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

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

#61

Post by Retr0id »

eszed wrote: post #7
chomp wrote: post #4

Thank god, .tk caused so many headaches for us, truly a cesspit of a tld. The rate of fraud and abuse on our platform was staggeringly high from it, it was close 99%.

It would follow that Cloudflare is tacitly admitting they have been / are hosting a large number of domains used for fraud and abuse. That surprises me, given the time and effort they spend mitigating fraud and abuse. Anyone care to explain what I'm missing?

Cloudflare's business model is largely reliant on the internet being filled with abuse.

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

#62

Post by lxgr »

KomoD wrote: post #12
eszed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would follow that Cloudflare is tacitly admitting they have been / are hosting a large number of domains used for fraud and abuse. That surprises me, given the time and effort they spend mitigating fraud and abuse. Anyone care to explain what I'm missing?

> 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…

> the amount of abuse I see from people using Cloudflare Warp is also very high.

More so than from "traditional" VPNs (i.e. the ones claiming to keep "no logs and never selling your data")?

That's quite surprising, since Cloudflare makes no such promises and markets Warp as a security/performance improvement tool, not an anonymity-providing one. I think at least for a while, Cloudflare-hosted sites would even bypass it entirely and they'd get the real underlying client IP.

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

#63

Post by bombcar »

where-group-by wrote: post #53
kdmccormick wrote: post #25

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.

I don't think that would be a good idea. It would introduce an admin burden on the schools related to moderating/monitoring the sites. And they would more than likely overstep in one way or another, when enforcing their rules.

The only way it would work is if it was literally handled by the government, and the associated 1st amendment rules applied (so it wouldn't be moderated unless it was actually shut down by a court case).

It would result in rampant wildness and people complaining, but if you didn't do it that way the burden would be too high.

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

#64

Post by lxgr »

bombcar wrote: post #17
_mlbt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that "free for kids" is also "free for scammers" and it's hard to square that circle.

Another way of looking at this is that scammers can probably afford to spend $5-10 on a TLD since it's just a cost of doing "business" to them, but many kids can't.

I was very happy about free TLDs back in the day as a teenager, since I could just try things out before having to convince my parents to let me use their credit card to register a proper domain name.

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

#65

Post by mypastself »

lolinder wrote: post #26
overstay8930 wrote: post #18

The people complaining that Cloudflare hosts these criminals would be the first ones complaining that Cloudflare has too much power when taking down websites it doesn’t like. You can’t win with these people, I personally think this is the best outcome and shows our systems work (albeit slowly). Sure it took a while, but now there doesn’t have to be a precedent of Cloudflare acting as the internet police more than it…

> You can’t win with these people This is the classic fallacy of assuming that because you see comments of type A and comments of type B on the same forum that means they're the same people. They're usually not. A more accurate way to phrase this is "you can't win with ... people". Whatever you do will end up ticking off some subset of the population.

“These people” is presumably a set of people quick to find fault in anything a corporation does, which could be a superset of those two groups. Not sure what kind of fallacy that’s supposed to be.

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

#66

Post by lxgr »

kdmccormick wrote: post #32
cube00 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That budget only works if you don't care about content moderation or abuse management at all – or did you expect teachers to just do that on the side?

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

#67

Post by thih9 »

PokestarFan wrote: post #48
thih9 wrote: post #19

The article presents this as a loss - but cloudflare has a free tier, do we know if these were paid accounts? If cloudflare weren’t going to convert these users then this could be a gain.

If the users were using free domains instead of paying for a domain do you think they'd use paid cloudflare? The cost of a domain is so much lower than the cost of Cloudflare.

I don’t know and that’s why I’m asking. Not paying for a domain is not a reason enough to expect not paying for cloudflare - these are different services. Also note that even not paying for cloudflare is not enough - I asked whether cloudflare intended to convert that segment.

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

#68

Post by xeromal »

thangngoc89 wrote: post #2

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 remember in the early 90s telling Mom that I built my own website. Mom was like noway that's impossible. I can't remember exactly where it was but it was like zoogatyler1.go.com or something. I think it was owned by Disney? I must have been around 7 or 8 but I remember being so excited. I think it was more of a homepage than anything. I started delving into those .tk sites when I was around 11 or 12 probably.

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

#69

Post by Semaphor »

101008 wrote: post #5
thangngoc89 wrote: post #2

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 :')

de.vu was popular in Germany for subdomains, I had a few of those. Also a .tk one later.

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

#70

Post by V__ »

Semaphor wrote: post #69
101008 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :')

de.vu was popular in Germany for subdomains, I had a few of those. Also a .tk one later.

Yeah, also .de.tf. I just looked it up and my old site is on the wayback machine. So many memories.
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