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Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

blog.gitbook.com

121–130 of 189 posts

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#121
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not for any binary content as uploaded by the user, that's served from raw.githubusercontent.com.

I'm aware, but I could just as easily see a lesser registrar getting confused by an abuse report and suspending github.com because it embeds content from githubusercontent.com.

So you also use two different registrars (the cheap option)?

Or the more expensive option where you use a registrar that gives you get a direct phone number to an account manager.

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#122

Could you imagine if "youtube.com" were blocked and locked by IANA/ICANN/? because of reports that somebody posted a video with misinformation and phishing content? I don't expect google appreciates how devastating this, but that would change quite immediately if it happened to them.

It's almost as if, while the laws and policies and regulations are supposed to be the same for all, giant entities with huge amounts of money and power behind them are held to a different standard than everyone else. I can't say I'm surprised.

There's a parade of apologists who will quickly pop up to say that a private company platform should not be held to any free speech standard since they're not a government, never mind how much power they wield in practice.

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have examples?

GoDaddy has great support. It’s available via phone and you don’t need to be on some enterprise plan to get it. (Disclaimer: I work there)

GoDaddy answers their phones with real people, but they are completely powerless to actually help you. You can escalate all the way to the office of the CEO (who doesn't answer their phones) and they won't lift a finger to help you. I had been a customer for over ten years with several domains, and they still wouldn't help me with a three-figure billing error. What kind of business fights a decade-long customer over an interest rounding error for them?

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason people keep forgetting that io stands for indian ocean and is actually a regional tld like co.uk .net .de etc Same with .ai fwiw.

No one forgot. Everyone knows. No one cares.

People who used to have .ly or .sy domains probably still care...

https://priceonomics.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-ly/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/oct/08/bitly-lib...

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you wanted good customer support you shouldn't have gone with Google. There are plenty of other more reputable domain regrestrars.

99% of people never need customer support, so I doubt most people consider it when choosing a service.

You're right.

Because 99% of people don't realise that their domain registrar holds the keys to their business's entire internet presence.

They can switch off your website/email at any time, with no real consequences apart from a little bit of bad PR if you have enough social media followers or post in the right forums where their staff hang out.

They can also do a shitty job of securing your domain, and let it get stolen/hijacked. The attacker then gets to set up their own MX records and collect all the password reset emails they triggered on every other important site, and pretty much own anything you doin't have 2FA set up on.

Anyone who doesn't think customer support from their business domain registrar is a thing worth paying for, most likely hasn't evaluated the risks properly.

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#126
post #70
post #63

The biggest hoster of phishing sites is Google.[1] Here's a list of major sites which have live entries in PhishTank.[2] Hosting phishing sites on Google Drive is very popular. Many of those are long gone, but PhishTank hasn't cleaned them out, so they're still listed. [1] http://www.sitetruth.com/reports/phishes.html [2] http://www.sitetruth.com/fcgi/ratingdetails.fcgi?details=tru...

To be fair, every platform which allows user-generated HTML pages suffers massively from phishing and most of them don't deal with it very well: Google, Microsoft, smaller players like Codebox and countless others. Then there's phishing on Dropbox, phishing on Google Forms, OneDrive, etc. Then you have phishing at all the various hosters like DigitalOcean, CloudFlare, etc. Even there you'll sometimes have IPs which h…

> To be fair, every platform which allows user-generated HTML pages suffers massively from phishing

The big difference here is that all the other platforms struggling (and failing too often) to prevent themselves being used as phishing hosting - aren't then turning around and hypocritically taking other platform's entire internet presence offline for doing so.

Google here are acting in the roles of judge and executioner, while being the biggest offender of the same crime.

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#127
post #6

Google Domains locked my domains at renewal time and refused to renew them until I provided proof of identity in the form of a scanned government ID -AND- a scanned copy of the credit card. Coupled with the horror stories of non-existent support, the first thing I did was move my domains out this month.

To where?

I've kinda given up, and use Route53 for everything, on the grounds that if I managed to piss AWS off enough for them too take my domain names down, all my infrastructure will probably vanish to, so having someone else manage to keep my zone files up will not be of any use anyway...

It's got all my eggs in one basket - but solving that problem is a much bigger task that just picking a different domain registrar... (And I sometimes wonder if my blue-sky cloud-agnostic dreams would all come crumbling down if I even managed to implement then anyway - if whatever went wrong that pissed AWS off enough for them to shut me down got shared with and/or triggered the same reaction at Azure/Google/DO/whoever...)

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#128
post #104
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going through issues with G Suite as an admin. They randomly blocked my account falsely accusing me of sending spam. I can't even access the help support team sicne I can't login to the system.

G Suite is a shit show. Had major problems with a trial. Firstly it would just redirect back to the admin console if I hit gmail. Support couldn’t fix it. Also you can’t give anyone access to YouTube (!) for 60 days after signing up or paying $30 in credit. Which is no good because when you pay them £30 fuck all happens. And again support were useless. Happy O365 customer now. And I’ve used support which was excellen…

What's O365.

Honestly I've tried everything and can't find any support pages. In order to get support you need to login to admin console on G Suite, well how the heck am I supposed to do that if I can't login to begin with? This is the generic https://imgur.com/a/lgRby50 page I get. It's been almost a week and a half, more than 5 business days, and I haven't heard back from my request to restore my account.

The problem is that they have my data and my credit card for this G Suite account.

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#129

GitBook CTO here: Our production domains (gitbook.com and gitbook.io) have been blocked and locked by our registrar (Google Domains). None of our infrastructure is impacted, all user content and databases are safe; our domains simply blocked by a heavy handed policy. As mentioned on Twitter, we are all hands working with Google to fix this issues ASAP. We'll then share an in-depth post-mortem https://twitter.com/GitB…

We've just published a postmortem: https://blog.gitbook.com/tech/post-mortems/06-20-gitbook-dom... let us know if you have any questions!

I'm curious how you feel about CloudFlare as a registrar not allowing GitBook to use an external root nameserver.

Being forcibly stuck on CloudFlare's own nameservers only sounds very nefarious, and isn't a limitation I've ever heard of with any other registrar. For instance, it would break my tooling that uses my host's APIs to control DNS records through their nameserver.

I'd be very appreciative if eastdakota or jgrahamc could elaborate on what possible reasoning there is for this restriction as well.

Re: Google Domains blocking all Gitbook URLS: post-mortem

#130
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like you should also move off of Google Domains, unless you have some compelling reason to use them.

In the postmortem it states that they are moving to Cloudflare

I'd like to interrupt all the sanctimonious blathering in this thread to note that Cloudflare domain registration terms and conditions are almost a verbatim copy of Google's, and includes the same unilateral cancellation clause for phishing.

Cloudflare: "Cloudflare and Registry Operator may deny, cancel, suspend, transfer, redirect or modify the Registrar Services or a Registration, or place any domain name(s) on lock, hold or similar status, as either deems necessary, in the unlimited and sole discretion of either Cloudflare ... for distributing malware, abusively operating botnets, phishing, piracy, trademark or copyright infringement, fraudulent or deceptive practices, counterfeiting or otherwise engaging in activity contrary to applicable law."

Google: "We may in our sole discretion, deny, suspend or cancel any registration or transaction, or place any domain name(s) on registry lock, hold or similar status if ... engaging in spam, phishing, or other deceptive practices."

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