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Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

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31–40 of 236 posts

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#31
post #5

Unrelated to the article but seeing .tk brings back many memories. As a kid without a bank account let's alone an international credit card (VISA/Mastercard), dot.tk is the only way to put a website online with your name. I created countless of websites with .tk for classmates, school and families.

Same here. .tk was the only one back then that allowed you to have your own domain name without subdomains. My memory is that: 1. freeserver.com/~userna 2. username.freeserver.com 3. username.fs.com 4. username.tk Then we grew up a bit and started paying domains :')

The problem with .tk was that it would inject ads into your content. And the whole TLD was filled with low quality spam and hacks. I never liked it.

$7/yr for a domain was one of the very first internet purchases I made. Then that set me down a path of finding free dynamic DNS services. For a short time my website and Invision forum were only online when I was, but I felt like I'd beaten the advertisers.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#32
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be really cool if public schools provided a free domain and basic hosting for any interested middle/high school student.

Good luck considering we can't even pay teachers properly.

Cost would be negligible compared to a teacher's salary.

(1 teacher / 20 students) * ($50k / teacher-yr) = $2500 per student per year to fund teacher salary.

Compare that to $40/yr domain+hosting, which maybe 10% of students will use. $4/student-yr will not be the diffence between paying teachers probably or not.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#34
post #3

Unrelated to the article but seeing .tk brings back many memories. As a kid without a bank account let's alone an international credit card (VISA/Mastercard), dot.tk is the only way to put a website online with your name. I created countless of websites with .tk for classmates, school and families.

I used .co.nr alongside .tk for a while, before moving to .co.cc, and then finally managing a way to buy my domain.

I definitely had a .co.nr domain before a .tk. I think I also remember (I was likely 13, so its been a while) that they had an "English" test question on the sign up form that read something like "A Britney Spears is a:" and one of the options was "Hamburger".

Looking back this could have been to slow robots down, but I distinctly remember one if the terms being you speak and host English content.

Another service I used a lot was " dominosfree" which had a bunch of .gs domains that looked like CC-tlds. I used .ca.gs a lot.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#35
post #10

Another prominent .tk domain is for the Tcl programming language (tcl.tk) and I just checked, that is one of the paid .tk domains that are still up.

Why do orgs feel the need to use these whacky TLDs I’m still of the fence with rust using .rs in important places which is fundamentally in control of the Serbian government. You’re going to have to trust the Serbian government with signing .rs DNSSSEC at minimum and I don’t.

In TCL’s case it’s a fun play on Tcl/Tk, which is how it is often referred to when including its famous GUI toolkit.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#37
post #9

Oh, that is why I wasn't able to renew some domains I have used for 10+ years. I'm not even able to upgrade to paid domain. I don't think it will help reducing malware/scams/phishing. But it will hurt students and young people that want to start in en development and aren't able to pay for a domain.

We still have https://nic.eu.org/ and https://freedns.afraid.org/ .

There's a couple more options too: https://free.wdh.gg/#/?id=domains

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#38
post #20
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That surprises me, given the time and effort they spend mitigating fraud and abuse What time? What mitigations? Cloudflare will proxy anything and then tell you "we're just a proxy, so we wont do anything lol" when you report anything other than cf pages. Doesn't matter if it's terror groups, animal torture, piracy, doxing, far right groups, etc. I have personally submitted abuse reports and seen that absolutely no…

I was thinking particularly about the DDoS protections they advertise (and explain in lovely technical posts on this site). So you're saying that they protect their network from others, whilst disregarding harms their clients cause to others. That was something I was missing, so I thank you.

Before cloudflare, it was difficult to run a DDoS-for-hire service because competing services would all DDoS each others' websites. Back when CDNs were all "call for pricing" affairs.

Cloudflare had the insight that the more DDoS-for-hire services there were out there, the greater the demand for their services. Offering free DDoS protection to DDoS-for-hire services helps keep customers coming back for more.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#39
post #13
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

probably not, but very little of value has been lost

I would disagree, I remember as a kid in the late 90s being able to host a website on one of the free hosting providers and then pairing it with a free domain name just made the whole thing that much more special. $10 or so a year for a paid domain name isn't a ton of money, but it can be for a kid with no credit cards and parents that aren't convinced as to why you "need" a domain name.

we're not in the 90s anymore. Many free subdomains options such as gitpages or full on free app (heroku) exists now.

Re: Cloudflare loses 22% of its domains in Freenom .tk shutdown

#40

Unrelated to the article but seeing .tk brings back many memories. As a kid without a bank account let's alone an international credit card (VISA/Mastercard), dot.tk is the only way to put a website online with your name. I created countless of websites with .tk for classmates, school and families.

In italy we had 3000.it

https://web.archive.org/web/20010331143129/http://www.kliman...

SPOILER: I didn’t become a webdesigner

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