A registry could abuse these powers to do significant harm to the global NGO sector, intentionally or not. We cannot afford to put them into the hands of a private equity firm that has not earned the trust of the NGO community. .ORG must be managed by a leader that puts the needs of NGOs over profits.
Source: Save .ORG | SaveDotOrg.org
There is one group of people that can stop this madness before it’s too late – the domain name registrars themselves. In the middle of October, Mark Jeftovic, CEO of the Canadian hosting company EasyDNS, vocally refused to comply with a request from PIPCU. Has he suffered the wrath of the British authorities? Nope. Was EasyDNS’s accreditation revoked? No. Is the company still in business? Oh yes.
via The UK Government Is Already Censoring The Global Internet.
“You don’t have to have access to any emails, passwords, or any other credentials. You simply grab the information from the WHOIS, write a letter with an attached photo-shopped ID with the same name, send it from a random email address, and the domain will be handed to you fairly quickly.”
via How Do You Hijack a Popular Streaming Movie Site? With Ease, Apparently | TorrentFreak.
The new Mega will operate from the Gabonese domain Me.Ga. With just 98,800 Internet users in a population of 1.6 million, the African country is a small player on the Internet, but this is about to change.
via Kim Dotcom Avoids “Unsafe” .Com, Picks Me.Ga for New Megaupload | TorrentFreak.
In a notice, ironically hosted on Kim.com, Dotcom also advises other cloud hosting providers to stay away from the U.S. and refrain from operating domains that are controlled by American companies.
Godaddy.com is down, but so are some of the site’s DNS servers, which means GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, and lots more. It’s currently unclear if the servers are being unresponsive or if they are completely offline. Either way, the result is that if your DNS is hosted on GoDaddy, your site may also look as if it is down, because it cannot resolve.
via GoDaddy is Down, Anonymous Claims Responsibility.
Pingdom flagged this site as being down for 55 minutes starting at around 5:15AM.
But at the end of the day what has happened is that US law (in fact, Maryland state law) as been imposed on a .com domain operating outside the USA, which is the subtext we were very worried about when we commented on SOPA. Even though SOPA is currently in limbo, the reality that US law can now be asserted over all domains registered under .com, .net, org, .biz and maybe .info (Afilias is headquartered in Ireland by operates out of the US).
This is really cheap — $2.99/year.
Update: The .com price is still $10/year. $2.99 is for .info. I wonder why no one wants .info?