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Never buy a .online domain

0xsid.com

171–180 of 513 posts

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(IAAL but this is not legal advice.) It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact . Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion .

> Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion. No, it's not. You're welcome to cite case law if you want to insist. Otherwise, unsafe (in the context of infosec) has a definition of likely or able to cause harm or malfunction. Something that is provable or falsifiable with evidence.

Whether that's true or not is irrelevant if it's defined by law differently. Even without case law and precedent you'd still have to test it in court, which for libel can be prohibitively expensive.

For clarity I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but what means sense to the layperson (including experts in a particular field) is sometimes at odds with what the law says.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#172
post #165
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is to stop Google et. al. from also adding a lot of excess domains to pump up there numbers? What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?

Google wants you to use it. If it blacklists excess domains that hold legitimate sites, their product gets worse. If they blacklist illegitimate sites, their product gets better.

This argument would hold more weight if Google didn't have a history of making their own products worse and then getting rid of them.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#173
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100% on Radix, not on Google. Google and Microsoft can (and probably should) have a registry of known-abusive websites. False positives are inevitable, so these should be taken with a grain of salt, but in most cases they're correct. Their lists are a lot more reliable than those from the "traditional" antivirus/anti-scam vendors that will list anything remotely strange to pump up their numbers. The external…

What is to stop Google et. al. from also adding a lot of excess domains to pump up there numbers? What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?

Google doesn't sell their list to you. They give it to you for free. Using their list costs them money. Pumping up numbers gains them nothing but the headache of PR issues when they get a false positive.

Spyware filters used to boast about how many domains they filter out because they wanted you to buy their filters instead of someone else's. By the time they hit a false positive, they've already sold a year's subscription to that customer.

The incentives are different.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google should not be allowed to make libelous statements without consequences.

(IAAL but this is not legal advice.) It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact . Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion .

Depends on jurisdiction. In the UK it's not an absolute defence, you still have to prove it's an opinion a "reasonable person" could come to based on facts.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#175
post #165
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is to stop Google et. al. from also adding a lot of excess domains to pump up there numbers? What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?

Google wants you to use it. If it blacklists excess domains that hold legitimate sites, their product gets worse. If they blacklist illegitimate sites, their product gets better.

Cute. That is the commenter’s whole point about monopolies. Google is on record making their product worse to squeeze revenue. We’ve been living in the enshitification economy.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#176
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100% on Radix, not on Google. Google and Microsoft can (and probably should) have a registry of known-abusive websites. False positives are inevitable, so these should be taken with a grain of salt, but in most cases they're correct. Their lists are a lot more reliable than those from the "traditional" antivirus/anti-scam vendors that will list anything remotely strange to pump up their numbers. The external…

What is to stop Google et. al. from also adding a lot of excess domains to pump up there numbers? What is to stop everyone from doing this blacklisting?

Nothing, but they haven't done it so far, and they don't really have any incentive to do so.

It doesn't really matter that it's Google. It could have been Microsoft, or PAN, or McAfee or some fly-by-night vendor. The problem was Radix taking the list as iron-clad truth and disabling the domain without any notification or way to resolve the issue.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#177
post #11

The TLD owner in this case was Radix, which also owns .store .online .tech .site .fun .pw .host .press .space .uno .website https://radix.website/

Despite blocking 66 TLDs and all IDN ccTLDs on my home dns I didn’t have these blocked. Guess I’ll consider it. Once you have the hagezi rpz files including threat information feed though you really have blocked most silliness.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#178
Took me a minute to realize Sid isn't associated with 0xide.computer. Clever domain name!

Getting Google to index my personal site has been a pain. Every other search engine works fine, but ever since I switched the images on my site to .webp (a format created by Google!), my site's content just doesn't get indexed anymore. I've given up since web search traffic matters less and less these days with LLMs, and it only really bothers me when I'm trying to search for my own articles.

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#179

The registrar relying on Google Safe Browsing as a “trigger” for suspension is the most horrifying thing I’ve seen in a while. This basically makes the entire TLD unviable for serious use.

.online is one of the many TLDs that charge a dollar for registration but bump the price to $30-$35 for renewal. So far, this seems like a good signal to tell apart serious TLDs and ones just preying on customers who sort by cheapest (or capitalizing on one-off phishing domains).

Re: Never buy a .online domain

#180
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google wants you to use it. If it blacklists excess domains that hold legitimate sites, their product gets worse. If they blacklist illegitimate sites, their product gets better.

Cute. That is the commenter’s whole point about monopolies. Google is on record making their product worse to squeeze revenue. We’ve been living in the enshitification economy.

There is a financial incentive to make the search results worse. (More searches, more ads, more money.)

There is no incentive for adding false positives to lists of malicious websites.

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