This is really big news if it's true.
Edit: I looked it up. Rob started Epik [1]. I wonder if that's really his password. Lol.
Edit 2: I wasn't aware of Epik's reputation either. I just knew they're a big (ish) registrar.
Archived OP link: https://archive.is/KJTHN
>There don't seem to be any active seeds and just under 0.5% seems to be available ATM, so... we'll see what happens!
It will be interesting to see which media outlets report on it after so many adopted a policy of not reporting on hacked info.
For those that are curious what's in there:
https://gist.github.com/Q726kbXuN/57f3825493d04867c3d192fd93...
I'm currently trying to download it now, but the torrent file is so large that it's crashing most torrent software (pico, deluge, webtorrent) I throw at it, on 2 machines!
They should sign an ethereum address to reduce ambiguity
(Any crypto asset address is fine, even PGP is good enough for this but PGP had 25 years to make that user friendly and common but failed, and cryptocurrencies made signing software more prevalent and uniform wayyyyy faster)
https://gist.github.com/Q726kbXuN/57f3825493d04867c3d192fd93...
> strings .whois.sql.swp
b0nano 5.4
anonymous
datahound
whois.sql
I tested on my machine and nano swap files contain the nano version (5.4), the username (anonymous), the hostname (datahound) and the filename (whois.sql).
Before today the only thing I knew about them was that they were the registrar for a few controversial domains. I didn't realize they were soliciting that market.
- Register.com is an annoying cesspool of value-add upsells and is extremely expensive in the process, with added cost to not have your personal info attached directly to your domain whois.
- GoDaddy, other than the creepy ads, has shown plenty of willingness to remove domains hosting content that they don't like, even if it's legal.
- I think Google is a registrar, but I'm not at all comfortable with how easy it might be to move my domain out of their grasp if I care to host my content somewhere else. I'm sure it's possible, I'm sure it has weird issues, and I'm certain there's zero support to talk to.
- Epik has, at least as far as I can tell, a reputation for simply hosting domain registrations, not asking questions, and ignoring just about every request for information.
Of those options, I'm fine with the last. I tend pretty hard towards the "free speech" side of the spectrum, and a registrar that will ignore anything short of a legitimate legal request from the authorities of the nation(s) they operate in is perfectly fine with me. Even if they host domains I consider distasteful, I'd rather support that than someone who will bow to public outrage and go snooping around domains looking for reasons to remove their registration (GoDaddy and Arfcom come to mind here).
There are probably other options, but those are the ones I know of, and why I'm intending to register future domains with Epik. I don't particularly care if a founder of a service is a scumbag in their personal life, as long as they reliably do what they promise to do.
Their site is one of the buggiest I've ever used (no, really), so this hack doesn't surprise me at all. Now I'm trying to remember how much personal information I would have given them.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965448572/meet-the-man-behind...
All my ICANN addresses are fake though so that's never been a concern for me.
I love how this is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the "hackers on steroids" piece from 2007 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNO6G4ApJQY
I honestly haven't delved deeply into the list of domains each registrar has removed, decided if I agree or disagree with it, sat down to evaluate the severity of each violation, etc. And I fundamentally don't want to, either.
If you've got a better domain registrar suggestion that isn't full on "bulletproof hosting Bitcoin only" stuff ending in .ru, I'm open to it, but... otherwise, at the end of the day, my goal is to register a domain.
Though, don't get me wrong, I'm seriously considering ending my entire involvement in modern consumer tech and going back to a 1900s tech level once I retire...
So so happy that I ended up not signing up. I just wanted a domain for my personal site and email, but I would've ended up on a public list next to nazis.
Edit: Turns out I didn't give enough attention to Transmission as it handled the file. Very impressive.
As a side note: this has got me pondering about testing edge cases on open source software. Wonder how much of that actually gets done.
Cryptocurrency address signing and wallets inherit the whole feature set so might as well run with that
When they banned me, I simply lost access to the entire domains.google.com page. As such, I was unable to transfer any of my domains out. The only thing I could do was let them lapse, wait for them to become available to the general public again, and re-buy them on a different registrar.
Their UI works great, most of the time, but I would not recommend Google Domains to anybody, ever, under any circumstances.
Remember when satellite.earth "pioneered" this idea for their platform? (not ragging on them but some of the content posted on there were insightful and unique)
I'm not aware of the story there — is there some sort of feud between the two parties?
Give https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/domains a shot.
I'm not affiliated aside from being a happy customer for over a decade. You can read their abuse-handling terms here: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/help/abuse
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epik_(company)
Also...
> When you purchase a domain name through Njalla, we own it for you. However, the agreement between us grants you full usage rights to the domain. Whenever you want to, you can transfer the ownership to yourself or some other party.
No?
I find it ironic that this is the first line of a “press release” from a group that was always defined by its nebulous nature.
High value domains use Mark Monitor. It is their entire businesss and most importantly they’re US based.
I receive email on my domain, which means that it is the root of all of my security. If you steal my domain or tweak my DNS, you can get my email, and you can reset my passwords.
I have some domains at Namecheap still. I have a FIDO2 key set up for their website, which is good, but I’m not sure that I trust their security. I trust Google more.
Google Domains actually has support, too
Also, every registrar sends you scary emails before and after a domain expires and enter the redemption period [1].
That means you failed to:
- register for 10 years in advance
- pay attention to your email for at least 60 days (including your redemption period)
- enable auto-pay
If you had done any one of those very normal measures for a high-value domain, you would have kept your domain.
1. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/domain-name-renewal-ex...
That there are people on this forum advocating for vigilantism is frightening. We are quickly approaching the point of lawlessness as a society.
Why? This was Epik being hacked not AWS or Azure. It’s just a domain registrar. And a shady one at that. Their lack of security is not indicative of the rest of the cloud.
But nevertheless, in the real world, Apple employees don’t care much about Epic Games. A lot of them probably have a personal account on Epic Games Store to get their free games. Like the random people they are.
Pay attention to not mix up the marketing bullshit drama of those companies around this trial with the humans working for theses companies. I doubt anyone working in there is bothered with this trial (appart from legal departments).
The ownership is a hack to workaround for some legal issues (e.g. for .es domains you're not allowed WHOIS privacy). Although post-GDPR most whois servers dramatically restricted public access, so maybe it's less important now.
You can literally generate any public key / address hash that conforms with a blockchain and sign it and anyone can verify that you therefore control it
This has zero crypto assets involved and has no trail of assets so what are you talking about? If anyone sends funds to the address hash the owners can just tornado.cash it and withdraw it somewhere else with an instruction sent over the relay with no prior link to the funds or address. Its perfect right now. But what do you perceive?
he still hasn't regained control -> https://www.attilahildmann.de/
The founder's name is like from The Onion article.
> Decloak origin IPs of nazi websites for further investigation, poking, prodding!
> Map out a decade of online fash with a level of clarity nobody has been able to UNTIL NOW!
> Support your starving hacktivists, and they will bless you in turn.
> So long, for now! Support #OperationJane and mess with Texas today!
> Abortion is a human right!
Yeah... This is not Anonymous. This is a bunch of people larping as them.
Of course, it would have reduced damaged, such as pointing out that unhashed or unsalted MD5 passwords in a database is... what we've stopped doing 20 years ago for good reasons? :)
But well, if you're a big hosting provider tailoring to white supremacist content, you usually don't need so much security, since apart from anonymous-adjacent antifascists pretty much everyone is licking your boots, including law enforcement. The biggest neonazi forums have been around for decades, and their biggest proponents are well hidden behind the walls of our police stations, banks and parliaments.
Love the reference to Woody Guthrie, too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_machine_kills_fascists
Microsoft bundling a super-insecure root daemon in all their Linux VMs. They developed it, published it on Github, embedded it everywhere, but when it turned out to be a security nightmare blamed "open source supply chain".
For example, some people consider radical servers from the anarchist scene to be hosting violent/extremist material, while i personally consider governments and big corporations to be pretty violent and extremist themselves in how they ruthlessly dominate the world.
Actions and speech are not neutral. It's all a matter of (political) perspective.
Anonymous doesn't only attack megacorps. First because anonymous is not a group so there's no central leadership to decide who to attack. Second because they're overall involved with fighting injustices of all kinds. It's not the first nazi-friendly site to get hacked by anonymous, but to my knowledge the first nazi-friendly webhost.
Also, depending on your understanding of what a megacorp is, Epik may very well qualify.
However, there's still some very good programs with good UX making use of PGP (for example delta.chat), and to this day no cryptomoney scam wallet has ever been as useful as PGP has over the years.
Yeah exactly. It's a huge cost upfront and zero immediate benefits. The investment is worth it to prevent losing value due to a breach, but unfortunately it seems pretty OK for for-profit companies to "loose" data from millions of their customers without facing any sort of consequences.
I'm not exactly saying it should be entirely okay for non-profits, but these generally don't have the resources/budget to ensure any form of security so i don't have the same standards. In my book, a for-profit business leaking user data due to preventable mistakes should be dissolved instantly by law for endangering uselessly their customers.
> we had a speaker from northrup-grunman
Uh. Sorry for you. These military industrial complex people have the best security advice, but they're the worst kind of humans.
That activity seems very extreme doesn't it over just reporting directly to the authorities.
This is best left to the authorities to deal with such issues rather than resorting to such extreme and illegal activities, no matter the cost or innocents affected.
I wouldn't be poking any bears had I been running that setup.
I was curious about prepaying for years of my domain in advance, and stumbled upon Erik.
Epik offers a “forever registration” where you get a domain “forever” for something like $500. I was seriously considering it before I heard about all the negative shit associated with them.
I suspect they’ve sold that service to at least a few average Joe’s.
https://epic.org/privacy/surveillance/prg-scorecard/basis.ph...
Only two left to go?
The mudkipz catchphrase was also very forced. Reminded me of the "hello fellow young people" meme. Of course, it might all be intentional.
Google around for their very colorful history. These are bad hombres.
As for the for-profit companies. For some reason there is not enough value placed on security in the eyes of the public. Sony is still a major player in the gaming industry, even though the massive hack years ago. Not saying Sony should not be in business, but I don't think it made any major impact on their ability to sell consoles. Security compromises don't seem to have nearly the same impact as other kinds of compromises.
People disagree about the definitions of crimes involving publication. For example, almost everyone is against the freedom to disseminate child porn under the excuse of "free speech." Then, some people are against free dissemination of ISIS propaganda, especially when it contains concrete calls for violence. Then again, disseminating Neonazi propaganda with similar calls for violence is not more legal than ISIS propaganda in most countries. Revenge porn and sites dedicated to slander and libel are prohibited in most jurisdictions, too.
The US has lax application of laws against right-wing calls for violence but is well-known to enforce against free speech if other groups like Islamists are involved. In the past, communists and civil rights advocates were also not too welcome. Other countries apply laws more stringently. In various modern and democratic countries content hosted by Stormfront is simply illegal and various posters on their forums commit crimes. Their servers would be raided and shut down by the police if they were under the country's jurisdiction. The US was never governed or occupied by full-blown Nazis, so it is only natural that people tend to be more liberal about these matters there, but that's more of a historical coincidence than an argument.
Their infra, peering and prices are way worse than pretty much everyone else.
Quiet a few operations under the name of anonymous have had some sort of political or social motivation.
(House Un-American Activities Committee).
> I thought anonymous used to only attack megacorps
Various individuals or groups labeling themselves “Anonymous” have operated during the Arab Spring, and after the murders of Tamir Rice and Michael Brown.
More generally, there’s broad consensus in the cryptographic community that PGP’s intended uses and design are fundamentally flawed/mismatched against modern actual uses.
Don’t get me wrong! Cryptocurrency is filled with shysters and I don’t use any of them. But we should probably be encouraging users to stop treating PGP over email as if it does anything and instead encourage them to switch to E2EE systems (since that’s what the majority actually want.)
It really isn't. It uses CFB and does not have a MAC, while the format is overly complicated for no reason.
I will have to disagree here. The amount of illegal pedo content has dramatically decreased over the years. You would see people spamming it all the time around ~2008-2013 in /b/, while nowadays it is much more likely that you will see such content while browsing facebook.
As for nazi content, there are a lot more things that are considered nazi these days that were common back (such as calling people slurs as a generic insult), although since around the time of gamergate the amount of unironic actual nazis skyrocketed (as part of a wider social radicalization) and they stopped being shamed as much when posting in unrelated boards.
> Also, depending on your understanding of what a megacorp is, Epik may very well qualify.
I think that this is stretching the definition. I believe that most people would consider something of the size and reach of cokecola and mcdonalds as megacorps.
As far as I can tell, Epik focused on hosting and DNS management for marginalized/excluded groups on the internet, so naturally they attract a lot of groups. Not sure why that'd be bad though.
Things like this also makes me actually like the company more:
> Pharmaceutical watchdog website LegitScript reported in 2018 that they had alerted Epik to the sale of illegal drugs and counterfeit medications on websites registered by Epik, and that Epik had refused to act upon the information without a court order
That's exactly how I want my hosting company to act, and any that don't are actively fragile.
I thought the default was to be against fascism? It's the kind of thing where you approve of it if you're not explicitly against it.
Also, are you implying Epik is fascist? I mean you're not wrong.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I mean who is the leader of anonymous? Who is the leader of "antifa"? BLM?
TL;DR you don't really get internet trolls / anarchists / unorganized entities operating under a shared name.
Put another way: it’s always been a cesspit, but it was a cesspit of a community. What passes for conversation on 4chan in 2021 appears to be neo-Nazis riling each other up.
[1]: On the bigger boards. The smaller ones are basically what they’ve always been, which lends further evidence to the point about the overwhelming majority of hate content coming from opportunistic reactionaries.
Probably not going to happen, but it would be interesting with an arrest.
As for hacking and doxxing people you don't politically agree with just because of that, that sure wasn't the original "hacker known as 4chan" mentality. That was called "moralfagging" back in the day.
Far right extremism is a threat to the status quo of open and tolerant liberal democracy, yes, you are correct.
Apparently NOT Epik's personal army: far from it.
The hero of hate speech is not exactly a sterling reputation to have.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/how-right-wing-social-media-site...
Scorpion and Pepe story… except strangely reversed. This would be the frog dumping the scorpion, after having been stung and used ruthlessly to serve the scorpion's selfish purposes for years. Very 4chan-like, to be able to survive a scorpion sting, but you can't poison poison, or meaningfully piss in an ocean of piss :)
Rob Monster for instance has expressed support for the KKK and claimed that the Christchurch shooting was a hoax.
I’ll defend with my life his right to say abhorrent things. But that also means I get to express myself and call him a bad dude.
Big if true.
Rob Monster and crew are bad people because they actually believe this rhetoric, that’s why they defend it. They aren’t taking on a noble cause of defending free speech. They are defending speech with which they agree, and tends to be pretty shitty…that’s why they’re bad.
I don’t think they should be forced to stop, in fact I really hope the 1A is never diluted to that level. But the 1A cuts both ways: we get to sit back and talk about how awful Rob Monster is.
That sounds... unlikely? Unless you have a very specific set of friends?
Does this mean we need — actually, needed — to do research on the political standings of every founder, CEO, CXO of every service we use? And somehow predict they won’t do abhorrent things in the future even if they appeared harmless at the time? Otherwise we deserve it when we get doxxed for being a customer of a disgraced person?
I believe the answer is no, that’s unreasonable. These hackers are just criminals illegally doxxing a huge number of people. They don’t deserve cheers. I hope everyone of them gets arrested, which is highly unlikely.
(This is really not a direct response to your comment; not saying you were cheering them on.)
In general there are a dozen registrars that are better than GoDaddy or Google without having to choose a right wing nutjob with bad security.
this algorithm has failed to proliferate outside of thin security conscious niches for an entire generation of internet users, and has been leapfrogged.
And this is a megadump of a hack.
But you can buy a .MONSTER TLD For $1.49: https://www.epik.com/promos/monster
That's the opportunity cost of defending. It's like walking through treacle at times, but you have to visualize the worst case scenario in your head and act as if you're gonna get breached. You need to essentially enact the situation in your head so that it gives you the momentum you need to keep defending.
They are public. A simple torrent away.
https://whois.domaintools.com/rob.monster
Domain Name: ROB.MONSTER
Registry Domain ID: D98633729-CNIC
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.psi-usa.info
Registrar URL: https://www.internetx.com/
Updated Date: 2021-06-05T01:19:43.0Z
Creation Date: 2019-04-01T14:00:01.0Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2022-04-01T23:59:59.0Z
Registrar: InternetX GmbH
Registrar IANA ID: 151
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Registrant Organization:
Registrant State/Province: nrw
Registrant Country: DE
Registrant Email: Please query the RDDS service of the Registrar of Record identified in this
output for information on how to contact the Registrant, Admin, or Tech contact of the queried
domain name.
Admin Email: Please query the RDDS service of the Registrar of Record identified in this
output for information on how to contact the Registrant, Admin, or Tech contact of the queried
domain name.
Tech Email: Please query the RDDS service of the Registrar of Record identified in this output
for information on how to contact the Registrant, Admin, or Tech contact of the queried domain
name.
Name Server: NS1.WESELLTHISDOMAIN.COM
Name Server: NS2.WESELLTHISDOMAIN.COM
Name Server: NS3.WESELLTHISDOMAIN.COM
DNSSEC: unsigned
Billing Email: Please query the RDDS service of the Registrar of Record identified in this
output for information on how to contact the Registrant, Admin, or Tech contact of the queried
domain name.
Registrar Abuse Contact Email:
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone:
URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/Considering that Epik have been in operation for almost a decade before a pivot to extremist hosting, I would assume that the vast majority of this """noble""" hack concerns innocent people.
I would also like to hear more about it because that's scary.
I wonder in the end who's more powerful though: ICANN or Google.
If you are concerned about getting your name off google because their systems are wierd, why wouldn't you be concerned with someone just stealing your domain from the insecure site by (e.g.) just logging in as you and initiating the transfer?
I've been all up and down the contact chain with Namecheap and quite frankly every time I make a stink about it in a public forum it's always the same playbook. "Yes a mistake was made, no we can't compensate you." Here is the reply from your support where you admit a fundamental systems flaw resulted in my domain being dropped:
"My name is Oksana and I am the Shift Leader of Domains Department. I would like to follow-up with you with regard to the issue you have faced with your domain name. We are very sorry that such unpleasant situation happened. We have reported it to our Technical team and they are doing their best to fix the issue that affected your domain renewal so that similar situations would not occur again. While we cannot change what has happened, we are planning to take steps to ensure that similar incidents and misunderstandings will not occur in the future. Unfortunately, we do not have any ETA on the fix implementation. Rest assured that as soon as there are any updates on this improvement, we will inform you via the ticket. Regretfully, we will not be able to recover your domain name, as it expired and later was re-registered by another Registrant. As a compensation for this negative experience you have faced, we can offer you the XXXX coupon code. You can use it to receive a 20% discount for registration, renewal, and transfer of domains."
Speaking to Gizmodo, Epik said they were unaware that they had been hacked, but would investigate.
I tried to move off of them a couple years ago, but I moved to lunarpages and they didn’t have enough dns options for my service. So then I had to move back to epik.
Um, can anyone recommend another domain host? EDIT: transfer initiated.
^I'm responding to this
_If_.
I am still openly questioning the nature of blockchain and open ledgers: trivial associations with transaction activity and address history can be had or via more complex analysis with clustering, modeling, etc (ie: Chainalysis). I used to think that a simple signature confirmation claiming "this is my email address" would be okay for solicited communications but what would happen if the channel used becomes adversarial?
Apologies but I'm failing at framing my own argument here as I'm confusing the intersection and implications of the current "NFT art" craze that's been happening. For example, some Tezos-based art projects are in reality minting your signature on the blockchain with an asset they host on an external source, eg: ipfs. You own the signature but do you really want to publicly "own" something controversial and perhaps illegal within your country's jurisdiction?
I can't speak for all of them. But I worked at a very large company known on a global scale. They thought they had proper security experts, but the people that hired them didn't know security very well. When issues were brought up, instead of them asking "how do we resolve this?" they would ask "why would someone do that?" This raised so many red flags in my head the first time I heard this, I didn't even know how to respond.
I came to them with various issues, one of them could've had very serious consequences. I proposed step by step solutions that were simple and would've patched up issues behind the scenes and only impacted people that were violating security policies. They never seemed to care about protecting what they had. It was very sad.
I'll give two examples of the issues they faced:
1. They left doors unlocked and open to the building during working hours, anyone could enter and witness highly classified work on someone's machine, or use someone's machine if they had left their desk without locking it, which happened frequently.
2. Their shared document service, which contained many classified, and highly classified documents had an authz vulnerability which would allow any logged in user to view (and in some cases edit) any document in the company that was stored on their document storage service.
I think my conclusion is that a lot of companies don't even know what their issues are, don't know what experts they need (or if they need them at all), and don't care because nothing bad has happened yet.
False. Even if your present day content is not currently censorable but you expect it will be censorable one day as cultural norms shift or speech authoritarians gain power, it is wise to put it somewhere that is censorship resistant, Epik or otherwise.
Fully agree. First and foremost the rule of law must be blind. However, spectators need not be similarly blind.
I am not cheering on the hackers. I am merely accepting the Newtonian forces at work here. I doubt that there are many (any?) Epik customers who I would consider good people (there’s simply no logical reason to host with them otherwise). That doesn’t mean they aren’t entitled to their rights, under the law.
But it does mean that I definitely don’t sympathize with them like I might someone else. Much like I wouldn’t sympathize with a drug lord who gets robbed by a rival drug lord. A crime is a crime, and the law should be applied accordingly.
Buuut I am only human. And I only have so much sympathy.
For example, I inherited a domain 12 years ago using it. At one point I tried to move to my personal host, but my personal host has bad DNS features and I couldn’t get my site configured. I was able to move it back (panicked I just went back to the service that I knew worked). And then I was stuck in a six month period where I couldn’t transfer it again. And then life happened and it’s three years later.
That might not fit into your logical conceptions of how people make choices. But I think it’s very very safe to assume that many customers are upstanding people.
https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2021/01/19/free-speech-in-...
They will "*not* lift one finger to help you [host your site here]" (emphasis theirs)
If you are not politically to their taste, they will look for a reason to kick you off as opposed to their other customers, "we *will* kick you off the instant you give us a reason".
In that same post, they revealed they will cooperate with police requests without any court documents or warrants being provided, putting them in the 'fragile' class of hosting providers.
There are some Nazis here. If you do not stop posting here you are associating with Nazis. Since you post here you are either a Nazi or Nazi sympathizer.
> You are in our prayers today. We are grateful for your support and prayer. When situations arise where individuals might not have honorable intentions, I pray for them. I believe that what the enemy intends for evil, God invariably transforms into good. Blessings to you all.
Anonymous is not bashing the fash, they now do the bidding of the far-left Establishment, enforce state-approved Censorship and Cancel Culture of any dissidents against the monoculture cathedral regime - who now just are your average regular independents, libertarians, and freedom loving populists.
Anyone who still falls for "but they're nazis and fascism is bad mmk" is either dishonest or not following this subject matter. Just because you don't like someone doesnt mean they're nazis.
I doubt this is even Anonymous. The real Anonymous would not be hacking companies providing free speech (no matter how bad the security).
There is an Establishment.
And there's a far-left.
There is no “far-left Establishment”.
> I doubt this is even Anonymous.
Anonymous isn't, like, a group with defined membership.
As part of my job, I perform (authorized) phishing simulations for employees of my employer. Typically this involves registering domains that look like my employer's domain (with permission), or domains that look like those of our vendors (again, with permission). I suspect one too many people clicked Gmail's "report phishing" button and their automated system took it from there. So I wasn't at all surprised that the account eventually got suspended, but I was surprised that my appeal was rejected, and closed with zero investigation. Perhaps I shouldn't have been.
Thankfully the only domains I lost were domains used for that purpose. At the time, I did use Google Domains for my personal domains as well, but thankfully I had those associated with my personal Gmail address and not my work account so I could still control them. Needless to say, though, I moved them off onto another registrar immediately.
The experience has also led me to slowly move off of Google products as a whole, with the notable current exceptions of Android and Google Fi.
--
* before the inevitable "phishing is a violation of their terms of service", it actually isn't. The related section forbids use that violates any laws or regulations, and lists phishing as an example. Authorized phishing simulations do not violate any laws or regulations. Unfortunately, Google failed to follow up with any of the individuals or evidence showing that it was authorized, and just rejected the appeal.
Why be concerned with domain providers giving personal information to authorities when Epik has already given it to the entire internet?
Signing an address has nothing to do with linkability or transaction history, or even blockchains, as this is not a transaction and requires no funds. It requires having generated the private key, client side. Signing proves you control the private key, public key and address hash. A signature allows other people to verify that you in fact do have control of that address. When looking at the address on a blockchain, it can be empty, no funds, and simply relegated to being a unique identifier for the person that signed the address.
Okay, so let's assume this is confusing because it conflicts with something else you thought you experienced regarding blockchains. Well just erase all that from your mind, and read on:
Blockchains use a namespace of address hashes. Private keys to generate those address hashes are only generated client side by the user, and there is enough randomness and entropy for no other user to generate the same private key, public key and address hash. But within the namespace, all public keys and address hashes already exist. I think this is the fundamentally different paradigm than account numbers like at a bank. At banks, for example, accounts numbers are incremental. ie. When an account is created new row is added to the account database it has an ID that goes up by one, and all the attributes of the account did not exist until the point in time that the server was instructed to create the account. In blockchains using a designated cryptographic namespace, all accounts therefore already exist and access must be generated client side by the user. The namespace is extremely large, which allows for assurances that nobody generates the same private keys, public keys and address hash. The other countintuitive thing to understand is that these accounts don't exist "on" the blockchain until someone sends funds to them. An empty address means it has never been seen on the blockchain, as this record only occurs after a digital asset or message references them in a prior transaction. GUI's for browsing blockchains smooth this over by letting you look at empty addresses simply by nature of them complying with the namespace, but an address that has never previously received funds or any other message is not in the blockchain at all, yet. The reason this is important is because if you have the private key to that address, you can still convey that you have control of that address via signing and there is no prior link to any other address or funds. There is no linkability or privacy issue. Signing just lets you have a unique identifier.
Using all that, to go back to what I said earlier, cryptocurrency wallets just makes public and private key cryptography so prevalent that signing is also more prevalent and available. Whereas PGP and GPG Suites had 25 years to do so and have not been successful outside of much much much smaller niches, that have not seem to have grown at all and the user experience arguably has gotten worse.
What you mentioned about NFT art signatures is a different topic. Address signing is about offchain signatures. All transactions and onchain metadata are onchain signatures.
This is an incredibly shortsighted / insular perspective. We live in a world where conservative orthodox Jews (e.g. Ben Shapiro) are called Nazi's and conservative Black folks (Larry Elder) are being called white supremacists, simply for being conservative. Likewise, progressives and other left leaning individuals that dare utter criticism of the left are met with the milder insult of being called conservative (e.g. Tim Pool, Glenn Greenwald, Bill Maher). People are deliberately shifting the overton window to a ridiculous degree and the scary thing is that they are getting away with it.
I can imagine a lot of regular conservatives worry about censorship and may find Epik to be a safer bet than, say, Google who blocks pro-life ads [1]. I can understand that maybe from your perspective (assuming you're left leaning) you are not aware of how hostile society has become to mainstream conservatism, but you should try to see things from the perspective of a regular conservative who sees prominent mainstream conservatives being slandered, lied about, and cancelled all around them.
Aside from that, Epik did have a few differentiating features like offering single purchase lifetime Domain ownership that I haven't seen elsewhere, which by itself could be sufficient motivation for people to host with them, without the necessarily knowing anything about potential controversy surrounding the business.
[1] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/google-blocks-ad-for-s...
> while nowadays it is much more likely that you will see such content while browsing facebook.
Overall it was a net positive experience, really. It led me to perform a personal Disaster Recovery exercise where I modeled losing my Google account, which was very interesting and informed a significant shift in my online behavior. If it ever happens, it'll be a bother, but not much more than that.
ANYWAYS.... i sure would like to know what would happen if everyone who has youtube, tiktok, facebook (etc) account had their personalized results/preferences changed so that all of the suggestions and 'similar' results would consist of 'Restoring Faith in Humanity' type videos. Thank you for listening, sorry its probably a dumb idea.
ANYWAYS.... i sure would like to know what would happen if everyone who has youtube, tiktok, facebook (etc) account had their personalized results/preferences changed so that all of the suggestions and 'similar' results would consist of 'Restoring Faith in Humanity' type videos. Thank you for listening, sorry its probably a dumb idea.
I liked Epik's offerings because of the option of "forever" domains. So, I moved a bunch over there from GoDaddy; and as a Christian, I felt it wouldn't hurt to support a Christian business owner. Had I known a bit more about Epik, I likely would've picked a more reasonable registrar.
Unfortunately, it looks as though any purchases prior to Feb 21st may infer that your payment info is in a new leak. Contemplating having my card changed at this point.
What really irritates me is that there's been zero communication from Epik. Either they own up to it, or they ruin their business and what's left of their reputation anyway. I'm already bailing, because I don't want to have my domains associated with that degree of stupidity (though, it's probably moot at this point).
...but that decision was made without knowing much about Epik. Ignoring the fact that they've potentially shielded some, uh, unsavory individuals (doxers, DDoSers, etc), the absolute stupidity in the design of their system, insecurity, and the fact that it looks now that Rob Monster tried to negotiate with the hackers to not release unhashed CC#s assuming they'd be happy with him removing the people they wanted removed...
Yeah, no. I'm moving my domains at this point. I don't want to be associated with that anymore than I already am at this point. The system "security" itself was bad enough, but having a CEO try to negotiate with the attackers? This is almost funny if it weren't so idiotic.
I've nothing but good things to say about Namecheap. Some of their employees post here from time to time and seem responsive to issues.