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The Perils of an .xyz Domain

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Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#81

Post by teddyh »

unethical_ban wrote: post #66
sneak wrote: post #3

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. Why are people afraid to use the real term for this? It's called censorship. Your provider is silently censoring your text messages. In peacetime. You can't expect it to improve when that's no longer the case.

You'll find I agree that the concept of silently spam filtering on TLD of a link is something that pisses me off. You'll also find that calling this "censorship" as if it has to do with government action, or that it has to do with the content of the specific site, is ludicrous. This is incompetence, not malice.

Censorship is far from not limited to government action. I see this misconception a lot, and I believe it comes from Americans misinterpreting their first amendment.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#82

Post by sneak »

burnished wrote: post #16
sneak wrote: post #3

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. Why are people afraid to use the real term for this? It's called censorship. Your provider is silently censoring your text messages. In peacetime. You can't expect it to improve when that's no longer the case.

Censorship is part of an agenda. This is not censorship, and you calling that waters the phrase down. If I have a poorly constructed email filter, is that censorship? I wouldn't say so, and this example is more in line with that than with any active censorship. So, in short, no one is afraid to call something censorship, I think they are just waiting for the right time. When it is applicable.

Hiding spam from users is an agenda, so therefore my usage complies with your definition.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#83

Post by fotta »

reidjs wrote: post #47
legrande wrote: post #41

Well .COM has had its day. There (was?) even a semi-parody site called Domains For the Rest of Us[0] that generates .COM domains that you can use for side projects (or startups?). [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24538758 The new gTLDs are a godsend since all the domain hacks have been largely exhausted. E.G: `del.icio.us`. I like the new avalanche of gTLDs since it reduces domain squatting, domain hacks, and…

I read a series of blog posts about a guy who would essentially work backwards from a domain name to start a business. E.g. he would buy things like 'weehawkenjobboard.com' then SEO a job listing service for people/businesses in Weehawken NJ. I thought it was a pretty clever strategy.

Was it this[0] guy? Previously discussed on HN[1][2].

[0] https://www.deepsouthventures.com

[1] https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-inter...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#84

Post by sneak »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #55
sneak wrote: post #3

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. Why are people afraid to use the real term for this? It's called censorship. Your provider is silently censoring your text messages. In peacetime. You can't expect it to improve when that's no longer the case.

Censorship would be intentionally preventing people from seeing something that they want to see. Here, the main intent is to prevent spam and nobody wants to see spam. Even as a free speech advocate, it's hard to see a problem with this.

False positives mean that they are censoring things that aren't spam, as illustrated in TFA.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#85

Post by schleck8 »

iconjack wrote: post #43
humanistbot wrote: post #2

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. This is wild to me. Tested it out myself and I couldn't send an SMS with a spot.xyz link to/from Google Voice T-Mobile. And no "failed delivery" notice either, just a silent failure. And yet I still get so many texts that are obviously spam or ph…

It was wild to me too. I have an .xyz domain, which seemed appropriate for a non-commercial math site. I'd try to send links of math experiments to friends and colleagues via SMS, so they could tell me if they worked right on their phones or not. Can't tell you how much confusion and frustration it caused that the links were simply not being delivered, though all the conversation around the links went through just fi…

> which seemed appropriate for a non-commercial math site

They are used by large cooperations too. The Alphabet domain is abc.xyz. Science Corp's is science.xyz.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#86

Post by dietr1ch »

duskwuff wrote: post #77
krono wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking of messages/emails and blanket email server/domain/extension blacklisting is the same as a postal service not delivering mail to or from a particular entity/street/town. Doing so silently and without a valid and case-specific reason should not be legally allowed. Edit: Added "street/town" to analogy, and "case-specific" before reason

You'd be getting an unbelievable amount of SMS spam if carriers weren't allowed to block messages. There's a lot of bad actors out there.

I wonder if that's why he mentions "without a valid reason".

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#88

Post by duskwuff »

RyJones wrote: post #6
sneak wrote: post #3

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. Why are people afraid to use the real term for this? It's called censorship. Your provider is silently censoring your text messages. In peacetime. You can't expect it to improve when that's no longer the case.

perhaps it's a parsing error, like the bug yesterday about usernames may not end in MIME types? SMSC[0] is re-implemented many times. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_Message_service_center

Given the context, it's absolutely a spam thing. When the .XYZ gTLD launched, registrars were incentivized to discount it aggressively, sometimes as low as $1 for the first year. Spammers loved this.

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#89

Post by kop316 »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #78
kop316 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read reciepts or delivery reports? I'm not sure if SMS supports read reciepts, but I didn't think so. The MMS standard allows for read receipts ("MAY" not "SHALL"), I was unable to get it working, and I suspect it's due to no carrier support. I was unable to get read receipts working at all, and I suspect it's because the carrier doesn't impliment it.

Delivery receipts, I've edited my comment. I've never been able to get read receipts to work. If I enable it, sometimes I will receive an actual text message that "123-456-7890 has read your message", instead of just marking the message as read.

Ahh, fair enough, thanks!

Re: The Perils of an .xyz Domain

#90

Post by idiotsecant »

blendergeek wrote: post #17
humanistbot wrote: post #2

> One surprising side effect of having a .xyz domain is that the mere inclusion of .xyz inside of a text message will result in a silent delivery failure for many providers. This is wild to me. Tested it out myself and I couldn't send an SMS with a spot.xyz link to/from Google Voice T-Mobile. And no "failed delivery" notice either, just a silent failure. And yet I still get so many texts that are obviously spam or ph…

I have this same problem with "obscure" .net domains. My text messages are silently dropped. The only work around I found is to not include http:// , just use the bare domain. Personally, I find this behavior of my SMS provider reprehensible.

Is it reprehensible only when it impacts you or is it still reprehensible when it's blocking hundreds of spam messages a day you might otherwise be receiving?
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