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Cake day: July 18th, 2024

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  • You don’t have to pay anything to have your own identity.

    If you want someone else’s servers to replicate a piece of information for you, and you want them to take responsibility for administrative issues like figuring out whether you still want it next year or what to do if you’re doing something illegal, you may have to pay anywhere from $5 a year to $30 a year for the privilege depending on a couple of factors. Given how massively inflated the price of registering a domain could be, if the type of ghouls who like to get their hands on things like this were able to get their hands on it, I’m inclined to call that success. About 99% of internet users will never need to know or care about DNS, and they can still have their identity without having to pay $30 a year.

    I’m pretty sure the price of domains has actually been going down over time, and they’ve introduced a bunch of new TLDs and new types of entries in the records in response to pretty much the only significant problems that the 40-year-old system has ever had during its history. Like I said, I’d call that success.




  • I like how a whole community of academics and researchers worked out how to run a system which, even into the modern day which is kind of amazing, is largely disconnected from being abused by government and industry, and just runs according to what the people who need to use the system need it to do. You can get extorted for a fancy domain name if you really want to, but you can also go to Hostinger and get one for $5/year or something, because a lot of the core of the system is still pretty well-protected from being a cash-grab, through application of good governance and cooperation.

    And then, somehow Hexbear managed to find their way around that system and fucked things up for themselves, and now it’s all DNS’s fault that they stepped in a pile of doo doo.

    Never forget the architects of the internet were some of the vilest US MIC and Silicon Valley ghouls who ever lived and they are still in control fundamentally no matter how much ICANN and IANA claim to be non-partison, neutral, non-political, accountable, democratic, international, stewardshipismists

    Yes, John Postel and David Mills were some of the vilest ghouls and so on. There was nothing about them that could provide a good model for how to do effective cooperation and succeed outside the systems of ownership that defined computing and telecommunications at the time, no particular reason they succeeded so dramatically and gave you, ultimately, this space to post pig balls today, and nothing about their work and traditions that needs to be defended against any silicon valley ghouls in the modern day. You fucking dingbat. I started out sticking up for you guys because no one deserves to get victimized by DNS scammers, but I take it back, go fuck yourselves.





  • Edit: Okay, I figured it out.

    NOTICE: The expiration date displayed in this record is the date the
    registrar's sponsorship of the domain name registration in the registry is
    currently set to expire. This date does not necessarily reflect the expiration
    date of the domain name registrant's agreement with the sponsoring
    registrar.  Users may consult the sponsoring registrar's Whois database to
    view the registrar's reported date of expiration for this registration.
    

    So, as I had guessed, sav.com registered it “for them” for one year more than they actually wanted to register, and then when there was some minor billing issue, used it as an opportunity to do a cash grab. Fuck sav.com, is basically what I’m saying.

    Previous comment, before the edit:

    IDK what’s going on with that web site, but it’s wrong. Or, sav.com updated something to backdate the expiration or something else shady like that.

    $ whois hexbear.net | head -n20
       Domain Name: HEXBEAR.NET
       Registry Domain ID: 2584175083_DOMAIN_NET-VRSN
       Registrar WHOIS Server: whois-service.virtualcloud.co
       Registrar URL: http://sav.com/
       Updated Date: 2025-02-11T17:34:08Z
       Creation Date: 2021-01-12T00:35:22Z
       Registry Expiry Date: 2026-01-12T00:35:22Z
       Registrar: Sav.com, LLC
       Registrar IANA ID: 609
       Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse-contact@sav.com
       Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.8885808790
       Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
       Name Server: NS1-EXPIRED.SAV.COM
       Name Server: NS2-EXPIRED.SAV.COM
    

    I trust running whois more than I trust a web site. Like I say, I have no explanation why they would be wrong, but they’re wrong. Maybe sav.com registers it “on behalf of” their clients, and sets the meta-expiration one year after to give them time to fuck around with auctions? Something weird like that? And then it’s only paid until last month, and because a card had expired or something trivial like that, they decided to throw it into this auction process?

    As much as I think it’s funny to make fun of Hexbear, I don’t think people should be celebrating them getting fucked over by criminals.

    Edit: They’re over on chapo.chat now, blaming the whole thing not on sav.com, or on themselves for choosing a registrar for an important server without doing due diligence, but on DNS itself and the architects of the internet. I take it back. Fuck 'em.

    https://chapo.chat/post/4468515


  • Ooooh. That explains it. Yeah, it just switched over to the redirect to sav.com for me.

    I think they’re fucked. Because of how Lemmy does federation, there’s no way that I know of to switch the domain for an existing instance without changing the name and making everyone resubscribe to everything. Although, they probably talk mostly to one another so they could probably change the name to hexbear.social or something with just a little temporary disruption if they don’t feel like coming up with $300. Personally, I definitely wouldn’t want to cooperate with the domain extortion, I’d rather change domains.



  • Hexbear (edit: is very much alive) was very much alive until my cached DNS values dropped out, and now they’re dead. Looks like they’re fucked.

    It looks to me like sav.com is some kind of domain name scammer. They trick people into registering their domains with them by offering low prices, and then some time later once you’ve come to depend on the domain, proceed to some kind of abusive process like this where they’ll let totally separate people (allegedly-real separate people) “bid” on your domain, and force you to pay whatever exceeds the highest bid, if you want to keep control of it. I honestly don’t know how it is allowed.

    It looks to me like Hexbear got suckered into registering with them, displaying the same savvy critical thinking skills that serve them so well in so many other areas. I don’t think the domain expires until a year from now? Am I misunderstanding, or is sav.com just getting the jump on extorting some money from Hexbear? I realize it would be funny to jump in and bid the price up, but be aware that (1) you are giving money to some genuinely godawful people, quite a bit worse than just a bunch of confused aggressive pro-left people, if you win (2) you won’t even get your entertainment until a year from now, unless I am misunderstanding something.

    Edit: If anyone’s curious, Hostinger has extremely cheap domain registrations: https://www.hostinger.com/domain-name-search

    They also have an endearingly janky AI assistant that likes to pop up the most hilariously wrong AI descriptions of whatever domain you are registering, for no reason at all. It goes with the rest of their endearingly janky hosting service. I honestly don’t mind it, I like them.

    Edit: Guys, I am sad to report that they fixed the AI assistant. It now (still for no reason) displays back to you a summary of what you want to use your domain for, but they’ve fixed the AI involved so that it no longer gives suggestions that are hilariously wrong. It’s just accurate and boring. I wish I had saved some of the ones it showed me way back when they first introduced it, because they were wonderful.



  • Yeah. He might start a nuclear war. Or, he might simply collapse the pitiful number of good things the US does on the world stage, while vastly increasing the cruelty and death for anyone who is the “other” inside the United States, and it seems horrible to turn my back on all of them just to save my skin. Or, in the absence of the US on the world stage, all kinds of shit might kick off, and it’s almost impossible to say that any particular place will definitely be spared from it.

    Maybe somewhere in coastal South America, or New Zealand, might be nice. Somewhere far enough from everything important that it’s possible to just hunker down. Also, close to the poles is a good idea, and near to the mountains, everything else might have all kinds of crazy shit happen to it soon.

    Somewhere, there is a science fiction story about some farmers in South America and their perception of a nuclear war that is happening in a place that is separate from them. They’re far from unaffected, but their lives are able to continue with some modifications without a major disruption. Their concerns are still about neighbors, harvest, and their own public life in the village. Purely because they weren’t in an important place.



  • Almost everyone I know who was at one point involved in the US military, came out it with a lot of resentment for the US military and bitterness towards the system in general. Maybe there is some self-selection bias there, and maybe my generation going to Iraq and Afghanistan makes a big difference, but that’s what I observed.

    A buddy of mine when he was much younger actually was really thinking about signing up, and he spent half an afternoon or so talking with a recruiter, and the recruiter and his colleague both clearly had massive issues both with the military and with their own lives, and he came out of it with the firm conclusion “Jesus Christ I’m glad I didn’t do that.”










  • the topic of this thread is the genocide in Gaza

    Correct.

    Biden’s complicity in it

    and the response to that from Democratic voters.

    Not really. Or, I mean, I know you brought those things into it, but the main topic of the thread was the “uncommitted” voters and whether or not they made a mistake.

    Then, you brought other arguments into it, including “Democrats have no principles”, abortion, immigration, Lina Khan, and Black Mirror. I responded to the new arguments you brought up and you became unhappy, suddenly, that we weren’t talking about Gaza anymore, and refused to respond to my response to what you said.

    genocide denial isn’t just “I deny that genocide is happening”. it’s more pernicious than that. it can also take the form of aggressively changing the subject.

    I responded directly about Biden and Trump vis-a-vis genocide, when we were talking about genocide. Trump is infinitely worse, vis-a-vis genocide. Someone who cares about genocide and doesn’t want to change the subject should be panicked about the prospect of Trump winning, even if the alternative is a Democrat. That is precisely the topic of this comments thread, before you changed the subject, aggressively, to “Democrats.”

    I do generally agree with your “perniciousness” argument. In particular, something like saying “Trump’s illegal calls for ethnic cleansing are horrific, but” should be a screaming red flag that the sentence needs to stop before the “but” comes in. Or maybe be finished up with “so it would obviously be a crisis if he gained power, so we should stop that.”