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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

#101

Post by lxgr »

Caligatio wrote: post #83
lxgr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's infinitely easier to spend $0 vs $0.01 if you're trying to be anonymous online. The criminals can certainly afford it but that also almost certainly means interacting with financial systems that leave a paper trail.

I doubt that that's any kind of obstacle to criminals.

At a quick glance, many registrars and hosters seem to accept crypto, and anyone can buy prepaid Visa and Mastercard cards anonymously for cash for the ones that don't.

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

#102

Post by echelon »

jesprenj wrote: post #96
echelon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't remember this. I started using TK domains as a kid in 2017 and you set your own nameserver records and they didn't serve ads.

This was in the 90's and 00's.

.tk was the only top level domain you could get without having to give them payment details or personal information.

It was a huge deal at the time for kids, students, and spammers.

They made their money by injecting scripts onto your pages to display banner ads.

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

#104

Post by lxgr »

mobilemidget wrote: post #78
lxgr wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What criminals are you referring to? The operators of .tk, or their users?

There are tons of shady websites hiding behind cloudflare's services. Some used .tk domains too but just in general, many shady websites are hiding behind Cloudflare and at least I know from personal experience if you contact cloud flare about it, they pretend not to be home. "We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying…

Cloudflare is a US company. If they provide hosting (or reverse proxying; I don't think there's a material legal difference) services for anything illegal under US law, shouldn't it be possible to compel them to stop doing that through the legal system?

And if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.

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

#105

Post by jlarocco »

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?

I've heard people bring up that problem before. On one hand they protect sites from DDOS attacks and bad actors, but on the other hand they help keep the bad actors online.

If there's no abuse, nobody will pay their protection money.

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

#106

Post by saghm »

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?

It seems at least plausible to me that either there would be even more fraud and abuse than there already is without the time and effort to mitigate it, or that maybe their mitigation is not as effective as they'd like. This isn't meant to contradict the other theories being posted here; I don't really have any experience specific to this area, so it's possible I'm just being naive.

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

#107

Post by wnevets »

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 switching to cjb.net because you could get free wildcard email accounts for your domain.

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

#108

Post by a1o »

wnevets wrote: post #107
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 switching to cjb.net because you could get free wildcard email accounts for your domain.

Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time. I had a Dragon Ball Z website using that domain, feels so long ago.

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

#109

Post by p3rls »

wnevets wrote: post #107
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 switching to cjb.net because you could get free wildcard email accounts for your domain.

It's interesting seeing it parallels the problems with .tks today-- I remember using cjb.net to make my own LOVE@AOL websites and phish AOL users telling them that a crush liked their account. Easiest money a 12 year old ever made.

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

#110

Post by RyeCombinator »

johnklos wrote: post #89
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?

If you try to find evidence that Cloudflare mitigates fraud and abuse, you'll mostly find anecdotal evidence (sites that have been attacked and moved to Cloudflare, mostly) plus information and claims provided by Cloudflare, which is unverifiable. The problem is that nobody protects us, the Internet, from Cloudflare. Cloudflare will happily take money from and host (yes, host - they host, in spite of their rather stu…

What are some other viable options?
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