Web3 Domain Name Service Could Lose Web Address-Owner Who Can Renew Is in Prison

https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/08/26/web3-domain-name-service-could-lose-its-web-address-because-programmer-who-can-renew-it-sits-in-jail/

by Vaslo • 4 years ago

78 81 4 years ago

coindesk.com

radiojasper• 4 years ago

Hey thanks, GoDaddy for releasing a statement[0] instead of fixing the problem. They literally choose this over siding with the customer and their lawyer.

[0] https://aboutus.godaddy.net/newsroom/company-news/news-detai...

smoldesu4• 4 years ago

There is no problem to 'fix'. The people who paid for eth.link domains do not own them, so GoDaddy has zero obligation to even acknowledge their existence. Hell, they're lucky they even got a statement at all, if I was them I'd just start selling off the domains slowly while I watch Twitter melt down.

csdvrx• 4 years ago

if I was them I'd just start selling off the domains slowly while I watch Twitter melt down.

Why do something you know to be bad and will lead to many people being angry?

Why not... be nice and helpful?

nominusllc• 4 years ago

I wonder if there is a reason they felt compelled to reverse their decision and omit any details as to what contact initiated that. I'd imagine the nature of the service handling that type of traffic could be significant to some.

Hamuko• 4 years ago

I thought that the problem was the web3 people pretending to build decentralised services while in fact they're relying on a convicted criminal to renew a domain?

bawolff• 4 years ago

Its certainly not their responsibility to fix the stupidity of others

riffic3• 4 years ago

seems like a reasonable statement, lol.

big corp isn't going to lose its icann accreditation over an intervention that breaks their policies.

jbirer• 4 years ago

Crypto scam victim detected. Eth.link was lying about being decentralized.

djbusby• 4 years ago

Active discussion on this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32628182

jefftk• 4 years ago

What does "After eth.link was renewed, GoDaddy decided to ‘re-expire’ the domain" mean?

aaaaaaaaata3• 4 years ago

Registrars are just pass through to ICANN to some extent.

So they began reporting it as expired after their client retroactively failed some heuristic that they previously let the client pass.

luciusdomitius2• 4 years ago

It is really interesting why he is in prison. Basically for attending a tech conference in North Korea. Frankly, this reminds me of the Soviet times.

nibbleshifter• 4 years ago

I personally know two people who were invited to that conference as speakers, but decided against it.

gregmac• 4 years ago

"Basically" is doing a lot of work in that sentence:

In September, Griffith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to violate international sanctions against North Korea. Griffith was arrested in November 2019 after giving a talk at a cryptocurrency conference in Pyongyang in April of that year.
“What you see here is an intentionality…and a desire to educate people on how to evade sanctions,” [U.S. District Judge Kevin] Castel said.
Judge Castel read a series of text messages and emails from Griffith in which the defendant admits to sharing information with North Korea for the express purpose of helping the repressive Kim regime evade sanctions.
What the judge found most damning, perhaps, was a photo of Griffith presenting at the conference, wearing a traditional North Korean suit and standing in front of a blackboard on which it read “No sanctions!” with a smiley face.

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/04/12/former-ethereum...

mccorrinall• 4 years ago

Quite a lot of jail time for what basically hosting a crypto party is.

What’s next? Sending everyone to jail who published articles online on how to trade crypto?

LewisVerstappen• 4 years ago

It's so funny how people are so happy to jump in defense of the US regime.

Are international sanctions laws just? Should the US government have the right to bar other countries from transacting financially with the world?

Griffith has been limited to two or less meals a day, usually peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, because gangs in MDC control the kitchens and the commissary

Gangs control US prisons because the US government is too incompetent to properly administer their prisons.

The judge refused to send him to a lower-security prison (this guy is clearly not a physical security threat) because allowing him to avoid gang-conflict would "not be enough punishment".

scoopertrooper• 4 years ago

I found the image! Amazing.

https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/2022/04/12/bizarre-the-fb...

riffic3• 4 years ago

You do realize the Korean War never officially ended (de jure), right?

m4jor3• 4 years ago

"Basically for attending a tech conference in North Korea."

Yeah, nah. That's not what happened.

He deserves to be in prison. He is so smart yet so stupid at the same time.

luciusdomitius2• 4 years ago

You forgot switching accounts before replying to the same parent the second time. LOL.

Traubenfuchs• 4 years ago

"decentralized web3 nonsense crumbles the second there is some issue on the centralized web2 architecture its built on behind the scenes", more news at 11.

charcircuit3• 4 years ago

The web3 part didn't crumble. It's the web2 bridge that is crumbling.

qeternity• 4 years ago

Well, the web3 part is in jail so I'm not really sure that's accurate.

Canada3• 4 years ago

I like to keep important domains paid up many years in advance. Some TLDs don't allow this. I wonder if .link is one of those.

wombat-man• 4 years ago

some registrars let you keep a balance, so even if you can't pay in advance, you can load up your account balance so instead of trying to bill your card it just deducts your balance. Idk why godaddy wouldn't have this so I assume he just didn't keep an account balance.

Canada3• 4 years ago

Yeah, I try to also do that, as the domains are so important to me that I want to front-load as many things that could fail as possible. This one domain I have only allows me to renew it when it's less than 60 days to expiry and it's not possible to auto-renew, which really sucks.

em-bee• 4 years ago

i register all my domains and especially those that belong to a community or a company with a registrar that allows anyone to pay the renewal fee. like gandi does.

for a community that means that any member of the community can pay the fee, and for small communities this is a nice way to make an effortless donation.

for a company it means that any office assistant can manage the payments without needing administrative access.

gchamonlive• 4 years ago

Giving a totally new dimension to "bus factor".

No organization should tie their infrastructure maintenance to individuals, but processes are really hard to consolidate and automate and knowledge is not easily shared either.

Curious as to how other people approach reducing their bus factor.

Macha• 4 years ago

Not even the first such high profile case (see also resierfs)

soco• 4 years ago

But this is not a problem with a decentralized system! ...oh wait...

aaaaaaaaata3• 4 years ago

It actually isn't, with proper backups and/or social recovery types of auth.

opvasger• 4 years ago

unreadable title - jesus! :P

TekMol• 4 years ago

Will domains have to be renewed at all in the future?

When you put a transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain, it will stay there forever. You don't have to renew it.

Why not the same for domains? You put "mydomain > 111.222.333.444 signed: me, the mydomain owner" on a blockchain and as long as you do not put another signed message that overrides it, it points to 111.222.333.444 forever.

GoOnThenDoTell• 4 years ago

What would incentivise the creation/migration/maintenance of such a system?

charcircuit3• 4 years ago

Having a name system improves the UX of a bunch of products. Products want to provide the best UX so they would be willing to pay for it as without it their product will be worse.

HideousKojima2• 4 years ago

Then certain domains would become impossible to change as soon as someone loses their keys or dies etc.

unixbane3• 4 years ago

That's not a grounded argument.

riffic3• 4 years ago

The future is what we've built upon in the past. Domain names are not going to change in any significant way because the DNS system won the test of time.

there's a concept I like to bring up here, the Lindy Effect, that shows that DNS because of its longevity will likely be around for decades or centuries to come.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

zeroclip• 4 years ago

ENS already mostly has this. depositcontract.eth expires in the year 2150 and cannot be modified or transferred until that point. Infinite expiry doesn’t really make sense.

https://app.ens.domains/name/depositcontract.eth/details

WheelsAtLarge2• 4 years ago

If it's so important, why doesn't someone just pay the fee. Anyone with an interest.

tomlogic• 4 years ago

Because unlike other registrars, GoDaddy only allows the domain registrant/owner to pay for the renewal.

WheelsAtLarge2• 4 years ago

That sounds harsh on GoDaddy's side. I wonder why they would do that? Usually, changes like this get implemented because of a big problem in the past.

lizardactivist• 4 years ago

EasyDNS CEO Mark Jeftovic had previously struck a deal to renew the domain address for another year before the domain provider allegedly decided to stop honoring the deal “suddenly” and “without notice.”

Another one in the great pile of reasons to avoid GoDaddy and other US American domain name services -- you don't own your domain name, you're just an authorized user as long as the US government allows it.

blueflow2• 4 years ago

you don't own your domain name

You never do, authority over a DNS zone is a service that is provided to you.

woojoo6662• 4 years ago

I think with web3 naming services (like ENS), regular people can actually own domains, since there is no service provider besides the blockchain

dsimmons2• 4 years ago

This.

Regardless of how you feel about "web3", I think most people (especially in technology) should see this as a problem and aspire to a brighter future where governments/corporations aren't making decisions about what people can and can't see on the web, especially when they're inherently biased.

duskwuff• 4 years ago

You say that as though this arrangement is unique to American registrars. It isn't.

dsimmons2• 4 years ago

I can't help but wonder if this is in any way motivated by the fact that ENS could be viewed as a threat/competitive in a hypothetical future where web3 becomes more mainstream.

unixbane3• 4 years ago

What the actual hell is with blockchainers and using centralized CRAP like Discord, Google, Amazon, and a decentralized naming system that nobody actually uses the decentralized way because they are not aware of the concept of running code on your own machine.

LinAGKar• 4 years ago

This doesn't seem like a real sentence

alberth• 4 years ago

Dumb question: what make this domain “Web3”?

Web3 Domain Name Service Could Lose Web Address-Owner Who Can Renew Is in Prison

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