their customer service is nice but the same can't be said for their service sometimes in my opinion.
If you were a lawyer, you could have fun with this.
Btw, perhaps unrelatedly, we had a domain marked as unsafe by Google as well for no particular reason.
No thanks.
and if hectic maybe .io
Considering .top domains have cheap registration and renewal. To me, it does feel as if .top are very speculative. I liked to search random things in tld-list to find unique-word.<any tld> so like random.top but my past experience says that .top domains are bought quite a lot/very speculative.
If possible I like .de but I think that .top are fine too. Both are great for what its worth.
> It however is falsely maligned by those with small brains who stereotype things.
I didn't know about this, can you please elaborate more about it?
Those with small brains who stereotype things often claim that .top is used only for scams, and that if a site is using .top, it means they're a scam site. In making this foolish assertion, they confuse P(A|B) with P(B|A). To continue, see the ChatGPT share 699f272e-475c-8012-ae9a-a89bd136fd01
> it does feel as if .top are very speculative
Sure, they can be, but again it's no reason to stereotype. They can be or become whatever they want to be.
In my opinion, .de , .ovh , .uk or personally my country's .in (yes OVH has their own TLD that you can use)
.de is one of the more interesting domains to me personally even though I am not german.
I wouldn't party too soon - from my experience getting something removed from Google's libel machine doesn't mean the same process that put it there in the first place is fixed and it you will most likely go through the same thing again and again.
> Not adding the domain to Google Search Console immediately. I don't need their analytics and wasn't really planning on having any content on the domain, so I thought, why bother? Big, big mistake.
This is just another way how Google has inserted themselves as the gatekeeper of the web.
And you have system and reputational damages.
Go for small claims suit, $5000. It'll cost more than that for their attorney to go to your jurisdiction.
(IAAL, but this is not legal advice. Consult a licensed attorney for legal advice.)
it's not meant to have any other consequences
so basically what happens is that because of hearsay of google thinking you site is not bad Radix does what normally should involve a judge order (taking down the whole domain)
(1): Yes that still would cause damages on any site with customers, but like way less and way more fixable then what happened here.
I was price-gouged out of owning a single, rare .icu domain when renewal fee for it went from 20 usd to 220 usd overnight, just for this one domain... I'm pretty sure it's not Gandi, but the TLD opetator, because other .icu domains I've had were fine. I decided to eventually abandon them all anyway. Moved away from Gandi later when they started doing gouging of their own, too.
What is HN's opinion on Dynadot?
More than what Gandi is now? 100%
https://www.scaleway.com/en/domain-names/
Could be very interesting for the people who love/host on scaleway.
Scaleway is a good company fwiw imo.
ftfy
The bigger problem is the unbanning - for which there should be a better system, probably that should take the form of the registrar having a short grace period to aid in the Google stuff (DNS verification etc.) with additional checks by the registrar to make sure it's not being used for spam/malicious content.
The other point being why was Google banning you so quickly? This is the opaque part. Was the site reported? Was there some URL hijinks? That's the thing you'll probably never find out.
If the registrar tracks this information, a possibly helpful course of action would be to notify or warn the domain owner that they are on the list.
In the modern adversarial web, I do not want a registrar that proactively disables my domain because of some third party report.
The was my first thought as well. Yes, using the Safe Browsing list feels wrong, but I don't know enough to speak definitively in that regards. However wouldn't a relatively simple solution be that if a registrar is choosing to use some third party's list of banned DNS entries that the registrar then also implement sufficient unblocked components that will allow people to be unbanned from that third party?
> Add a DNS TXT or a CNAME record.
I haven't had a use-case for a TXT record come up yet, but isn't it low risk enough to allow domain owners to continue to configure TXT records even if the registrar wants to ban configuring other record types? Then the person in the article could prove ownership and could then get off of the third party ban list that the registrar was utilizing.
The registry only maintains a list of NameServers associated with the domain (and records for DNSSEC zone signing). Registries have nothing to do with regular records. They only record who defines those records.
Now whether this downside justifies the massive problem it causes on false positives...
Even google safe search isn't blocking you site per-se, it just adds a very annoying "this site is not safe" dialog you can "somehow" bypass (but most people wont and don't know how).
Like if this where the main site of a company (which it very much could be) this would also have taken down mail, all APIs, all Apps relying on such APIs.
so no this is absurdly unreasonable actions
that they seem to neither know nor care that this makes it impossible to "fix" false positives with google isn't helpful put this in the area of high levels of negligence which can get you into a lot of trouble in the EU