the argument for .ml domain has always been absurd to begin with. So it’s free but the price you pay is that it’s being run by Mali. I’d just drop 8$/year tbh, that’s not a hill you want to die for. Also you harm your project by being SEO punished for using spam-associated TLDs like this. One of the reasons original Lemmy took so long to adopt until Reddit’s API drama. Pretty dumb ngl.
If i remember right it was also “free to register but insanely expensive to renew once they start to see traffic”
Renewal costs are my primary consideration when picking domains. Subscription fees is how your money disappears when you’re not looking.
Anyone know how companies get the rights to domains to sell in the first place? Do they literally submit a list of all domains to ICANN or something? Sorry if this is a stupid question, I just never understood how any of this really works.
TLD - Top Level Domain (.com .ml .whatever)
Registrar - NameCheap, PorkBun, etc. Submits your domain.TLD request to a Registry
Registry - Maintains the list of domains for a specific TLD and the server infrastructure to run the TLD
ICANN - Decides who can be a Registry and for which TLD. Not involved in the nitty gritty of individual domain names.
How is that decision made? How hard would it be for a group of amateurs to make an rog and try to be a registry or registrar.
You should check out the OpenNic project, which is an organization that has already attempted what you’re describing.
ICANN hands out top-level domains (TLDs - such as .com, .org and .ml), either to organisations or government agencies. They, in turn, hand out secondary domains to companies or regional organisations. For example, the TLD .jp belongs to the Japanese government and is operated by an agency called Japan Registry Services. In turn, it hand out the .tokyo.jp secondary domain to the Tokyo Metropolitan government. They, in turn, manage domains for various departments, wards, etc.
But individuals and businesses in Tokyo can also use the .tokyo TLD, which is owned by a private company called GMO Internet Group. And of course anyone can use .com or .org, although you may have tp pay a pretty big fee.
Using .ml was stupid in the first place. No need to try to be a special snowflake by using a sketchy TLD.
Man, hacking, DDOS and now this. The fediverse just can’t catch a break…
Resiliency is the strongpoint.
If Reddit shuts down, all of Reddit dies.
Same with Facebook, YouTube, etc. is that highly unlikely? Well, yeah, but still nonzero. The fediverse offers resiliency in this regard, and no one person has the ability to shut it down. Even if all instances decide to shut down, new instances can still be spun up.
If the communities you like to read and post to are down, then Fediverse is effectively down for you. Thus it doesn’t offer any additional resilience, it’s not a P2P system.
Stuff like technology has multiple big communities, I can go to the one on .ml .world or beehaw and still get a lot of content
I haven’t learnt all about account federation - through who are you authored to write a comment here with a .ml account? Where are you logged in from?
They’re logged in from
lemmy.ml, your account is only on the instance you registered with.Yeah my confusion was that I thought all .ml lemmy instances were down at the time.
Just because anti-lock brakes fail to work in all scenarios doesn’t mean they’re not still an improvement.
Lemmy is still up for most people. That is resilience. If you are affected by this outage, then it failed for you in this particular case but that doesn’t mean the mechanisms don’t exist and that they won’t work to your advantage in the future.
I get your analogy.
But are there situations where ABS is less effective than a standard braking system?
In racing.
ABS works in all scenarios.
True but if you have several interests, hopefully spread over several instances, then there is resilience because if one server crashes, you have at least some other things trucking along.
can fediverse be P2P like i2p?
Fediverse - yes. Lemmy - no. At least not in its current state.
Would help if users spread out over all the running servers because problem is just a few lemmy servers have all the users. For example the instance I run would be a simple proxy to use for all the content and then would mitigate issues when a big server had problems since just parts of the fediverse would be affected from the users pov.
I feel like communities are the bigger problem here. And not one that’s easily solved.
If users from multiple instances come together in communities, those communities are still centralized on a single server. So if something happens to that server, or if your instance defederates with it, the whole community goes with it.
The alternative would be to have tons of duplicate communities spread over many instances, but that’s a bad user experience.
I think it can continue even without the source server? Like, once I press the
Replybutton on this comment, it gets saved to my instance (lemmings.world) then it lets all the other instances know, includinglemmy.world(where the community is hosted) andslrpnk.netwhere you are registered.Now let’s say
lemmy.worldstops existing, my instance still would let all the other instances it federates with know, meaning you could read my reply on a community that basically no longer exists. Though I’m pretty sure there are downsides to that (like, what if all the mods were fromlemmy.world? There’s no admin who can add a new mod).At least that’s what I think it works like.
meaning you could read my reply on a community that basically no longer exists
oh really? does it actually work this way? if lemmy.world dies, can all its communities continue to live on as long as there are lemmy instances out there federated and subscribed?
No. You would only ever be interacting with a snapshot-at-the-time-of-death of the community on your local instance only. It is the home instance of the community that federates all events, not the instance of the originating post/comment/vote/whathaveyou.
Ah, ok. So if lemmy.world dies, but !somecommunity@lemmy.world was federated to 2 different other instances, those instances wouldn’t be able to “talk to each other”? They’d just have snapshots that they could locally interact with, but never see anything else? So is the fate of the Lemmyverse a graveyard of communities from dead instances?
Yep, without the source instance, you can’t communicate with other instances.
Pretty much. I wouldn’t pay much attention to that, though - the absolute majority of the internet that has ever existed is a graveyard.
I wonder about this as well – because communities are tied to a specific home instance, that instance going down affects that community, potentially killing it. Something more akin to hashtags/tags/labels wouldn’t be tied to an instance so they would be more robust, though you’d lose the moderation of a community and just have a firehose of posts/comments…
Wow, you’re right. We really need to bring back something like USENET, where newsgroups (their “communities”) weren’t tied to a specific server. We could almost just resurrect NNTP, although the handling of images (and binary data more generally) probably needs some tweaking.
no need to resurrect it, usenet still exists and has a bit of discussion traffic (and a lot of binary traffic) but we just need to get users to swap over. course there needs to be some decent mobile apps made as well.
Jesum Crow… Tags aren’t a new concept. Just group communities with a tag… is that incredibly complicated to implement or something?
There needs to be a way for a person or group to essentially own a tag to enable moderation. It might be one of those rare problems for which a block chain is a good solution, because there would need to be a public ledger showing who is a moderator for a tag at any given moment.
There is no need to own a tag, nor to tack blockchain into a problem to try and sell a solution. Ever.
You seem confused about what block chains actually are. I’m not suggesting anyone sell anything.
And if you think moderation isn’t needed for healthy online communities, I invite you to visit Twitter.
Moderation like you are proposing in no way requires someone to “own a tag”.
Anyone can use #CocaCola. Coca Cola Company does not get to dictate, audit or execute how people use the tag, nor should anyone else.
It doesn’t have to be a bad ue though. The concept of multi-communities would make it easier to see communities based on topic.
And having a search automation that find like communities, even if just the same community name on different instances would really go a long way.
At this stage in the game, I’m not even sure how to evaluate the trustworthiness of instances. Which also applies to the one I’m currently on. I’d like to assume everything is good, but admins do have power that can be abused, like visibility of IP addresses, access to accounts, access to passwords (reusing passwords is bad but especially don’t do it here and certainly don’t use the same password for your email associated with your account).
Facebook abused those powers (zuck even bragged about being able to see everyone’s passwords, emails, private messages, pictures), so did Reddit (though more with shadow banning or quietly removing/restoring posts).
Fediverse instances are just run by random people as far as I can tell. I’m sure there’s some that should absolutely be avoided and I’m sure that there’s some that are perfectly fine. But I don’t have a clue how to determine which list about specific instance is in, otherwise I’d love to join someone’s small instance.
Edit: oh and that only goes into whether the admin is acting in good faith or intends to be abusive. Then there’s the question of whether the admin is competent enough to run a server without it getting pwnt and giving others access to that same information and capabilities.
You are correct. A lot of the internet is built on trust. This is no exception. I suggest having an account in more than one instance so that you are not too vested into 1 place.
the problem is most users fear that if they choose a small instance, that it goes down random more likely and their account and everything else is gone. if you choose a bigger instance it feels less likely that the admin of the instance just says fuck it and kills the server random for whatever reason.
as long accounts can’t be easy transfered and are maybe even safe somehow without their instance, people will choose the instance that feels the most secure to them. and when i looked at the available instances… most looked not really long term secure. most did look like they are random ideas of people and they could vanish any second into the void. so i as an example did choose lemmy.world. seemed the most safe option with the best features (nsfw allowed, a lot of users and a big instance)
On a small instance, you have greater opportunities to take action to positively support that instance. You can make friends with the administrator, volunteer to become an administrator yourself, donate cash to offset running costs, lodge helpful reports, welcome new users, etc…
agreed, but i’m already moderating a community with 1,3k members elsewhere and have to do a lot of work daily there (posting content for the members who wait for it daily). also i currently start to build one up on lemmy.world that also takes time from my day. i don’t really have time in my daily activity to additonally do stuff which involve moderation or managing of such things like a server instance.
don’t understand me wrong, i agree with what you say and its logical and smart to do it. but its always depending on the situation of each user. in my situation, its the best thing to go to a big instance.
I understand the logic but its actually backwards. A small instance like mine is easily paid for totally out my own pocket and requires no outside funding or maintenance because I can do everything. If too few people donate to major instances then the costs starts to run away from the owners. In some ways becoming too large is a problem.
i understand that, but think about it - its a random instance from a random stranger on the internet. you don’t know that person, and don’t know if he is actually serious interested in that project of running that instance… or if he will shut it down maybe a few day, weeks or months in the future.
and you can’t really backup your account and load it somewhere else, so if this happens everything you saved and do is GONE. thats a huge risk if you value your account and contribution to communitys.
so it doesn’t really matters to me if smaller instances are not expensive etc… thats not what fears people (there are still ways to spread users along more instances but more even). its the suddenly vanishing without warning that scares people.
i had this often enough with similiar other projects where i created a account on such a small community / instance, was really active… and suddenly it was just gone from one second to the next without warning. everything gone. admin didn’t told anyone about it… was just gone into thin air.
so it feels safer to go to instances who are more “trustworthy” in the longterm security of a stable operation.
if lemmy would support export of accounts maybe ever month once or something… that would change things. also allow spoofing of stuff, but it would help with vanishing instances and people would feel safer on smaller more unknown instances.
“i understand that, but think about it - its a random instance from a random stranger on the internet. you don’t know that person, and don’t know if he is actually serious interested in that project of running that instance… or if he will shut it down maybe a few day, weeks or months in the future.”
Have to be honest with you, that is how all yhe instances started including lemmy.world.
“so it feels safer to go to instances who are more “trustworthy” in the longterm security of a stable operation.”
There is no metric by which to know this yet as lemmy is new. Its not like there are 5 servers that are 10 years old and al the rest are just starting up. Just how it is.
Have to be honest with you, that is how all yhe instances started including lemmy.world.
but now they have enough reputation & users to make them feel like the safest option
There is no metric by which to know this yet as lemmy is new. Its not like there are 5 servers that are 10 years old and al the rest are just starting up. Just how it is.
compared with random instances with 2-3 users or so, a instance who is there since the beginning / relative long compared to other is safer feeling tho.
i’m so worried about this topic, that i even think about maybe setting up my own instance just to keep my accounts etc safe & from vanishing.
I feel like you have missed the points im my previous comments but if you just want to feel safer because in your heart of hearts this instance or that instance just feels safer then go for it.
My advice does not change. Make a backup account on another instance to avoid being burned. If you dont want to, then its now on you.
My exact same thought process and why I’m here on lemmy.world as well. Once they get the server setup process more streamlined (hopefully dockerized) I’ll probably setup my own private use server, but until I get around to that project I wanted to pick one that didn’t seem like it would vanish once the guy hosting it started getting those hosting bills.
Does that really scale though? The load on a server is not dependent on the number of users, but on the number of communities from other server that the sum of user is subscribing to.
Which means if you have a server for 100 users, you still need to pay for the 1000s giant communities that those users are subscribing to, as they are being copied over in your server.
So if you have a few mega server like Lemmy.world, they each pay say 10000£ in hosting a month (number taken out of my hat), which is fine because they have as many users that can contribute to it financially ( via donations, ads etc.). But small servers won’t be able to support that load and will ultimately close.
That sounds like a design flaw if you ask me but i did not see anyone mentioning it so maybe i’m misunderstanding.
No its not really as bad as that at all. The disk space is linear in that way but disk space is cheap. All the rest is not taxed heavily by federation. Do the big costs like CPU dont scale up like that.
I’m on it 😁, well at least one little instance more (just gotta make the email stuff work, over OVH if I can do that).
and that’s just the first month
I cant believe this is just coincidence. This is coordinated.
Hi, professional DNS engineer here! if anyone has any questions about the inner workings of DNS or top level domains, ask away! (THIS IS MY MOMENT)
Why is it always DNS?
Because DNS is the user-facing part of the whole system. There is plenty of trouble with everything else, but you usually don’t see that as a user. Also it’s a hierarchical system with big providers/governments giving and taking names as they see fit, so there is always the possibility to get screwed.
Because its always DNS
Because it’s the least-likely position to be staffed by a company. It’s the “least important” person to have… until it breaks. Often a company relies on routing-switching engineers to do DNS instead of hiring a dedicated DDI engineer (DNS, DHCP, IPAM). It saves money in the short term, but when shit hits the fan… no one knows how to fix it because DNS is really easy until it’s not. DNS is super simple at a basic level. But it goes way deeper than most people realize.
Well that sounds like my dream job, unfortunately this issue in particular is more of a Lemmy problem, not a DNS problem. See: https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/190200 for the explanation of why you cant just transfer domains with Lemmy.
Also, if you’re genuinely interested in this field, first you should enter the world of enterprise network engineering. Get Security +, CCNA, and PCNSA. With those certs in hand (and knowledge in your brain), apply to jobs as a network support engineer. Do the work for a few years. Learn BIND. Learn Infoblox. Focus on learning DHCP and subnetting. Learn DNSSEC & IPv6. Experiment with a Pi Hole. Set up a home lab. Apply to jobs with DNS. Start living the good life. This takes about 10 years if you learn fast and are good at interviews.
I left my job as a network engineer to do DDI and it’s been a blast. A lot more to DNS than I could have imagined.
Also, a cat explains DNS.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/4ZtFk2dtqv0?si=uSI3Rzzh49cN_Yl5
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I only just now saw this post, the last month i have already been going all out to learn everything that i need for my Security+ (then CySec+) i have a 30hr video course im part way thorugh, and ive set up a few VMs with various servers like OWASP Security Shepherd and Dam Vunurable Web App for some more hands on experience as well as testing on my personal production Nextcloud and Jellyfin servers and ive been having alot of fun with it all, i think im pretty solid with DHCP and subnetting already through my home networking adventures. I will look into each of those other Certs and each thing you mention to learn thank you! Ive been deep into various Linux systems since about 2008 and im hoping to leverage that as much as i can(although its left me with a lack of modern Windows experience).
Thank you so much for all the tips! I feel some good things coming as im getting into this as work.
Ah, thanks for the info! I have no idea how Lemmy stuff works. I only became aware of Lemmy last month.
When I was talking my cyber security / ethical hacking class, we learned how to do zone transfer. The concept never stuck and I basically “copy” from my friend. So what exactly is a DNS Zone Transfer?
Friday I was doing a zone transfer! What are the odds?
A zone transfer is like moving houses, except for an authoritative zone.
In DNS, we have what’s called an authoritative zone. That means the device hosting the “resource records” (all the data that DNS passes around) is the “ultimate” answer. I.e, it’s not cached data. It’s not a hosts file. It’s not a recursive answer. It’s the real deal.
When you want to move the authoritative zone to another server, you do a “zone transfer” that means the new server will copy all the resource records over TCP from current authoritative zone. The reason you may want to do this instead of manually hand-jamming it is that many large organizations have, sometimes, hundreds of resource records (last month I coordinated a zone transfer that was over 1000 records!).
Why would a hacker want to conduct a zone transfer? In otherwords, what is the utility or usefulness of a zone transfer for a hacker (black or white hat)?
If you initiate a zone transfer, you can now claim to be authoritative for a zone. That means you can be a ‘bad actor’ DNS server that serves fake records. In practice, this means that you can redirect people to an attack site.
Let’s say you’re Joe the Random Internet User and you want to go to lemmy.world This is what happens in a non-attack (we’re skipping caching & non-authoritative answers for brevity):
- You type “lemmy.world” into your browser
- Your computer initiates a stub resolution for lemmy.world. (the trailing dot here isn’t a period. It’s the “true” FQDN)
- Computer looks at hosts file and doesn’t see anything
- DNS packets are sent to your configured DNS server. If you don’t have one configured, DHCP already configured it for you
- Your DNS server performs a recursive search for world by asking the root zone where the “world” Name Serer is
- root zone resolves world as:
world. 3600 IN NS v0n0.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v0n1.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v0n2.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v0n3.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v2n0.nic.world.
world. 3600 IN NS v2n1.nic.world.
- Your DNS server reaches out to one of those Name Server’s (That’s what the NS record is for) and asks it where “lemmy” is
- world Name Server responds with:
lemmy.world. 300 IN A 172.67.218.212
lemmy.world. 300 IN A 104.21.53.208
- Your DNS server contacts your computer and serves it those IP addresses. (A record’s are domain name to IP Address)
Now lets say there’s a DNS spoof attack:
- Before the “world” server can get back to your DNS server, the hackers server interjects with it’s own authoritative claim that lemmy is here:
lemmy.world. 300 IN A [attack site IP]
- Your DNS server contacts your computer and serves it that IP address. Your computer then contacts the attack site and you get a virus.
What’s the point of alternative DNS roots? Can they be a thing to mitigate DNS related failures (though lemmy.ml is back online, so I guess that wasn’t it)?
An alternative DNS root is where someone other than IANA sets up a root zone. At the end of the day, root zone authority is technically not “hard coded”. It’s a terrible idea to set up an alt root or to use one for these reasons:
- Security. This is the biggest one. DNSSEC works via setting up Trust Anchors with the root zone and chaining down the tree all the way to the recursive DNS server. DNSSEC doesn’t work if anyone in there doesn’t have a trust anchor for the root zone. Additionally, if that root zone is untrustworthy, you can effectively have DNS poisoning happen at the root level. Imagine having two google.com’s based on which root zone (and therefore walking two separate trees) you ask.
- It encourages dividing the internet. The two largest Alt zones are Russia’s (RNDNS) and China’s (.chn). RNDNS exists as a continuity plan in case the rest of the world decides to cut them off of the internet. China’s is part of a hare-brained plan to “reinvent the internet under IPv9” (an idiotic plan that sounds even more crazy than Iran’s supposed “quantum computer”)
- Pointing to a different root zone can cause a lot of headaches for diagnosing DNS issues when they aren’t coming down from the same root zone. It can cause different answers (and a parallel tree).
To answer your second question, they are not good for acting as a way to mitigate DNS failures. No domain servers are going to be asking them in the first place, meaning no one can get there even if it does have the “correct” answer. If all 13 root servers went down simultaneously, the results would be catastrophic. But that’s also why they’re physically located around the world in many different countries in heavily secure facilities with many High-Availability servers (clone servers that instantly take over if there’s a failure, the ultimate “hot” server)
You wouldn’t want to have a DNS server ask two root zones anyway. If it can’t reach the root zones, then that needs to be addressed. You can’t just ask a “less secure” server in case the primary doesn’t work. That’s just begging for a security breach via cutting off access to the primary root zones so that they “fail over” to the less secure ones.
Thank you for such a detailed and instructive answer!
Woot we’re saved.
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Could users set a temporary entry in their hosts file pointing the .ml domains to public IPs in order to regain access to their account if they needed to?
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Can Lemmy federate to an IP address directly or will the settings only accept an fqdn?
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Will a Lemmy instance work behind a reverse proxy.
Thanks for taking the time to answer questions.
There are several problem with this including total lack of SSL without the proper cert for that other domain, also Lemmy.ml’s IP seems to be running a reverse proxy so the internal IP that we would want to connect to is not visible to the world this is common for web security, the owners must set allowed domains and ports in their config file.
If none of that was a problem Lemmy itself does not do well with changing domains, as highlighted here: https://lemmy.nrd.li/comment/190200
- Yes. Unless there’s some kind of crazy domain-level hi-jinks involved with Lemmy (I am not versed in Lemmy), pointing directly to the IP will work if you bypass it by spoofing your DNS (Hosts file, for example).
- I don’t know how Lemmy federation works, sorry :(
- See #2
Sorry that I couldn’t answer more of your questions.
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Why is it always dns
Hi! When DNS servers are launched, they have to be purchased, correct? So in this case, did Mali file for the domain to be reclaimed somehow? Do you have an idea how that might work?
I can answer this. The organization that says mali owns .ml gives the ownership country a lot of sway.
So if the country of mali were to reach out formally to the organization and say “hey this domain violates our laws” they would take that very seriously and then work with the registrar & authoritative nameserver owner to handle the situation.
I’m sure this isn’t 100% accurate but 90-95 based on my work in a web hosting company
It’s a little stronger than that. The country gets the final say on where the root zones point to when it comes to their assigned country code. Many countries employ private organizations to handle their TLD. They aren’t supposed to be paid for that though. (But it 1000% happens under the table)
So, how some companies get right to sell TLDs? Can I start selling TLDs nowdays? It’s just that they were there first and get all top level domains and now we have to pay for it?
Thanks in advance.
They paid a huge amount of money to get a TLD
Companies don’t/can’t sell TLD’s. Only IANA can decide those. When the internet first started, .org, .net, .com etc. were handed out to non-profit organizations and the costs were purely to keep the servers running. Eventually though, when IANA decided to hand out country codes like .io (Indian Ocean), .cat (Catalonia) or .tv (Tuvalu), those countries rent their “desirable” names to private organizations that sell domain registrations for lots of money. In 2013, IANA decided to enact the gTLD auctions to help raise more money. Basically, if you wanted to (and had a lot of money & DNS engineers on staff), you could register any TLD you want provided you were willing to make a large donation to IANA. If someone else wanted it, they had to go into an action war over it. That’s how we ended up with things like .party or .sport or .world cough Now-a-days, if you want a TLD, you’d have to convince IANA to give you one… But good luck with that. They won’t give you one unless you’re some major corporation that can actually handle it. They also just don’t give them out. Usually it’s only when they really feel like more TLD’s are needed. It’s a very serious responsibility and mismanagement could accidentally DDOS a DNS root zone & impact the internet.
So why do we need the .com or .org or whatever at all? And the www. as well?
I remember when I had to type the whole http://www.cakefarts.com and now just cakefarts.com works. What changed? And what’s next?
The “.com” and “.org” and all other Top Level Domains are owned/controlled by some organization.
Com and org are your original TLDs, so since they were around first you see them everywhere. At some point countries got their own TLDs so Mali got “ml” for example but Tuvalu got “tv”. (Yes, technically “.tv” has nothing to do with television.) And a few years back there was open bidding for a bunch of new TLDs which is where “.sport” or “.dentist” come from.
Anyone some entity owns/controls them and then can sell any word or domain under it. So if you want “greatgatsby.com” you have to talk to the “.com” owners. If you want “greatgatsby.sport” you talk to the “.sport” owners. Usually there is another company or agreement that groups these together so you can manage all your domains in one place.
So anyways now you own a domain like “greatgatsby.sport”, what do you want to host? Mail at “mail.greatgatsby.sport”? A website at world wide web aka “www.greatgatsby.sport”? Up to you.
Over time, largely by convention “www” became where you put your website.
From there you have two options, you can setup a redirect from “http://greatgatsby.sport” to “http://www.greatgatsby.sport” or you can do a little hosting “trick” and just make “http://greatgatsby.sport” return your website.
So say I want a “.travel”, who actually makes and sells these? Is it a private company? A country? An independent entity who’s sole purpose it is to keep domains and the interwebs alive?
The last one, ICANN is the name of the organization. It’s reasonable to argue they are actually the first one. Also they are based in the US, so technically the country answer also apply. HOWEVER they are suppose to be independent.
Also since you want “.travel” that’s a common enough word that it is probably already owned by an entity, so you would probably have to buy it from them.
However let’s say you wanted “.tchotchony” which I feel confident saying doesn’t exist yet. As far as I know ICANN is not regularly taking applications for new TLDs, so you probably can’t have it. Although realistically if you have enough money, you can.
Well, it’s not just a money issue. There’s also the “are you knowledgeable, responsible, and have DNS engineers on staff” problem. If you own your own TLD, it means you can talk directly to the root zone. You could theoretically DDOS the root zone servers and cause them to crash. They would, of course, just revoke your TLD permanently & it wouldn’t really cause any noticeable disruption to the rest of the internet. You could also allow attack domains or shady websites. Maybe it could be used to pretend to be another site. Imagine owning “.conn” that would be a premium attack site TLD because it looks like “com”. There’s lots of other issues too.
Btw, .com is owned by the US Department of COMmerce. .org is owned by a non-profit organization called “Public Internet Registry”
To answer your other question: most likely, www.cakefarts.com is now accessible from cakefarts.com for one of three reasons:
- Your web browser automatically checks the A record “www” if “cakefarts.com” doesn’t have an A record. A records are the records in a DNS server that says “this domain goes here”
- The site cakefarts.com put their website on cakefarts.com and placed a CNAME record called “www” that points to cakefarts.com
- cakefarts.com has an APEX record that points to www.cakefarts.com
For the ‘record’, www is just a really common record name. There’s nothing special about it. You could have dudebro.cakefarts.com or wwwwwww.cakefarts.com. It’s up to the domain owner.
How does the TLD get reclaimed? I’m assuming whoever was previously the “owner” of the .ml tld was on board and Mali didn’t just come along and snatch it away?
So here’s the thing about TLD’s, ownership of them is determined by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). They’re basically my career’s gods. If they tell me to jump, I ask “how high”. They control the DNS root zone. Effectively, that’s the actual top-level of ALL domains. If they decide to remove a TLD or reassign it, all you can do is lodge a complaint straight to their shredder. They’re owned and operated by ICANN, a non-profit organization.
Back in 2013, Mali allowed a private Netherlands company to “manage” (rent) their TLD, .ML Recently, that company (Freenom) got sued by Meta. Even though I don’t really like Meta, as a network engineer, I don’t like Freenom even more. They turn a blind eye to bad actors on the internet, refuse to investigate hackers/scammers/DDOSers, and generally refuse to play ball. They are a huge pain in the ass. Due to the lawsuit, IANA reassigned ML to Mali since they asked for it. At the end of the day you “cant” sell a country-level TLD. Mali was renting it to Freenom under the table. This happens a lot and IANA usually just looks the other way. .io for example is the freakin’ Indian Ocean.
So yeah, Mali didn’t “snatch” it. They just asked IANA to reassign it and there isn’t shit Freenom can do about it since they never “really” owned it in the first place.
We had a situation at a shared space here where an OpenWRT client device accidentally somehow managed to announce itself into the network in a way that its v6 local link address (
fe80::) got inserted into /etc/resolv.conf as a third DNS option (with the first two being the ones from DHCP) and then served incorrect records when queried. What mechanism is that and were the engineers who designed that feature on drugs? Also, how can I tell my Linux system to not accept such announcements?deleted by creator
They don’t know unless the DNS server tells them. For example, a very popular webhost Akamai uses a complex DNS + web hosting suite (DNS edgesuit to be exact) to send that type of data to the web servers. It can also allow for many many other features.
Why is it always DNS?
lemmygrad.ml and lemmy.ml are gone? So sad.
Anyway.
Link to the actual post OP screenshotted: https://very.bignutty.xyz/notes/9hf13it1ced3b2za
Screenshots of text are not the way. The crappy “hey, a text thing I want to share, let me take an accessibility-poisoning screenshot and upload that graphic file like a psychopath instead of just copy/pasting either the link to the text or the text itself like a decent human being” routine needs to die with Reddit, we have to be better than that here.
It’s called a single-point of failure in Engineering.
Funny enough it wasn’t even a technical one but a contractual one.
Maybe there is some kind of lesson here on the risk of delegating critical structural elements to 3rd parties that rent rather than own that which they’re selling …
This brings a disturbing thought to mind… if an instance domain name like foo.bar lapses and someone else snaps the domain up (or of it gets stolen) can the new controller plop Lemmy on a server and be instantly federated? If so what kind of damage could they do?
No, the signatures wouldn’t match.
That’s an assumption that lemmy will quit federating with a server that does not match.
And what signature are we talking about anyway? Is not certificates…
Activitypub signatures that each user and group sends out their messages with.
It’s not an assumption, it’s how activitypub works.
Can you show me documentation that shows communities or servers are signed?
So looking at that spec… Nothing there is validation that current messages originate from an “original” server…
I don’t think either of these signature options for Server to Server communications means that my current lemmy.saik0.com instance can’t be torn down (delete LXC container) and reconfigured as a brand new instance (New LXC container) and other instances wouldn’t know that there’s been a change to the instance running here… or more accurately would flag a change. I think these signatures are all about not being able to spoof OTHER instances. eg, lemmy.ml can’t send messages on behalf of lemmy.world.
I assumed that once federated the public key would be remembered and signatures that do not match it would be handled, but you may be correct. I do wonder whether this could be a problem as instances close down over time. I’ll have to spend some more time researching to see if there’s a more clear answer, or if any ActivityPub implementations have their own way of handling that situation.
ICANN has an Expired Registration Recovery Policy (ERRP) that requires your registrar to give your domain a 30-day grace period before deleting the records. ERRP also requires them to shutdown your DNS resolutions 8 days before deletion.
You’d have to be really mismanaging your domain if you miss all the required email reminders and don’t notice your domain has been non functional for a couple of days.
I think Microsoft and Google have both done it, but what do they know? 🤣
Oh really? Haven’t heard that one, back in the day or something?
Yeah some dude bought the google.com domain via some glitch a while back. Here’s a story about it.
Awesome lol
Yup. Microsoft let hotmail lapse once. Someone paid for the renewal for them. https://slashdot.org/story/00/01/18/1645224/microsoft-hotmail-domain-reward-check-on-ebay
This is why you don’t let your domain registration lapse. It’s not the only way computers on the internet verify each other’s identity, but a hell of a lot of internet security features are based around domain names, so keeping yours functioning is a very big deal.
Domain registration ≠ internet security. Root of trust is in cryptographic keys, not domains. DNS is not the security cornerstone you make it out to be. PKI says hi!
Consider how many system relies on being able to send you an email for verifying your login and performing password reset. Those who have control over your email address domain can trigger password reset for most of online services out there. Imagine if Google forgot to renew gmail.com and it falls to a wrong hands.
Email is tied to domains. TLS is tied to domains. CORS is tied to domains. OAuth is tied to domains. Those are just four things I can think of while half asleep. Here’s one recent example of how screwing up a domain name is enough by itself to cause a security breach.
Cryptography is not security any more than domain names are; both are facets of how security is implemented but there’s no one system that makes the Internet secure.
Yes, but it is very quick and cheap to get a domain validated cert from a CA that is generally trusted by most web browsers, so once the bad actor has the domain, the should be able to trick most users, only maybe certificate pinning might help, but that is not widely used.
Out of curiosity, other than fmhy.ml, lemmy.ml, and lemmygrad.ml, what other Lemmy instances were using .ml domains? Also, how are the latter two still running but fmhy.ml isn’t?
edit: This has triggered a chain of comments I wasn’t expecting. I’d appreciate it if someone can answer on a technical level. Is the latter two using a different registrar or name server which is why it still works for them?
Why are so many instances using .ml anyway?
AFAIK, lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml use it because the ml can also stand for “Marxist-Leninist”, and the two primary maintainers of Lemmy are Marxist-Leninists . Not sure about the others though.
It can also definitely stand for Machine Learning which is the first thing that comes to my mind
Yes but lemmy has nothing to do with Machine Learning.
Yes, but as discussed several times here and there Lemmy Devs are pro china and anti USA and they admin lemmy.lm. in this case LM stays for Marxism Leninism.
Hey now, what’s with all the logic and stuff. We only allowing jumping to conclusions around these parts, you should know better than that.
/s
It’s not jumping to conclusions; it’s actually pretty well-known. The devs and their instance are very open about being Marxist-Leninists.
I don’t see how machine learning is related to Lemmy in any way
Okay, fair enough. So…we getting back to Lemmy now?
Edit:
It really is an interesting social experiment when talking in neutral tones about people with communist beliefs. So I said are we getting back to Lemmy now and I get a battering of downvotes, okay I struck a nerve, but why? I’m pretty “far left” in my beliefs but we are all here aren’t we?
It’s just interesting to see people say “well you can change instances!” Yeah, but the devs are still the devs - just because they’re not running those instances doesn’t mean they’re not the father or grandfather of those alternate instances. So your beliefs make you take a stance on the instance you choose, but not the software? How do you reconcile that?
As far as the developers go, I think they created a great piece of software, but I trust the open source community to vet like they always do with all open source software, let’s see where this goes. I think the developers want to see the world in a way that just isn’t compatible with our current evolutionary state. They stated that they have their beliefs, and what they expect of their communities is kindness, and consideration towards others. So far, I’m good with that.
I mean, the concepts of Marxism are actually quite noble. But there’s no doubt about it. The system fails because the people never end up in control, it simply doesn’t work. I just feel these devs simply live in the clouds too much and are not grounded in reality. I’m not sure how old they are, but they may not have lived enough life to realize we’re not a people evolved enough to support a true balanced socialist lifestyle - the best we can do is try to interject social programs into our capitalist lifestyle, as it is today, to fill the gaps that a capitalist society leaves behind.
That’s not true at all. ML was used as an idiological choice as it’s the only free TLD you can get and you should not have to pay for a domain name as per Lemmy’s creators ideology.
That’s not true. There are a few other free TLDs. I think five total?
I’m going to have to make a copy paste for this:
.ml stands for Mali.
.ee stands for Estonia.
.tv stands for Tuvalu
Just like .ca stands for Canada.
this is technically true, but it’s not why lemmygrad, ran by full on communists, chose the .ml tld
Which ironically, is now failing due to the fault of those in power of that TLD. The fediverse needs to be careful with tld’s they choose. ICAAN exists, but it’s obvious that some domain power is delegated and therefore safer TLDs should be chosen
Honestly this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think this literally down to bad luck and this is nothing we have to be prepare for anymore than any other host. Which is an incredibly small amount. It’s not like this shit happens often as there would be a lot of news coverage around it considering the amount of big companies affected, and I frankly think this is very low on the list of priorities of things that lemmy has to keep in mind or address at some point.
I completely agree with you. My point was purely to say that in the future those running parts of the fediverse now need to be more cautious. Now that we know that ICAAN will allow TLD administrators to reclaim these domains, it’s important that TLDs are chosen less about how they look in the moment as a cool URL, and more about their historical integrity of keeping a domain active.
Stalinists, not communism
It’s funny you’re getting down votes for this. ML was literally created as the official formulation of Marxism & Leninism for the USSR by Stalin.
Reactionary Stalin/China/etc stans try to frame themselves as communists and don’t like it when it’s called out. They’re like qanonists with a different cult leader.
I’m surprised they didn’t use the .su Soviet Union Top Level Domain.
.ml was the main Lemmy before .world Most communities were there.
Yes I know, the owners of lemmygrad/lemmy.ml created lemmy
I can’t believe someone else is having the exact same conversation with the exact same person as me
Yes, it stands for Mali, no, it’s not why lemmygrad used the domain name. Do you think all the services like Grammarly and Bitly are all Libyan services as well? Because I’ve got news that may just blow your mind.
Please stop copy-pasting ignorance.
Please don’t make a copy paste for this, smh.
lemmy.ml, what type of drug are you on
Do you have a source for that statement?
Yes. Check (Google) esses in GitHub of one of Lemmy Devs, check official Lemmy creation history, check Reddit post announcing lemyy creation.
This topic was discussed multiple times here and there.
Alright, thanks. I’ll look around. I don’t have a problem with it if that’s why they chose ml, I just want to know for sure before I told anyone that. Some people get up in arms about socialism.
LemmyNet GitHub: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
One of two creators and main devs https://github.com/dessalines (second one: https://github.com/Nutomic)
His essays on github: https://github.com/dessalines/essays
Very polite version of lemmy creation: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/07-history-of-lemmy.html
In this trhead someone already posed reddit annoucment, which uses more honest wirding 🙂
Okay, but.
Are they Marxist-Leninist? Pro-China? Socialists? Anti-capitalists? Looks like: yes.
Was the whole thing founded on the grounds of free, shared things and anti-corporate thinking? Also yes.
Do we absolutely know for sure that the ML domain was chosen because of this? No, because the above sources (or any source I ever saw) confirms or denies this claim. (If there is something specifically about the TLD, please share with me.)I’m not saying it stands for Machine Learning. I’m not saying it stands for My Love or Mah Lord. But I also wouldn’t say that it for sure stands for Marxist-Leninist. We can assume, but we don’t know for sure. Maybe it’s because it’s free, maybe it sounds cool, maybe it’s Maybelline. We don’t know this specific aspect of the story. (As far as I’m aware.)
Idk if it was intentional or not but that last sentence is a great pun lmao
I think it’s because ML is a popular shorthand for ‘Marxist-Leninist’ since they mostly seem to be communist servers
.ml stands for Mali.
.ee stands for Estonia.
.tv stands for Tuvalu
Just like .ca stands for Canada.
Thanks, I know what it stands for but I am trying to explain why that particular top-level domain was picked for those lemmy instances
.ml was the main Lemmy before .world Most communities were there.
Thats not a rebuttal. The .ml instance is run by Marxist-Leninists
You are technically correct, but surely you must know at this point that’s not at all how domains are used on the internet. Bit.ly isn’t hosted or affiliated with Libya.
And if you ever doubted that the maintainers of Lemmy are tankies, well have I got a post from you, from the horse’s mouth:
https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/
Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.
Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I’m sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.
So I’ve spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it’s pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we’d have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.
Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it’s been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.
Raddle isn’t an option obviously since it’s run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.
I wanted to ask ppl here if they’d like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.
The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. They chose “.ml” because they are Marxist-Leninists. They first advertised on /r/communism and that post outright states they’re Marxist-Leninists.
Thinking they chose .ml because they really like Mali is absolutely ridiculous.
A while ago Libya suddenly requires all companies that use .ly domain to have a presence in Libya or have their domain reclaimed by the government. bit.ly (and other internet startups that use .ly domains back then) suddenly found themselves in a precarious position. It was pretty hilarious as .ly TLD was hip back then.
I’ve never felt that country TLDs were worth using and this has only cemented that opinion for me
Hey, I didn’t quite get it. Can you copy and paste this reply a few times more? Thanks.
It was free
So they can support Russia by proxy.
Lol so one could say they fucked around and have now found out (yes I realize that was a sarcastic answer)
It was free, and anonymous I guess
It’s not anonymous. In fact because it’s free it requires more data to prevent someone from acquiring all of the domain names.
I’m guessing because it’s sort of an alliteration on lemmy?
It was free
And
Lemmy creators are Marxist Leninists
Theyre tankies, thats why.
I know a ton about DNS and its technical functionality, not necessarily the regulations guiding registrars, but the technician in me says your TTL (how long other servers wait until asking where xyz.ml points to) hasn’t expired, maybe? Perhaps the government administration process simply hasn’t executed any action against those particular registrars yet?
I never liked TLDs that are from random islands or less than stable countries and there are so many great TLDs available now, I simply don’t see the reason to use such obscure TLDs just for the marketing factor.
Yeah, not a good situation.
The main story I found seems to indicate that many government communications have been misdirected due to the typo of .ml instead of the intended .mil - reserved for the US military. 🤦♂️ There has been an entrepreneur that holds the contract to manage Mali’s country domain and that’s expiring Monday (24th?). I’m assuming the government is not renewing the contract and will instead be taking over the domains and any related data. He has been collecting some of that data and warning the US government about the issue to no avail…for 10 years.
Control of the .ML domain will revert on Monday from Zuurbier to Mali’s government, which is closely allied with Russia. When Zuurbier’s 10-year management contract expires, Malian authorities will be able to gather the misdirected emails. The Malian government did not respond to requests for comment.
Their contents include X-rays and medical data, identity document information, crew lists for ships, staff lists at bases, maps of installations, photos of bases, naval inspection reports, contracts, criminal complaints against personnel, internal investigations into bullying, official travel itineraries, bookings, and tax and financial records.
ICANN is the body responsible for the gTLD initiative, which gives you names like .social and .world. They are an American non-profit with a multinational committee, handling nearly all of the databases that store our Internet address records, etc., you can be relatively assured that your domain won’t be messed with.
The instances really have no option here than to test out moving their systems to an alternative domain and “bench test” their migration to discover a path that works or a least come to the conclusion to start all over.
Holy shit this is actually kind of a huge story
Totally understandable incompetence from the military.
I think I only have a few original pages from my service. Most just disappear.
Yeah, they should just block ingress/egress to any .ml. Maybe they keep it open for misinformation campaigns.
Lmao if the US military gets phished by a domain typo they deserve it.
I never liked TLDs that are from random islands
I remember reading somewhere that Tuvalu gets like 10% of their entire yearly income from Twitch.
I now pronounce Twitch as Twitch dot Tuvalu, but I get weird "huh?"s when I say it like that.
I for one will now be joining you in this crusade 🫡
You can see all but posts and comments won’t be on their server until back online that are a few it went down. So I can visit my communities like https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/c/artwork that I mod. I can see it but nothing will happen until it comes back online. That’s what understand at least.
Why is Meta suing Freenom?
The lawsuit points to a 2021 study (PDF) on the abuse of domains conducted by Interisle Consulting Group, which discovered that those ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up five of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.
Oof. Also what a bizarre landscape where this comes out in 2021 and the only action on it is a private corporation personally suing them over a year later. Where’s ENISA and EC3?
There is also the recent news about how millions of US Military emails (.mil) were sent to Malia instead (.ml).
That’s got to be fake news or satire, right? Right?
Like, how is it even possible to send to .ml instead of .mil? ‘i’ and ‘l’ are not even close enough to fat-finger it on most keyboards, and even if you did, it wouls have to be by using the same finger for both ‘i’ and ‘l’, which means you’d physically register the double tap.
Nope, here’s an article from CNN about it: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/17/politics/email-typos-mali-military-emails/index.html
Yikes…
I was using .ml domains for my selfhosted services, since it was just an hobby and I didn’t wanted to invest money on it. Apart from Freenom website being pretty unusable since I have memory, I’ve already had troubles renewing them last year and now they stopped working without any notice nor update from Freenom itself. Finally I decided to move to a payed domain from Infomaniak, since it’s been more than a year I’ve been selfhosting and $10/year is a fair price for me.
But still without those free domains I wouldn’t probably ever started selfhosting, and I guess a lot of other people like me wouldn’t have experimented or spin up their projects if they had to pay for a domain from the beginning. So despite my hate for Freenom I guess I have to thank them and hope someone else (maybe a bit more “professional”) will take its place in the future
The lawsuit points to a 2021 study (PDF) on the abuse of domains conducted by Interisle Consulting Group, which discovered that those ccTLDs operated by Freenom made up five of the Top Ten TLDs most abused by phishers.
Umm… Can we talk about how a private company is suing another private company over something that should be in the interest of the government/general public? Where are our agencies, where is Interpol/Europol or ENISA?
FYI I have made a tool that can backup / copy your account settings, subscriptions, and blocks to a new account: https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim
There are others out there as well if you look.
Obviously the loss of .ml communities would still be catastrophic to Lemmy, but at least your new account won’t start from ground-zero, and you can be less effected by downtime by having 2 accounts with the same subscriptions.
deleted by creator
The domain bs is a interesting case of scummy practices in general, .tv was missused in a similar way with awful contracts, essentially scamming a already increadably poor country!
A lot of people should be concerned about this for .me domains as well (Montenegro)
I think that’s different because the .ml domain apparently was being given away for free by a registrar that wasn’t responding to abuse complaints, and thus was being heavily abused.
…but if not, then holy shit what a mistake it was to register
firstname@lastname.meas my primary email address.deleted by creator
Proton also uses ch and com.
