I found this post:
"I contacted Identity Digital, the registry operator for the .ME domain zone, to request the reason why t.me was placed on "serverHold".
The company has now responded and confirmed that the domain was suspended due to OFAC-related compliance requirements.
The domain t.me has been placed on serverHold due to OFAC-related compliance requirements
Identity Digital also stated that, under its agreements with accredited registrars, it cannot provide further details directly to third parties. Any additional communication regarding the registry action must go through the domain's registrar, GoDaddy." [weird response, this is a serverHold, not a client lock]
As you can see, the Montenegrin government is NOT at fault. It’s a decision made by the two biggest stakeholders in the .ME registry, which together hold over 70%: the American companies GoDaddy and Identity Digital. In my opinion, it’s extremely sad that the countries managing TLDs have so little autonomy and are also constantly accused of doing wrong when it’s not their fault.
OFAC just announced sanctions against a VPN provider that had a t.me link listed as its website. I wonder if that's what triggered the t.me ban? They saw the domain in the filing and went, "Yep, ban the whole thing."
I think you're being sarcastic? Because you don't believe they are responsible for the actions of their agents?
If I hire someone to file my taxes, and they lie/cheat/steal. I'm still going to jail.
I don't think they should be required to answer for this fuck up, but if they not angry at their chosen agents, it's because they're on the wrong side, and deserve some blame too.
I must have completely read your comment backwards. I thought you were suggesting they didn't have any fault. But you're saying it'd be better if managed their domain themselves, that I completely agree with.
Curiously enough, .me's whois record does not list Identity Digital as a contact (as seems to be standard practice with externally-managed ccTLDs, such as .gi), and .me is not listed on Identity Digital's "TLD Portfolio"[0]
On the other hand, all of their infrastructure (registry websites, nameservers, whois server) are hosted on Identity Digital, Godaddy, and Afilias IPs. Does anyone know what the relationship between .me and Identity Digital is?
Absolutely.
According to a recent Montenegro government document, doMEn is owned by:
GoDaddy.com LLC 38.352%
Identity Digital Limited 36.848%
ME-net (local montenegrinian network) 24.8%.
Of course we launched our Telegram channel just this weekend, so I am feeling pretty happy that I enforced a 15-year old SOP that says "never email links to 3rd-party domains ; always use a redirect"...
Swapping the redirect now for telegram.me, which hopefully won't go down simultaneously
I think you also misunderstood, they are suggesting OP redirect to a telegram domain that isn't on the .me TLD, as the other .me is potentially at risk of also being taken down.
I thought this was a long solved problem: the server syncs encrypted data, and the user provides the decryption key from another device (via QR codes, BLE, …)
Since when did registars care about the political positions of its clients? They could have registered on cloudflare or namecheap and I doubt they'd bat an eye. Telegram is mainstream enough that nobody is going to cancel them, unlike kiwi farms or 4chan.
oh, there were so many of those during the first months of the war! most websites had simply put up a "I support the current thing" banner, but some really went out of the way. it was actually amusing to click a link to some fuckass blog that probably gets 5 visitors a day and get greeted with "NO RUSSIANS ALLOWED". I think it's safe to say by now that those measures weren't enough to incite a revolution or trigger an economic collapse, but hey, if it made those people feel like they were helping, who am I to judge?
sometimes I wonder if they did the same thing during Israel's carpet bombing of Palestinian civilians, or when America killed more children in a single strike than Russia does in a year of its genocidal all-out war. probably not, it's different after all.
You accuse them of being hypocrites for staying silent about some other wars, while you are here downplaying the importance of a large scale war ("I support current thing" /pol/ lingo implies there is no valid reason to be against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you have to be a brainwashed sheep to do that)? Sounds hypocritical to me.
PS: The blog blanners and all that were so powerless, yet they still trigger you 4 years later?
I think the accusation is more that they are propagandized sheep doing what the sheep are expected to do instead of actually thinking about what they are doing from a wider perspective.
>"I support current thing" /pol/ lingo implies there is no valid reason to be against Russia's invasion of Ukraine
"I support current thing" /pol/ lingo implies their Ukraine banners were a reskin of BLM banners from a year before.
>PS: The blog blanners and all that were so powerless, yet they still trigger you 4 years later?
like I said, I found them amusing, especially those custom geofences on obscure blogs. a fucking John Johnson (they/them) from Oregon oblast goes out of his way to scold Ivan Ivanov (он/им) from Orenburg oblast for something John's own country did so many times in Ivan's lifetime he'd lost count.
also, all tech-adjacent Russians had VPNs by that point because of Taliban-tier morality policing, so bypassing those blocks took an eyeroll and two clicks.
You should probably try replacing the name of the country in the phrase “<nation> is not allowed” with your own nationality to understand what the problem is here.
> You accuse them of being hypocrites
They are.
> while you are here downplaying the importance of a large scale war
registrars are bound by the political whims of those that allow them to exist there have been multiple domains that have been shut down at the behest of certain governments even when its well beyond their jurisdiction
kiwi farms and 4chan are relatively harmless compare to what Telegram enables yet kiwi farms was taken offline at the behest of a political camp that has certain opinions about very basic stuffs that shouldn't even be grounds to be considered.
>kiwi farms and 4chan are relatively harmless compare to what Telegram enables yet kiwi farms was taken offline at the behest of a political camp that has certain opinions about very basic stuffs that shouldn't even be grounds to be considered.
For most people, the % of content that's "harmful" matters more than absolute harm numbers. This is a good thing, because otherwise after telegram, the next app to be canceled would be signal.
> kiwi farms and 4chan are relatively harmless compare to what Telegram enables yet kiwi farms was taken offline at the behest of a political camp that has certain opinions about very basic stuffs that shouldn't even be grounds to be considered.
Literally what the fuck is this take? Kiwifarms' central purpose for existing is to organize doxxing and harassment efforts. It has harassed multiple people into committing suicide, and celebrates these murders as achievements. It is shameless to downplay that in the way you're doing.
4chan and Telegram are completely unrelated. They are low-censorship platforms. People can misuse them to commit harm, as they can misuse any place they're allowed to speak with privacy/anonymity, but the platforms do not exist for the explicit purpose to cause harm.
> You won't die just because someone posts your passport online.
Jesus, do you have the object permanence of a 3-year-old? This part alone, no. But this then directly leads to hundreds of people harassing you, everyone you know, blackmailing you, etc. People get fired because their workplace doesn't want to deal with it, for fuck's sake.
News outlets have been reporting on how the Terrorgram, O9A, 764, and murder loving European fascist groups have been organizing on Telegram (it's in the name!) for years.
Discord at least attempts to do some moderation about this.
Telegram's strategy to deal with violent extremist groups on its platform is to not ban them but just make it hard to discover. But this doesn't stop someone already in the groups from inviting their buddies. I bet they actually prefer it this way.
Do you want privacy, or do you want back doors into everything?
Usually, the backdoor on apply to "regular" citizens, while the governments and military get exemptions from it.
If the balance of power wasnt so asymmetrical I would be inclined to emphasize with the position that E2EE is a bit of an over-correction. We would be remiss to ignore the practical concerns about nefarious actors using it to organize.
HOWEVER, we would ALSO be remiss to ignore the imbalance of power it would cause if ONLY the governments are privy to secrecy...
Violent extremist groups can also meet in parks and go to a bars. Police should follow everyone around and make everyone wear mandatory surveillance devices. Let's call them portable telescreen.
They subscribe to a belief that private speech should not be surveilled. I'm partial to their views. For all of human history, any two people could get together and privately talk. Talk about anything, including committing crimes. Now communication methods have changed but people still want to get together and talk about things, privately. Some of those things include crime, sure. The problem is it's not your freaking business what anyone is talking about privately. As soon as you open the door to surveillance "because crime", now you also have surveillance because you disagree with the government. And when it comes to internet surveillance, everything is preserved forever and also sold/leaked routinely, so you're really committing to leaking everyone's private life to anyone who is interested, forever. The internet is such an integral part of how most people communicate that "just don't say anything personal on the internet, ever" is not in any way reality.
I think this is not a line that can afford to be crossed. It is better for criminals and terrorists to be able to communicate privately than it is for no human anywhere ever to be able to communicate privately. It is not worth stripping the rights of billions of people to target a tiny minority of bad actors. And, given the trivial potential for authoritarian governments to misuse the power of absolute surveillance, I think the world we end up in would be much, much worse. Allowing nobody to privately communicate opposition to the government will lead to much worse outcomes than allowing nobody to privately communicate about crime, despite best intentions in short-term-thinking harm reduction.
In addition to the criminal groups you mention it being wanted in Europe for, Telegram is also being prosecuted in Russia for harboring anti-Putin-regime activists! Such is the inherent nature of private communication.
GoDaddy is just a general clusterfuck of arbitrary decisions. I don't have anything ready offhand to point to, but the general consensus is that you should avoid GoDaddy pretty vehemently.
You can read an explanation of the status codes on the icann website.
The explanation for clientRenewProhibited was interesting:
"This status code tells your domain's registry to reject requests to renew your domain. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or when your domain is subject to deletion."
Similar language for some of the other statuses like serverDeleteProhibited.
No, not being able to renew the domain due to the max renew ahead policy (it's registry-specific but also 10 years for .me) does not result in the clientRenewProhibited flag for .me.
(Yes, but it expires at 2035-05-20. If you count years by rounding up to integers, there's not enough time room to renew it an additional year. It would make it 11 years.)
Same for dog years, but why are we inventing ways to make it seem more than 10 years out when registries, quite reasonably, just use the date normally?
> To the best of my knowledge, a domain can only be renewed in advance for up to 10 years.
That is the rule for COM/NET/ORG. ccTLDs can do what they please.
That said, as a registrar I highly recommend people renew important domains for 9 years. It gives you maximum buffer but allows you to transfer to a new registrar even if your old or new one has the same misconception hard coded.
The DNS isn't 50 years old. There's absolutely no certainty your payment for the last year's will mean anything. Also if you're older than 35, you'll probably be dead. If you're not dead you probably won't care about the domain any more. Certainly all current politicians and the current political and economic systems will be dead. It's unclear there will be any reason to still have the domain and that it won't be blocking some innovative economic activity. It's unclear there will still be an internet.
It won't protect you against the country hosting the registry being nuked but it will likely shield you from future price hikes because not honoring pas renewals would quickly get the registry a reputation for being a fraud. Which is probably also why there is a limit - no registry wants to be bound by arbitrary long timed liabilities.
“This status code is set by your domain's Registry Operator. Your domain is not activated in the DNS.”
Also the serverDeleteProhibited status is active, which ICANN also admits is a weird and rare one:
“This status code prevents your domain from being deleted. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes, at your request, or when a redemptionPeriod status is in place.”
Mind you, this is ICANN's description, which applies to global domains and not country domains like .me. Country registries can (and do!) assign different meanings to these statuses; for example in .pl clientRenewProhibited has a completely different meaning.
Telegram is currently the target of legal/regulatory investigations by Russia (alleged extremism), France (likewise), and India (alleged facilitation of national exam leaking/cheating). I'm guessing the latter since it's the most recent and arguably has the most fiscal heft.
Also very surprised to see Telegram was reliant on GoDaddy, notorious for its lack of transparency.
But Telegram hasn't engaged in that, some of their users have.
I think the issue might be that although Telegram has a lot of abuse takedown activity, they do not permit access or direct action by authorities. If I recall, they have reiterated many times that some level or types of messages always remain private.
Maybe that's the issue is that a lot of illicit activity is going on in private channels and whether or not their filtering addresses it at all, authorities see the activity and have no access for court cases or direct action against it, so they can imagine it is quite rampant.
Other platforms either don't have the requested data (Signal) or willingly hand it over when they get a court order to (Facebook). When Telegram gets a court order it ignores the court order and then makes Pavel Durov hard to physically find and therefore arrest. One can only guess what motivations he has for this.
So courts seek alternative enforcement mechanisms.
I'm not making an argument about who's right or whether these disputes have any merit, I'm just trying to guess who might have had the inclination and legal resources to make this happen.
I always figured telegram got the screws turned on them all the time because their lack of E2E encryption meant it was viable to demand they proactively police the platform in the first place. Maybe Signal would just be outright blocked in these locales if it was anywhere near as popular, though.
I don't think anyone cares about E2E encryption as much as tech people think.
For all of the much-vaunted complains about their lack of it, I am not aware of any proof or credible claims that Telegram the company has ever revealed the contents of non-encrypted messages or group chats.
Meanwhile, I don't think any authorities actually care about to what extent E2E Encryption makes it harder for Signal the corporation to extract message data. There's plenty of other ways to skin that cat - on-device compromises, abuse of backup mechanisms, abuse of mechanisms to manage linked devices, etc. They'd go after them just the same if they thought there was anything they really wanted on there.
If there's any real difference, I think it's most likely because many more of the group chats that such authorities are aware of and find "interesting" are on Telegram because basically nobody really does E2E well in medium-large groups right now.
That's vague to the point of being completely meaningless. Do you have any examples of a time they've been in "very big trouble", whatever that means? Exactly how often constitutes "all the time"? Do you have an example of a valid court order in any jurisdiction that they have failed to comply with? Do you have any examples of a court not mandating similar compliance for Signal, iMessage, or any other E2EE platform due to that? There is no exception in the law for E2EE and it will not save you from consequences from failing to comply with a valid court order.
Famously, Pavel Durov (owner of Telegram) was arrested in France a couple of years ago and held in custody until he complied with one he'd received earlier.
Famously, Signal complies with court orders by giving up all the data that's requested that it has, which isn't very much. This is what you expect from E2EE platforms.
A court order to do the impossible is invalid. Telegram gets in trouble because it's possible for them to comply but they choose not to. Subpoenas are usually worded as "you must provide all information you have, relating to ..."
But as long as Signal controls the client app, there are very possible court orders to provide access to "encrypted" user chats even if courts haven't made use of those yet (as far as is publicly known).
The published reports of the exact things requested of them in the French arrest seem pretty vague. If they're related to the security of private messages and chats, it would seem to prove the point that they do infact refuse to provide that for anybody. The details around his release seem even more vague. We have only speculation and no actual proof that he or Telegram caved on such a request. As far as I know, we've never seen any charges that definitely came from Telegram revealing the messages of a private group chat.
Meanwhile, if you believe that any Governments actually refrain from prosecuting Signal executives due to their refusal and/or inability to produce the messages from private chats because they have E2EE, well, I've got a nice bridge to sell you.
If they actually are refraining from going after Signal executives in a similar fashion, most likely either 1. Nobody is actually using it for anything interesting, 2. They are actually secretly cooperating somehow, or 3. Governments are already happy with other technical means of extracting the contents of Signal chats they are interested in. See the US FBI's curious sudden lack of interest in Apple's ability, or lack thereof, to extract a wanted suspect's iMessage messages.
They generally don't have to proactively police it, but they have to answer court orders in every country that has courts, or they'll be in trouble in that country. And countries are free to cooperate with each other to enforce these.
Pavel Durov was arrested when he traveled to France because Telegram was noncompliant with French court orders. You can ignore them in Russia... you can't ignore them in France. And you can ignore Russian court orders in France but not in Russia. And the Russian or Indian court is free to ask the Montenegrin government to suspend your domain name and the Montenegrin government is free to agree or disagree.
Signal is already well known to governments. In fact a few years ago there was a report in the UK media about how some governments used signal instead of official channels like email and did so because of Signals disappearing messages feature (ie making those MPs less accountable).
More recently, a Signal chat record leaked, between US national security advisor Mike Waltz, US VP JD Vance and others, regarding the ongoing illegal assassinations in Yemen:
I've been in quite many Telegram chats, none of which has enabled it. For most practical purposes you can just consider Telegram not to have e2e since it's no good if it's not used.
>But Telegram hasn't engaged in that, some of their users have.
Yeah, but government workers just want a legal slam dunk to call it a day and collect the glory, and it's always easier to go after the platform where the crimes are being discussed, rather than after the individual users actually committing the crimes.
It's how government, prosecution and law enforcement jobs are incentivized to operate.
It's more likely they did go after the individual users, by sending a demand to Telegram to identify the users, and Telegram refused despite having the ability.
Montenegro (.me) seems to be aligned with the EU. But I would have expected there to see a legal ruling in France before Montenegro would do this sort of thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if GoDaddy caved to request. They are known for giving up domains to anyone with a badge and a fax machine!
serverHold status means registry, not registrar, hold - the relevant protocol (not WHOIS) has the registry as the server, as you'd expect. But you are right about GoDaddy and they are a strange choice.
In Russia, "extremism" is being against Putin or the war. For example, posting photo of Alexey Navalny is "displaying extremism symbol". Also, there are people charged with extremism for posting a link to instagram/facebook domains (Meta is an extremist organization).
Also "facilitation of exam cheating" is the most stupid accusation. Why they cannot keep exam question in secret? Also why they do not shutdown scammer call centers which scam Westerners? So they want Telegram to be blocked but scammer call center to continue operating?
> So they want Telegram to be blocked but scammer call center to continue operating?
Obviously yes, follow the money. Call centers use BSNL which is a state-owned telco, the government gets a cut of every call made. Telegram doesn't give the government any incentive to keep it around.
>In Russia, "extremism" is being against Putin or the war.
In Russia, "extremism" is whatever the state decides it to be. "Give me the man, and I will find the crime" has always been its modus operandi. the last people who might have got fair trial were nobles under the Tzar.
Zulip is amazing. Nothing against that but what are your thoughts on fluxer and the others (recently chatto seems interesting, matrix, stoat are interesting options as well).
Also awesome initiative by the way, how did you end up making it and I'd love to know some backstory about it actually as well.
Not the original commenter, but Matrix is awful. I used it on and off, and self-hosted it too. It's slow, bloated (I'm pretty sure I tried other homeservers). The app UI/UX is not great either. The E2EE stuff got better by the end but adoption-wise I was able to get way more people on Signal.
Matrix the protocol is just fine, and all features you expect are there. Their problem is with actual apps that either don't support most of good features, are unpolished to the degree of being unusable, or both.
I agree that Matrix has a lot of problems, at least when used with the Element app, but I've found that voice calls are much better with Matrix compared to Signal over a flaky network. It was as good as WhatsApp in my experience.
For matrix, I don't use the original client but rather cinny. This client is so good that I wish that other clients and it looks really good in UI/UX, honestly I have had some serious thoughts of porting this UI sometimes: https://cinny.in, so I would be curious what you think about this as well.
(Side note: Fractal and the matrix element fork called schildichat are interesting as well. It is also possible to run matrix in terminal for what its worth as well, and nhekochat is good as well. Fractal runs on gtk and nheko runs on qt. I do agree though that running matrix homservers is a bit bulky sometimes from what I have heard but the client scene is probably really good so I am curious what you think about cinny :-D )
I used Cinny at some point, but the issue for me was the mobile client. I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client. I think I tried Fractal and whatever KDE was working on and neither was polished at the time of use.
Hm yeah I understand, there were some issues in Fractal where it didn't support spaces sometime back (I am not sure about it right now), it was fun talking to the team at gnome though making fractal.
> I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client.
I feel as if sacrifices must be made as Signal and most others are probably web based clients as well. Fractal probably comes as close to it tbh
> but the issue for me was the mobile client
Ah I see, I don't really run matrix on phone but yeah I understand what you mean, aren't there some clients like fluffychat and others for Android though? Certainly not as polished as Cinny I imagine but it should be workable (hopefully) from my time seeing some of its screenshots. another side nitpick of matrix protocol but I have heard from people that Matrix clients sometimes take battery consumption.
When I was making https://mirror.forum I had my fair share of trying various protocols and to be honest, I feel as if we have enough good open source solutions out there that the tech part just isn't the limiter anymore and FOSS solutions in general might be good enough but its the network effects which are the issues.
which is tangentially why I had built mirror.forum where you can add your discord, matrix, fluxer, stoat links all in one for a guy to join any of them by just changing the link from #discord to #fluxer among other things.
Though I do understand the overall frustration of wanting something which just works but Fluxer is an honestly good option as well and I would love to know if it fits your use case perhaps if not matrix, what do you think? IMO its a low hanging fruit to replace from discord to fluxer given how similar the overall UI/UX is. I also think that Fluxer also has a mobile client or is working on that.
They're in a position to get their own TLD (e.g .tgrm - edited from .tg); they should probably do this and run their own supporting infrastructure for it at this point.
Well, almost all of them are ultimately controlled by the nations, but there are quite a few that private companies operate because they've paid the nation to gain control.
But then there's .io (and a few others: .ac, and previously .sh, .tm) where they were actually delegated to a British guy and are now controlled by the private company he started. And according to the British government, they have no agreement with the company, and they receive no revenue from the domain registrations.
2 letter TLDs/country-code TLDs, are determined by ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes, and having a country code doesn't necessarily mean a country or a state.
There are a bunch on there that I wouldn't consider states, e.g. both UN/EU are exceptionally reserved and have `.un` and `.eu`. Antarctica also has `.aq`.
The Heard Island and McDonald Islands has `.hm`, and it's not a state (since it has no population) but I guess it is controlled by Australia.
Suspended means the "serverHold" status. I haven't found any official blog post/announcement yet, but the status is unambiguous, and the fact that it happened to one of the Telegram's main short links means that it might be related to legal matters.
Archive warrior's default project is mirroring t.me links. If you're running it you'll need to switch to a different project. It isn't handling the domain not resolving well, it stuck in timeout backoffs.
i really hope this is it from telegram. its downright causing havoc in countries without the jurisdictional power like korea and japan which have seen insane rise in drug related crime especially in
japan they have a new wave of crime from anonymous telegram operators running human cell crime ops
If telegram disappeared then others would immediately take its place.
Telegram also isnt device to device fully encrypted unless you use a more limited private chat and, as Telegram uses googles messaging service, so likely compromised to NSA anyway.
> If telegram disappeared then others would immediately take its place.
I'm not certain that's the case. Telegram has survived in large part because Durov is incredibly wealthy and can afford to shovel money into running the service more or less indefinitely. There's no obvious heir apparent.
>> they have a new wave of crime from anonymous telegram operators
I love how your solution isn't "country should decide for themselves and pass the law that suits them" but "let people that have nothing to do with that country take something away from them (sidenote: I also don't have nothing to do with that country)".
Drug abuse is a systematic problem, if telegram single-handedly enabling it to alarming rates, the solution should be at least to ban a tech stack.
Otherwise it will get replaced in a seconds.
Yep, I would never use a registrar called "go daddy". It always sounded like a registrar for noobs that will take adverse actions to "protect" you and this only confirms this.
What’s your beef? The name? Because I’ve been super happy with porkbun but damn, that name… and then the official-sounding ones like network solutions are quite shady. don’t judge a registrar by its name I guess.
The ad is not sexist, it's sexy/sexualized and humourous, which is something else. And of course it is from 2010, just before the great ... cultural shift.
It’s absolutely #%^*ing bizarre to me how many 500+ employee tech companies use it. I just don’t get it. I know IT isn’t web developers but they ought to at least have better opinions on this kind of thing?
GoDaddy is a shit registrar, but it has nothing to do with the name. You shouldn’t be basing your choices (or your HN recommendations) on product names, domain names, or other similar “vibes-based” reasoning.
FWIW, I have also never liked the name, but the name is just marketing. This should rank very low in your decision matrix, hopefully.
I would recommend a registrar that would explain to the customer why they would not want a .me domain for anything critical unless the person lives in Montenegro and trust the Government of Montenegro to maintain a good and trust worthy registry.
Otherwise just use which ever registrar is cheapest and who you think will handle any quirks or shenanigans that registries may do to domains you own, and which own system and processes hold high enough standard for you.
ccTLD hacks are both semantically incorrect and geopolitically unstable.
The .io TLD will likely be phased out in the future due to geopolitics, and all the companies who decided it was more important to signal how hacker jargon aware their startup was will have to go through the very difficult process of changing domains.
In order to log into IRS.gov to get a code to pay my USA taxes, I had to verify my USA ID via a private company called ID.me, whose domain name AND company name are now forever tied to the whims of the government of Montenegro.
The biggest difference is the role of ICANN and their willingness to regulate the management of a TLD. With ccTLD they have an official policy to be hands off and not dictate what a country will do with their top level domain. If the US government would start to mess with Verisign and how the registry handles domain, then ICANN is within their own policy to just move it somewhere else.
The government of Montenegro could, just like many other ccTLD, decide tomorrow that every registrant must be a citizen of Montenegro. Many countries do this today, and it is no big deal because it is the country of and ccTLD that dictate how their domains should be operated. They can raise prices by a factor of 100 if they wanted, decide on some form of ID for registration, or dictate that you must have a company located in the country. ICANN has no objection to any of that.
ICANN is a nonprofit in California. It doesn’t really have any power on its own. It only exists because everyone from browser developers to server operators to consumers agrees we need a central place to organize stuff.
If the US justice system issued a warrant telling Verisign to do X, what do you think the courts would do to ICANN if they tried to actively stop X from happening? At best, they would be politely asked to stop, at worst, they would get felony charges for obstruction.
It's very different. If the USA soon starts cancelling politically inconvenient domains, European ones will be safe. Just like Nazi propaganda domains would be censored in Europe, but are safe in the US.
Every domain has a country. It's as if every non-ccTLD was actually underneath .us. For legacy reasons .com .org etc were grandfathered in. gTLDs are also under .us for corrupt reasons.
Politically inconvenient domains are already routinely seized by the US and there are international agreements in place that allow cross-border takedowns.
Why do you think t.me got taken down? Montenegro doesn’t care about Telegram.
Never use the same company for your hosting or CDN and your domain, and avoid cloudflare in general.
That's because if they don't like your website being on your CDN, and they suspend your account, you'll lose your domain. If your domain is at Porkbun you can change it to point to a different IP address.
And avoid Cloudflare because they're centralising the internet.
I chose Porkbun because it's a small company with good prices, a good vibe, and all the tools that I need. Cloudflare was never going to be on the table because I don't want to feed the beast that is already swallowing the entire internet.
Never had any trouble with them, but also moving away from them is unnecessarily hard (the code sometimes takes a day to arrive) and they cover the entire interface with their paid hosting stuff which makes them a poor registrar. I ended up on them because of Google Domains selling off but got off them because very annoying to use.
I'd honestly be careful with squarespace. They are owned by private equity, advertise on countless YouTube channels, and at the same time their core market is under a looming threat from the AI companies.
You need your domain registrar to be stable and predictable. Their profile is not that.
My understanding is that both GoDaddy and Namecheap used to do domain front running[0] at the time I was registering my first handful of commercial domains, so I've always avoided even using their search engines.
My bank automatically blocks payments to Namecheap. When I had domains with them, I had to call and give prior approval for the exact amount I would be paying. My bank claimed it was because of a high number of fraudulent charges.
Namecheap got bought by private equity fairly recently, so i switched away from them. Wouldn’t recommend starting with them just in time for the enshittification to start.
Their prices had already been going up for a few years before that, which finally pushed me off them starting around August of last year. I'm about to swap my final few domains over this month before they renew.
Porkbun has been great so far. Easy to use, refreshingly minimal, and good prices.
FYI - Gandi was great, but they got bought by private equity a few years back and the price skyrocketed and service went downhill super fast after the buyout.
Didn't t.me also support showing previews of entire channels? Perhaps they got hit with a take-down of sorts due to content (e.g., CSAM) on any particular channel?
I found this post: "I contacted Identity Digital, the registry operator for the .ME domain zone, to request the reason why t.me was placed on "serverHold".
The company has now responded and confirmed that the domain was suspended due to OFAC-related compliance requirements.
The domain t.me has been placed on serverHold due to OFAC-related compliance requirements
Identity Digital also stated that, under its agreements with accredited registrars, it cannot provide further details directly to third parties. Any additional communication regarding the registry action must go through the domain's registrar, GoDaddy." [weird response, this is a serverHold, not a client lock]
As you can see, the Montenegrin government is NOT at fault. It’s a decision made by the two biggest stakeholders in the .ME registry, which together hold over 70%: the American companies GoDaddy and Identity Digital. In my opinion, it’s extremely sad that the countries managing TLDs have so little autonomy and are also constantly accused of doing wrong when it’s not their fault.
OFAC just announced sanctions against a VPN provider that had a t.me link listed as its website. I wonder if that's what triggered the t.me ban? They saw the domain in the filing and went, "Yep, ban the whole thing."
Will they compensate the losses to Telegram for disrupting its business? Or it's ok to take down random domains?
Which provider? It sounds like they're doing something right.
> the Montenegrin government is NOT at fault
Who gave management of the TLD to foreign interests? Montenegrin government.
You're right, their fault is not choosing to manage it themselves
I think you're being sarcastic? Because you don't believe they are responsible for the actions of their agents?
If I hire someone to file my taxes, and they lie/cheat/steal. I'm still going to jail.
I don't think they should be required to answer for this fuck up, but if they not angry at their chosen agents, it's because they're on the wrong side, and deserve some blame too.
No I am not sarcastic, I think it's sad that countries give up the autonomy of controlling their sovereign domain to random foreign American companies
I must have completely read your comment backwards. I thought you were suggesting they didn't have any fault. But you're saying it'd be better if managed their domain themselves, that I completely agree with.
Curiously enough, .me's whois record does not list Identity Digital as a contact (as seems to be standard practice with externally-managed ccTLDs, such as .gi), and .me is not listed on Identity Digital's "TLD Portfolio"[0]
On the other hand, all of their infrastructure (registry websites, nameservers, whois server) are hosted on Identity Digital, Godaddy, and Afilias IPs. Does anyone know what the relationship between .me and Identity Digital is?
[0]: https://identity.digital/tld-portfolio
Absolutely. According to a recent Montenegro government document, doMEn is owned by: GoDaddy.com LLC 38.352% Identity Digital Limited 36.848% ME-net (local montenegrinian network) 24.8%.
doMEn is the registry of .ME.
llm output?
Here's the source for what I'm saying: https://wapi.gov.me/download/0d9fcdc2-c491-4b2c-9a71-d493af1...
Of course we launched our Telegram channel just this weekend, so I am feeling pretty happy that I enforced a 15-year old SOP that says "never email links to 3rd-party domains ; always use a redirect"...
Swapping the redirect now for telegram.me, which hopefully won't go down simultaneously
I would do something that isn't *.me, since it was them that suspended it.
I think you misunderstood -- OP is running op-s-domain.com/telegramchat -> redirect t.me.
They updated op-s-domain.com/telegramchat -> redirect telegram.me.
I think you also misunderstood, they are suggesting OP redirect to a telegram domain that isn't on the .me TLD, as the other .me is potentially at risk of also being taken down.
This is barely an issue… changing the redirect is instantaneous.
fair enough -- dunno what domains telegram uses
telegram.dog
.is might be a choice, since archive.is continues to be available despite many legal threats
You don't have to be an Icelandic national to register a .is
kiwifarms and sci-hub have been kicked off .is
Based on that heuristic, .st is a very good domain, as is .gl (which hosts Anna’s-archive’s registration).
.st went down for most of a day:
https://blorn.com/post/29851770158/beware-cutesy-two-letter-...
Little TLDs may be poorly run. Would not trust again.
Technical failures are different from procedural ones (didn’t verisign blow up dot com or something years ago?).
The future is domain resiliency - whether that’s via apps or other methods.
I currently check Wikipedia to find out the current domain for sites that are subject to frequent takedowns.
They operate in antiphase: annas-archive.st and sci-hub.gl are suspended.
This couple checked all the domain zones money can buy and... ended up using different sets, with zero intersection
.is is a very resilient TLD indeed, and it's well known in some communities.
how about .to? that's what i'm mainly using for my url shortener/redirects and haven't run into any issues... yet
A recent change in .to management gave it the technical ability to take down domains quickly.
It's a pretty good heuristic if some of the more targeted communities choose a TLD and stay up for some time.
isis
ospf-vs-is.is
Imagine getting kicked off .isis
.isis would fall under US jurisdiction so that would be easy. They're very censor-happy in the US.
I appreciate the idea, I'll happily adopt your SOP, seems pretty useful
thanks
I can't believe they use GoDaddy as a registrar.
insanity. it almost undercuts everything they do.
Wait until you hear that the chats aren’t end to end encrypted.
wait until you hear why, and that you can optionally use e2e but lose other functionality.
And end-to-end encryption not supported on web client and doesn't sync properly between devices. Useless.
>> doesn't sync properly between devices
which is good, actually. We don't want a way through which a server could tell a new device all the information it needs to decrypt messags
I thought this was a long solved problem: the server syncs encrypted data, and the user provides the decryption key from another device (via QR codes, BLE, …)
Make it device-to-device then
yeah, it is good! I hate usability features too!
You either have E2EE or you don't. If you have usability, you don't have E2EE.
i think it makes perfect sense if you understand what telegram is and which country it benefits
Since when did registars care about the political positions of its clients? They could have registered on cloudflare or namecheap and I doubt they'd bat an eye. Telegram is mainstream enough that nobody is going to cancel them, unlike kiwi farms or 4chan.
namecheap actually went full retard and indiscriminately booted all Russian customers in the first days of the invasion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30504812
alas, it appears that screeching and throwing rocks at powerless peasants didn't help to end the war.
> namecheap actually went full retard and indiscriminately booted all Russian customers in the first days of the invasion
I actually rep namecheap more now
oh, there were so many of those during the first months of the war! most websites had simply put up a "I support the current thing" banner, but some really went out of the way. it was actually amusing to click a link to some fuckass blog that probably gets 5 visitors a day and get greeted with "NO RUSSIANS ALLOWED". I think it's safe to say by now that those measures weren't enough to incite a revolution or trigger an economic collapse, but hey, if it made those people feel like they were helping, who am I to judge?
sometimes I wonder if they did the same thing during Israel's carpet bombing of Palestinian civilians, or when America killed more children in a single strike than Russia does in a year of its genocidal all-out war. probably not, it's different after all.
You accuse them of being hypocrites for staying silent about some other wars, while you are here downplaying the importance of a large scale war ("I support current thing" /pol/ lingo implies there is no valid reason to be against Russia's invasion of Ukraine, you have to be a brainwashed sheep to do that)? Sounds hypocritical to me.
PS: The blog blanners and all that were so powerless, yet they still trigger you 4 years later?
I think the accusation is more that they are propagandized sheep doing what the sheep are expected to do instead of actually thinking about what they are doing from a wider perspective.
>"I support current thing" /pol/ lingo implies there is no valid reason to be against Russia's invasion of Ukraine
"I support current thing" /pol/ lingo implies their Ukraine banners were a reskin of BLM banners from a year before.
>PS: The blog blanners and all that were so powerless, yet they still trigger you 4 years later?
like I said, I found them amusing, especially those custom geofences on obscure blogs. a fucking John Johnson (they/them) from Oregon oblast goes out of his way to scold Ivan Ivanov (он/им) from Orenburg oblast for something John's own country did so many times in Ivan's lifetime he'd lost count.
also, all tech-adjacent Russians had VPNs by that point because of Taliban-tier morality policing, so bypassing those blocks took an eyeroll and two clicks.
You should probably try replacing the name of the country in the phrase “<nation> is not allowed” with your own nationality to understand what the problem is here.
> You accuse them of being hypocrites
They are.
> while you are here downplaying the importance of a large scale war
They aren't.
registrars are bound by the political whims of those that allow them to exist there have been multiple domains that have been shut down at the behest of certain governments even when its well beyond their jurisdiction
kiwi farms and 4chan are relatively harmless compare to what Telegram enables yet kiwi farms was taken offline at the behest of a political camp that has certain opinions about very basic stuffs that shouldn't even be grounds to be considered.
>kiwi farms and 4chan are relatively harmless compare to what Telegram enables yet kiwi farms was taken offline at the behest of a political camp that has certain opinions about very basic stuffs that shouldn't even be grounds to be considered.
For most people, the % of content that's "harmful" matters more than absolute harm numbers. This is a good thing, because otherwise after telegram, the next app to be canceled would be signal.
> kiwi farms and 4chan are relatively harmless compare to what Telegram enables yet kiwi farms was taken offline at the behest of a political camp that has certain opinions about very basic stuffs that shouldn't even be grounds to be considered.
Literally what the fuck is this take? Kiwifarms' central purpose for existing is to organize doxxing and harassment efforts. It has harassed multiple people into committing suicide, and celebrates these murders as achievements. It is shameless to downplay that in the way you're doing.
4chan and Telegram are completely unrelated. They are low-censorship platforms. People can misuse them to commit harm, as they can misuse any place they're allowed to speak with privacy/anonymity, but the platforms do not exist for the explicit purpose to cause harm.
The wrong thing is that instead of going after doxxers, and reducing data collection to prevent leaks, they simply force the sites go to Tor network.
And now Europeans want everyone to send a selfie and a passport to register at sites, which only makes doxxing easier. Clowns.
Also, doxxing is relatively harmless. You won't die just because someone posts your passport online.
> You won't die just because someone posts your passport online.
Jesus, do you have the object permanence of a 3-year-old? This part alone, no. But this then directly leads to hundreds of people harassing you, everyone you know, blackmailing you, etc. People get fired because their workplace doesn't want to deal with it, for fuck's sake.
News outlets have been reporting on how the Terrorgram, O9A, 764, and murder loving European fascist groups have been organizing on Telegram (it's in the name!) for years.
Discord at least attempts to do some moderation about this.
Telegram's strategy to deal with violent extremist groups on its platform is to not ban them but just make it hard to discover. But this doesn't stop someone already in the groups from inviting their buddies. I bet they actually prefer it this way.
Do you want privacy, or do you want back doors into everything?
Usually, the backdoor on apply to "regular" citizens, while the governments and military get exemptions from it.
If the balance of power wasnt so asymmetrical I would be inclined to emphasize with the position that E2EE is a bit of an over-correction. We would be remiss to ignore the practical concerns about nefarious actors using it to organize.
HOWEVER, we would ALSO be remiss to ignore the imbalance of power it would cause if ONLY the governments are privy to secrecy...
Violent extremist groups can also meet in parks and go to a bars. Police should follow everyone around and make everyone wear mandatory surveillance devices. Let's call them portable telescreen.
Oh extremists can also buy knives...
They subscribe to a belief that private speech should not be surveilled. I'm partial to their views. For all of human history, any two people could get together and privately talk. Talk about anything, including committing crimes. Now communication methods have changed but people still want to get together and talk about things, privately. Some of those things include crime, sure. The problem is it's not your freaking business what anyone is talking about privately. As soon as you open the door to surveillance "because crime", now you also have surveillance because you disagree with the government. And when it comes to internet surveillance, everything is preserved forever and also sold/leaked routinely, so you're really committing to leaking everyone's private life to anyone who is interested, forever. The internet is such an integral part of how most people communicate that "just don't say anything personal on the internet, ever" is not in any way reality.
I think this is not a line that can afford to be crossed. It is better for criminals and terrorists to be able to communicate privately than it is for no human anywhere ever to be able to communicate privately. It is not worth stripping the rights of billions of people to target a tiny minority of bad actors. And, given the trivial potential for authoritarian governments to misuse the power of absolute surveillance, I think the world we end up in would be much, much worse. Allowing nobody to privately communicate opposition to the government will lead to much worse outcomes than allowing nobody to privately communicate about crime, despite best intentions in short-term-thinking harm reduction. In addition to the criminal groups you mention it being wanted in Europe for, Telegram is also being prosecuted in Russia for harboring anti-Putin-regime activists! Such is the inherent nature of private communication.
Clue me in? Is GoDaddy particularly censorial as a registrar?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3381822 still holding Godaddy's support for SOPA against them
Their TOS isn't very protective of domains. Tend to disable at the slightest fake email. Namecheap/Spaceship are a little better, IIRC.
Namecheap was recently sold to PE. I had been with them for decades and immediately transferred to Cloudflare. Lessor of evils.
Cloudflare is still a greater evil than Namecheap. Try Porkbun or Dynadot.
I've had really good success with porkbun. Everything seems to work for me.
https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/peta-closes-godadd...
GoDaddy is just a general clusterfuck of arbitrary decisions. I don't have anything ready offhand to point to, but the general consensus is that you should avoid GoDaddy pretty vehemently.
they're particularly incompetent
You can read an explanation of the status codes on the icann website.
The explanation for clientRenewProhibited was interesting:
"This status code tells your domain's registry to reject requests to renew your domain. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes or when your domain is subject to deletion."
Similar language for some of the other statuses like serverDeleteProhibited.
https://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited
But if you check the domain's expiration date, it's far away in year 2035.
To the best of my knowledge, a domain can only be renewed in advance for up to 10 years.
(that could be the reason for that status).
No, not being able to renew the domain due to the max renew ahead policy (it's registry-specific but also 10 years for .me) does not result in the clientRenewProhibited flag for .me.
(2035 is less than 10 years from now)
(Yes, but it expires at 2035-05-20. If you count years by rounding up to integers, there's not enough time room to renew it an additional year. It would make it 11 years.)
Same for dog years, but why are we inventing ways to make it seem more than 10 years out when registries, quite reasonably, just use the date normally?
> To the best of my knowledge, a domain can only be renewed in advance for up to 10 years.
That is the rule for COM/NET/ORG. ccTLDs can do what they please.
That said, as a registrar I highly recommend people renew important domains for 9 years. It gives you maximum buffer but allows you to transfer to a new registrar even if your old or new one has the same misconception hard coded.
What domain zone let you register for more than 10 years?
None do at present, AFAIK. But ccTLD could do that, if they wanted to; there is no rule against it, unlike the gTLDs.
That's weird there no such zones then. It would be nice to be able to pay for a domain 50 years in advance.
The DNS isn't 50 years old. There's absolutely no certainty your payment for the last year's will mean anything. Also if you're older than 35, you'll probably be dead. If you're not dead you probably won't care about the domain any more. Certainly all current politicians and the current political and economic systems will be dead. It's unclear there will be any reason to still have the domain and that it won't be blocking some innovative economic activity. It's unclear there will still be an internet.
It won't protect you against the country hosting the registry being nuked but it will likely shield you from future price hikes because not honoring pas renewals would quickly get the registry a reputation for being a fraud. Which is probably also why there is a limit - no registry wants to be bound by arbitrary long timed liabilities.
I think they just flagged all locks in their admin portal. Like this: https://imgur.com/a/zoTQbwn
The status that actually says the domain is suspended is serverHold.
Came to say this, ICANN says:
“This status code is set by your domain's Registry Operator. Your domain is not activated in the DNS.”
Also the serverDeleteProhibited status is active, which ICANN also admits is a weird and rare one:
“This status code prevents your domain from being deleted. It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes, at your request, or when a redemptionPeriod status is in place.”
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...
Mind you, this is ICANN's description, which applies to global domains and not country domains like .me. Country registries can (and do!) assign different meanings to these statuses; for example in .pl clientRenewProhibited has a completely different meaning.
Telegram is currently the target of legal/regulatory investigations by Russia (alleged extremism), France (likewise), and India (alleged facilitation of national exam leaking/cheating). I'm guessing the latter since it's the most recent and arguably has the most fiscal heft.
Also very surprised to see Telegram was reliant on GoDaddy, notorious for its lack of transparency.
But Telegram hasn't engaged in that, some of their users have.
I think the issue might be that although Telegram has a lot of abuse takedown activity, they do not permit access or direct action by authorities. If I recall, they have reiterated many times that some level or types of messages always remain private.
Maybe that's the issue is that a lot of illicit activity is going on in private channels and whether or not their filtering addresses it at all, authorities see the activity and have no access for court cases or direct action against it, so they can imagine it is quite rampant.
Telegram shields its users from such requests.
Other platforms either don't have the requested data (Signal) or willingly hand it over when they get a court order to (Facebook). When Telegram gets a court order it ignores the court order and then makes Pavel Durov hard to physically find and therefore arrest. One can only guess what motivations he has for this.
So courts seek alternative enforcement mechanisms.
I'm not making an argument about who's right or whether these disputes have any merit, I'm just trying to guess who might have had the inclination and legal resources to make this happen.
But if you state X then you must also be implying Y. Right?!
I always figured telegram got the screws turned on them all the time because their lack of E2E encryption meant it was viable to demand they proactively police the platform in the first place. Maybe Signal would just be outright blocked in these locales if it was anywhere near as popular, though.
I don't think anyone cares about E2E encryption as much as tech people think.
For all of the much-vaunted complains about their lack of it, I am not aware of any proof or credible claims that Telegram the company has ever revealed the contents of non-encrypted messages or group chats.
Meanwhile, I don't think any authorities actually care about to what extent E2E Encryption makes it harder for Signal the corporation to extract message data. There's plenty of other ways to skin that cat - on-device compromises, abuse of backup mechanisms, abuse of mechanisms to manage linked devices, etc. They'd go after them just the same if they thought there was anything they really wanted on there.
If there's any real difference, I think it's most likely because many more of the group chats that such authorities are aware of and find "interesting" are on Telegram because basically nobody really does E2E well in medium-large groups right now.
Telegram is in very big trouble all the time for refusal to comply with court orders they're capable of complying with, which is related to E2EE.
That's vague to the point of being completely meaningless. Do you have any examples of a time they've been in "very big trouble", whatever that means? Exactly how often constitutes "all the time"? Do you have an example of a valid court order in any jurisdiction that they have failed to comply with? Do you have any examples of a court not mandating similar compliance for Signal, iMessage, or any other E2EE platform due to that? There is no exception in the law for E2EE and it will not save you from consequences from failing to comply with a valid court order.
Famously, Pavel Durov (owner of Telegram) was arrested in France a couple of years ago and held in custody until he complied with one he'd received earlier.
Famously, Signal complies with court orders by giving up all the data that's requested that it has, which isn't very much. This is what you expect from E2EE platforms.
A court order to do the impossible is invalid. Telegram gets in trouble because it's possible for them to comply but they choose not to. Subpoenas are usually worded as "you must provide all information you have, relating to ..."
But as long as Signal controls the client app, there are very possible court orders to provide access to "encrypted" user chats even if courts haven't made use of those yet (as far as is publicly known).
The published reports of the exact things requested of them in the French arrest seem pretty vague. If they're related to the security of private messages and chats, it would seem to prove the point that they do infact refuse to provide that for anybody. The details around his release seem even more vague. We have only speculation and no actual proof that he or Telegram caved on such a request. As far as I know, we've never seen any charges that definitely came from Telegram revealing the messages of a private group chat.
Meanwhile, if you believe that any Governments actually refrain from prosecuting Signal executives due to their refusal and/or inability to produce the messages from private chats because they have E2EE, well, I've got a nice bridge to sell you.
If they actually are refraining from going after Signal executives in a similar fashion, most likely either 1. Nobody is actually using it for anything interesting, 2. They are actually secretly cooperating somehow, or 3. Governments are already happy with other technical means of extracting the contents of Signal chats they are interested in. See the US FBI's curious sudden lack of interest in Apple's ability, or lack thereof, to extract a wanted suspect's iMessage messages.
They generally don't have to proactively police it, but they have to answer court orders in every country that has courts, or they'll be in trouble in that country. And countries are free to cooperate with each other to enforce these.
Pavel Durov was arrested when he traveled to France because Telegram was noncompliant with French court orders. You can ignore them in Russia... you can't ignore them in France. And you can ignore Russian court orders in France but not in Russia. And the Russian or Indian court is free to ask the Montenegrin government to suspend your domain name and the Montenegrin government is free to agree or disagree.
Signal is already well known to governments. In fact a few years ago there was a report in the UK media about how some governments used signal instead of official channels like email and did so because of Signals disappearing messages feature (ie making those MPs less accountable).
More recently, a Signal chat record leaked, between US national security advisor Mike Waltz, US VP JD Vance and others, regarding the ongoing illegal assassinations in Yemen:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/24/politics/yemen-strikes-jo...
and it didn't leak because of Signal's security, but because an Atlantic maganize journalist was added to the group chat by Waltz.
We are clear on OPSEC
in fact, telegram does support e2e encryption ("secret chats")
It does, but it's not enabled by default; and that's the point.
I've been in quite many Telegram chats, none of which has enabled it. For most practical purposes you can just consider Telegram not to have e2e since it's no good if it's not used.
>But Telegram hasn't engaged in that, some of their users have.
Yeah, but government workers just want a legal slam dunk to call it a day and collect the glory, and it's always easier to go after the platform where the crimes are being discussed, rather than after the individual users actually committing the crimes.
It's how government, prosecution and law enforcement jobs are incentivized to operate.
It's more likely they did go after the individual users, by sending a demand to Telegram to identify the users, and Telegram refused despite having the ability.
Not every country has DMCA safe harbor for service providers. A crap sandwich may taste horrible but it has bread.
Montenegro (.me) seems to be aligned with the EU. But I would have expected there to see a legal ruling in France before Montenegro would do this sort of thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if GoDaddy caved to request. They are known for giving up domains to anyone with a badge and a fax machine!
Is the badge really that much of a requirement? I mean, if you have a fax machine, you must be a legit source to make that request.
serverHold status means registry, not registrar, hold - the relevant protocol (not WHOIS) has the registry as the server, as you'd expect. But you are right about GoDaddy and they are a strange choice.
Yep.
clientHold = registrar (GoDaddy)
serverHold = registry (Montenegrin Registry)
IIRC Telegram has some kind of direct partnership with .me registry. I wonder if it's related
In Russia, "extremism" is being against Putin or the war. For example, posting photo of Alexey Navalny is "displaying extremism symbol". Also, there are people charged with extremism for posting a link to instagram/facebook domains (Meta is an extremist organization).
Also "facilitation of exam cheating" is the most stupid accusation. Why they cannot keep exam question in secret? Also why they do not shutdown scammer call centers which scam Westerners? So they want Telegram to be blocked but scammer call center to continue operating?
> So they want Telegram to be blocked but scammer call center to continue operating?
Obviously yes, follow the money. Call centers use BSNL which is a state-owned telco, the government gets a cut of every call made. Telegram doesn't give the government any incentive to keep it around.
>In Russia, "extremism" is being against Putin or the war.
In Russia, "extremism" is whatever the state decides it to be. "Give me the man, and I will find the crime" has always been its modus operandi. the last people who might have got fair trial were nobles under the Tzar.
We only recently started moving the Functional Programming India community from Telegram to Zulip. That decision is looking better and better!
Zulip is amazing. Nothing against that but what are your thoughts on fluxer and the others (recently chatto seems interesting, matrix, stoat are interesting options as well).
Also awesome initiative by the way, how did you end up making it and I'd love to know some backstory about it actually as well.
Not the original commenter, but Matrix is awful. I used it on and off, and self-hosted it too. It's slow, bloated (I'm pretty sure I tried other homeservers). The app UI/UX is not great either. The E2EE stuff got better by the end but adoption-wise I was able to get way more people on Signal.
Matrix the protocol is just fine, and all features you expect are there. Their problem is with actual apps that either don't support most of good features, are unpolished to the degree of being unusable, or both.
Yeah, I would agree. To be honest, I used Beeper for a while, and I had no issues with it, despite at least the client being similar to Element.
I agree that Matrix has a lot of problems, at least when used with the Element app, but I've found that voice calls are much better with Matrix compared to Signal over a flaky network. It was as good as WhatsApp in my experience.
For matrix, I don't use the original client but rather cinny. This client is so good that I wish that other clients and it looks really good in UI/UX, honestly I have had some serious thoughts of porting this UI sometimes: https://cinny.in, so I would be curious what you think about this as well.
(Side note: Fractal and the matrix element fork called schildichat are interesting as well. It is also possible to run matrix in terminal for what its worth as well, and nhekochat is good as well. Fractal runs on gtk and nheko runs on qt. I do agree though that running matrix homservers is a bit bulky sometimes from what I have heard but the client scene is probably really good so I am curious what you think about cinny :-D )
I used Cinny at some point, but the issue for me was the mobile client. I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client. I think I tried Fractal and whatever KDE was working on and neither was polished at the time of use.
Fluffychat works reasonably well on mobile for me. On desktop I use Fractal but it still misses some fairly major features like spaces and threads.
Hm yeah I understand, there were some issues in Fractal where it didn't support spaces sometime back (I am not sure about it right now), it was fun talking to the team at gnome though making fractal.
> I liked Cinny, but wasn't a huge fan of a web-based client.
I feel as if sacrifices must be made as Signal and most others are probably web based clients as well. Fractal probably comes as close to it tbh
> but the issue for me was the mobile client
Ah I see, I don't really run matrix on phone but yeah I understand what you mean, aren't there some clients like fluffychat and others for Android though? Certainly not as polished as Cinny I imagine but it should be workable (hopefully) from my time seeing some of its screenshots. another side nitpick of matrix protocol but I have heard from people that Matrix clients sometimes take battery consumption.
When I was making https://mirror.forum I had my fair share of trying various protocols and to be honest, I feel as if we have enough good open source solutions out there that the tech part just isn't the limiter anymore and FOSS solutions in general might be good enough but its the network effects which are the issues.
which is tangentially why I had built mirror.forum where you can add your discord, matrix, fluxer, stoat links all in one for a guy to join any of them by just changing the link from #discord to #fluxer among other things.
Though I do understand the overall frustration of wanting something which just works but Fluxer is an honestly good option as well and I would love to know if it fits your use case perhaps if not matrix, what do you think? IMO its a low hanging fruit to replace from discord to fluxer given how similar the overall UI/UX is. I also think that Fluxer also has a mobile client or is working on that.
I went here for an IP to write in /etc/hosts and no one has posted it yet :(
dig +short @ns-cloud-b1.googledomains.com t.me
149.154.167.99
there you go
Its serverHold which means the .me registry took this action, not the registrar (GoDaddy).
Curiously, GoDaddy has a 38.352% stake in .ME registry services.
https://t.me/ is back online today. No official explanation yet
They're in a position to get their own TLD (e.g .tgrm - edited from .tg); they should probably do this and run their own supporting infrastructure for it at this point.
.tg is already used by Togo, although .te is not taken.
two-letter TLDs are reserved for country codes and not available for private use.
Not available for private use isn't exactly true...
which 2 letter TLDs are not controlled by states?
Well, almost all of them are ultimately controlled by the nations, but there are quite a few that private companies operate because they've paid the nation to gain control.
But then there's .io (and a few others: .ac, and previously .sh, .tm) where they were actually delegated to a British guy and are now controlled by the private company he started. And according to the British government, they have no agreement with the company, and they receive no revenue from the domain registrations.
2 letter TLDs/country-code TLDs, are determined by ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes, and having a country code doesn't necessarily mean a country or a state.
There are a bunch on there that I wouldn't consider states, e.g. both UN/EU are exceptionally reserved and have `.un` and `.eu`. Antarctica also has `.aq`.
The Heard Island and McDonald Islands has `.hm`, and it's not a state (since it has no population) but I guess it is controlled by Australia.
.eu :troll:
.su
You changed the topic.
I said available for private use.
Supposedly none because they're only given to states, but there're a few that have some murky administrative situations.
Direct link to the registry to verify the domain status (JSON): https://rdap.identitydigital.services/rdap/domain/t.me, Ctrl+F for "server hold"
I don't understand I visited the whois site and it seems all it's fine but I don't know if this match with the following cases.
- The site was suspended but now it's ok - The site was not suspended - There is other information about telegram suspended
serverHold status means suspended.
I stored all of my user images links with t.me and on my telegram mini app all users profile don't show the image. Switching to telegram.me
That's not likely to help, it was the .me people that suspended it, they will likely do the same with telegram.me
for a second I thought i was hacked
DNS pre-screen delegation detected for t.me watch=. scan=55461 previous: CLEAR_UNDELEGATED now: TAKEN_DELEGATED NS=ns-cloud-b1.googledomains.com, ns-cloud-b2.googledomains.com, ns-cloud-b3.googledomains.com, ns-cloud-b4.googledomains.com rcode=NOERROR server=a0.nic.me
Fixed.
Seems to be working fine? What does suspended imply here?
It might be working fine for you if the DNS server you're using hasn't propagated this change yet. The Google DNS server has: https://dns.google/query?name=t.me&rr_type=A&ecs=
Suspended means the "serverHold" status. I haven't found any official blog post/announcement yet, but the status is unambiguous, and the fact that it happened to one of the Telegram's main short links means that it might be related to legal matters.
Archive warrior's default project is mirroring t.me links. If you're running it you'll need to switch to a different project. It isn't handling the domain not resolving well, it stuck in timeout backoffs.
NEVER use godaddy!
Any explanation?
Yeah,a serverHold is placed by the Registrar.
It could be for a lot of reasons:
- spam, phishing or malware distribution
- contact verification issues
- trademark, copyright or cybersquatting legal issues
- or sometimes even errors or registrar transfer issues
It is a valuable and important domain for TG, most likely they'll resolve it soon
serverHold is set by the owner of the TLD, not the registrar.
registry*
Another pathetic uncompetitive play from within US amalgamation blob.
This is world under 'Economic Hit Man' and the Rule-based international order.
Happy meal for the 'three Zuckerbrins', may they rot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
centralized dns is always going to give some people headaches, but works for 99.9% of the rest of the people
someone enforcing a min character policy on them?
No. There are still many 1 char .ME domains available, and they've always costed an high price. https://imgur.com/a/0NL7oA6
This what's called a golden share.
No announcement from Durov yet...
serverHold means like "suspicious activity, domain is administratively held and taken off dns"
This is what the problem is with DNS.
i really hope this is it from telegram. its downright causing havoc in countries without the jurisdictional power like korea and japan which have seen insane rise in drug related crime especially in japan they have a new wave of crime from anonymous telegram operators running human cell crime ops
Is there a defensible position from which to advocate removing the ability of other people to communicate privately? I can't think of any.
If telegram disappeared then others would immediately take its place.
Telegram also isnt device to device fully encrypted unless you use a more limited private chat and, as Telegram uses googles messaging service, so likely compromised to NSA anyway.
That's why they keep getting in trouble. They're not E2EE, but keep refusing court requests just because "we don't wanna"
They moved to Dubai?
So if a court order is obtained in UAE then they will likely comply, but not from other countries?
Or move again or hide forever. They already fled Russia and France. In Dubai they might be able to get protection with money.
Dubai isn’t a super power, they have to follow what USA and the major countries say.
Wasn’t long ago that they introduced extradition agreements so now it’s not a country anyone can hide in.
Doesn't mean they'll comply with those agreements under all circumstances. I hear it's a pretty corrupt place.
> If telegram disappeared then others would immediately take its place.
I'm not certain that's the case. Telegram has survived in large part because Durov is incredibly wealthy and can afford to shovel money into running the service more or less indefinitely. There's no obvious heir apparent.
>> they have a new wave of crime from anonymous telegram operators
I love how your solution isn't "country should decide for themselves and pass the law that suits them" but "let people that have nothing to do with that country take something away from them (sidenote: I also don't have nothing to do with that country)".
Drug abuse is a systematic problem, if telegram single-handedly enabling it to alarming rates, the solution should be at least to ban a tech stack. Otherwise it will get replaced in a seconds.
A domain ban won't be 'it' for telegram.
What counts as drug related crime?
source?
Yep, I would never use a registrar called "go daddy". It always sounded like a registrar for noobs that will take adverse actions to "protect" you and this only confirms this.
The "serverHold" status is not set by GoDaddy, but by the actual .ME registry https://domain.me/
GoDaddy could apply "clientHold" but not "serverHold"
Weird. The .me registry specifically says there are no restrictions and even advertises Telegram.
Lying in your marketing materials is often useful.
GoDaddy owns 38% of .ME registry https://domain.me/
What’s your beef? The name? Because I’ve been super happy with porkbun but damn, that name… and then the official-sounding ones like network solutions are quite shady. don’t judge a registrar by its name I guess.
Not the person you replied to, but GoDaddy are (or at least, were) pretty infamous for their sleazy and sexist ads, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi0AqS4e6NI
So I can't imagine any serious organisation wanting to do business with them, unless they're a sleazy organisation themselves.
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_GoDa...
The ad is not sexist, it's sexy/sexualized and humourous, which is something else. And of course it is from 2010, just before the great ... cultural shift.
It just doesn't sound professional, and I wouldn't want some "daddy" in a garage in charge of my domain name.
Daddy implies garage? I'm not familiar with that stereotype.
Also namecheap sounds shit, but afaik they have good reputation.
They used to, before they got bought out by private equity and started jacking up the rates. Moved all my domains to porkbun since then.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45243123
Not so much any more but I don't remember why. At least they started raising prices. Porkbun is the new Namecheap.
If you are set on Namecheap anyway, Spaceship is a suggested replacement. It's run by Namecheap but with a new codebase.
I mean, there was that whole elephant hunting thing...
It’s absolutely #%^*ing bizarre to me how many 500+ employee tech companies use it. I just don’t get it. I know IT isn’t web developers but they ought to at least have better opinions on this kind of thing?
GoDaddy is a shit registrar, but it has nothing to do with the name. You shouldn’t be basing your choices (or your HN recommendations) on product names, domain names, or other similar “vibes-based” reasoning.
FWIW, I have also never liked the name, but the name is just marketing. This should rank very low in your decision matrix, hopefully.
My vibes are usually correct though.
Which do you recommend?
I would recommend a registrar that would explain to the customer why they would not want a .me domain for anything critical unless the person lives in Montenegro and trust the Government of Montenegro to maintain a good and trust worthy registry.
Otherwise just use which ever registrar is cheapest and who you think will handle any quirks or shenanigans that registries may do to domains you own, and which own system and processes hold high enough standard for you.
What’s with the shade on Montenegro? .me is a perfectly normal domain.
And the government doesn’t even operate the registrar, it’s operated by doMEn d.o.o. which is a Montenegro version of an LLC.
ccTLD hacks are both semantically incorrect and geopolitically unstable.
The .io TLD will likely be phased out in the future due to geopolitics, and all the companies who decided it was more important to signal how hacker jargon aware their startup was will have to go through the very difficult process of changing domains.
In order to log into IRS.gov to get a code to pay my USA taxes, I had to verify my USA ID via a private company called ID.me, whose domain name AND company name are now forever tied to the whims of the government of Montenegro.
FYI, 75,2% of doMEn d.o.o. is controlled by American companies (GoDaddy.com LLC 38.352%, Identity Digital Limited 36.848%)
Every non-cc TLD is controlled by the USA which is also geopolitically unstable.
I mean, the government of Montenegro is a reasonable European democracy on its, admittedly slow, way to join the EU and is a NATO member.
It’s not really any different than this website we are now on being at the whim of the US government.
The biggest difference is the role of ICANN and their willingness to regulate the management of a TLD. With ccTLD they have an official policy to be hands off and not dictate what a country will do with their top level domain. If the US government would start to mess with Verisign and how the registry handles domain, then ICANN is within their own policy to just move it somewhere else.
The government of Montenegro could, just like many other ccTLD, decide tomorrow that every registrant must be a citizen of Montenegro. Many countries do this today, and it is no big deal because it is the country of and ccTLD that dictate how their domains should be operated. They can raise prices by a factor of 100 if they wanted, decide on some form of ID for registration, or dictate that you must have a company located in the country. ICANN has no objection to any of that.
ICANN is a nonprofit in California. It doesn’t really have any power on its own. It only exists because everyone from browser developers to server operators to consumers agrees we need a central place to organize stuff.
If the US justice system issued a warrant telling Verisign to do X, what do you think the courts would do to ICANN if they tried to actively stop X from happening? At best, they would be politely asked to stop, at worst, they would get felony charges for obstruction.
It's very different. If the USA soon starts cancelling politically inconvenient domains, European ones will be safe. Just like Nazi propaganda domains would be censored in Europe, but are safe in the US.
Every domain has a country. It's as if every non-ccTLD was actually underneath .us. For legacy reasons .com .org etc were grandfathered in. gTLDs are also under .us for corrupt reasons.
Politically inconvenient domains are already routinely seized by the US and there are international agreements in place that allow cross-border takedowns.
Why do you think t.me got taken down? Montenegro doesn’t care about Telegram.
Maybe India gave them enough reasons to care.
porkbun are great
There is nothing Porkbun or any other registrar can do if Montenegro decides to suspend the domain, which seems to be what actually happened.
I also recommend porkbun
Is it better than cloudflare?
Never use the same company for your hosting or CDN and your domain, and avoid cloudflare in general.
That's because if they don't like your website being on your CDN, and they suspend your account, you'll lose your domain. If your domain is at Porkbun you can change it to point to a different IP address.
And avoid Cloudflare because they're centralising the internet.
Has this actually happened to anyone on Cloudflare Domains?
If they don’t give you access, you can escalate to the ICANN.
Porkbun's dns is powered by Cloudflare (they don't hide it on their dns management page), so afaic it's the same can of worms
Depends on what you mean by better.
I chose Porkbun because it's a small company with good prices, a good vibe, and all the tools that I need. Cloudflare was never going to be on the table because I don't want to feed the beast that is already swallowing the entire internet.
i use it too,can only recommend, also funny website btw.
squarespace is legit. GCP cloud domains are moved to them.
Never had any trouble with them, but also moving away from them is unnecessarily hard (the code sometimes takes a day to arrive) and they cover the entire interface with their paid hosting stuff which makes them a poor registrar. I ended up on them because of Google Domains selling off but got off them because very annoying to use.
hm, tbh for me Squarespace is the most professional and ad-free UI (compare to Godaddy, and others)
I'd honestly be careful with squarespace. They are owned by private equity, advertise on countless YouTube channels, and at the same time their core market is under a looming threat from the AI companies.
You need your domain registrar to be stable and predictable. Their profile is not that.
which one then?
Porkbun has been good to me and a lot of others.
I'm quite comfortable with Netim
I've never had a problem with Namecheap but I'm not sure they are really any better as I've never had a problem with GoDaddy either.
My understanding is that both GoDaddy and Namecheap used to do domain front running[0] at the time I was registering my first handful of commercial domains, so I've always avoided even using their search engines.
I wonder if the practice still exists.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting#Domain_name_fro...
I don't believe Namecheap ever did that, unless that was in the distant past. Never had a problem with them.
My bank automatically blocks payments to Namecheap. When I had domains with them, I had to call and give prior approval for the exact amount I would be paying. My bank claimed it was because of a high number of fraudulent charges.
Weird. I've been a customer for 15 years and never had any such problem.
Namecheap got bought by private equity fairly recently, so i switched away from them. Wouldn’t recommend starting with them just in time for the enshittification to start.
Their prices had already been going up for a few years before that, which finally pushed me off them starting around August of last year. I'm about to swap my final few domains over this month before they renew.
Porkbun has been great so far. Easy to use, refreshingly minimal, and good prices.
Dynadot. One of the largest registrars, and very competitive pricing like Namecheap. They also have very good features.
I’ve been happy with Gandi.net for years now. They’re based in France.
FYI - Gandi was great, but they got bought by private equity a few years back and the price skyrocketed and service went downhill super fast after the buyout.
Oh. I haven’t had to renew in a few years. Any EU-based alternative you suggest for when my next renewal comes up?
If EU++ is ok, Infomaniak.
porkbun
Stupid fucking name
You made an account just to complain that a company's name is a random noun?
AWS Route53 or Namecheap
Cloudflare
Cloudflare
So far so good, for personal use; they have the lowest renewal prices for top level domains.
Just be aware they can arbitrarily take it away from you. If that's fine with you, go ahead.
Didn't t.me also support showing previews of entire channels? Perhaps they got hit with a take-down of sorts due to content (e.g., CSAM) on any particular channel?