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Suspicious TAG changes

Discussion in 'Domain Research' started by webber, Aug 2, 2020.

  1. Ben Thomas

    Ben Thomas Well-Known Member

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    Cool story, Kalin. We'd prefer it if you left the UK market alone to be honest. But everyone has a right to it, I suppose.

    As for BHAYDOM, I'm sure he bought a shit ton of LLL's from Acorn not so long back. Could these be part of that?
     
  2. Domain Forum

    Acorn Domains Elite Member

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    IWA Meetup
     
  3. LCHappy United Kingdom

    LCHappy Active Member

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    Just a wild guess, but I've got a feeling your project will be discontinued when they bring out the auctions.
     
  4. DJ

    DJ Well-Known Member

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    Unlikely looking at the amount of inventory they have and the prices they are after. Sadly, they will be holding on to a few of those for many years to come.
     
  5. LCHappy United Kingdom

    LCHappy Active Member

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    The project where mysterious people with DACs and absolutely no connection whatsoever to Tool Domains, transfer their names to them, that's the part that will co-incidentally end.
     
  6. DJ

    DJ Well-Known Member

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    I think they have planned for the end and are fully aware it is coming hence the reason they have consolidated everything into one tag as they will now hope the reap the rewards of they Ill gotten gains.
     
  7. Murray

    Murray Well-Known Member

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    I'm finding it hard to blame Kalin at this point - if rules aren't enforced then there are no rules so how can you cheat

    Anger should be focused at Nominet, not that they care they're busy playing at business people offering security lol couldn't make it up
     
    • Agree Agree x 4
  8. Siusaidh

    Siusaidh Well-Known Member

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    I have had an informative conversation with Kalin, to try to understand his agenda and plans.

    I also followed links in the Salestrar website to this page which explains and outlines his goals:

    https://seo.domains/

    It's suggested on the Nominet forum today that there are still existing flaws - so that (if true) I very much wonder what will happen September 2nd to 12th with the Ionos and Fasthosts name dumps. Will it go the same way as January 2020 and July 2019, with dominant players getting half the key domains, and 20 times more than most serious domainers?

    Sure, people will exploit a system that lets them. What I have issues with is a company, tasked with serving the UK's namespace, operating with what to some seems to verge on 'laissez-faire', whether that's allowing mass-registrations (which is why the name dumps are happening next month) or failure to resolve flaws, even if that means outsourcing the task to the more technically proficient.

    I have questions about the urgency with which flaws have been addressed by Nominet, which I've posted on their forum. Their failure to reply to myself or Andrew Bennett doesn't communicate urgency either. It's almost as if - were one to be cynical - the whole system's coming to an end, so why bother? That, of course, may not be true. Things are not always straightforward to resolve. But it is a matter of concern, if we find that the name dump of 1,300,000+ .uk domains in the coming month has been exploited once again.
     
  9. Hay

    Hay Active Member

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    What you all fail to understand is that this is the very reason why Nominet are changing their systems... because you all constantly slag them and other tag holders off (day in, day out) and this has been the case for many years... all you need to do is look at the acorn archive to realise every year a different domainer is in the limelight and its always when someone has success which is almost jealously and at worst bullying which is why Nominet have had no option but to intervene.

    There are many ways someone can have success and obviously those that can code will do better than those that cant which is just a reality of being apart of a technical niche where Nominet specifically outline from the very start that they "do not provide any code for their services"... on top of that those with knowledge will always do better... again this stands in many areas of life.

    For example... those using Mythic Beats will have better performance over those using DigitalOcean, Why? Because Mythic beast uses indirect peering through Telehouse and sovereign's core routers which has a Nominet presence meaning your traffic is routed to nominet much quicker than digital ocean (also digital ocean contains more hops between your request than those on mythic beats network) therefore your request might only take 1ms to complete with someone like Mythic Beast whereas Digital Ocean might take 3ms to complete... so the advantage here? This means when you see "N"... it takes you 3ms to send your request where as someone using Mythic might only take 1ms...

    There are lots more things to take into account but ultimately what im getting at is... the technically advanced people within drop catching are always going to do better than those that are not and that is just the reality of being involved in something that requires coding and network knowledge. You would not request a job interview the be a network engineer if you was a painter and decorator with no knowledge of networking.. clearly, those that have knowledge will do better than those without... Nominet do not have the means of training every man and his dog, This is the exact same for every other TLD, not just the .uk namespace and Nominet have probably had enough of all the crap they have to listen to every day for the last 10 years.

    Its all these posts that have accumulated over the years that have put the .UK namespace down.. not nominets actions and those that complain "ONLY" complain when things are not working in their favour.... the moment they start to have success they dont say a word... or they are no where to be seen.

    Agree with me or disagree, i dont care, im just stating the reality.
     
    • Informative Informative x 1
  10. Breakline

    Breakline Active Member

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    Ben, you say that because of the moaners Nominet will move to an auction model or worse. I disagree. The moaners always show up when people cheat, you can tell yourself that you are good at what you do all day long but that doesn't change the facts. You are not catching domains because you are good at coding, you are catching because you exploit the poor system Nominet makes available. I had at some point booked around 10 names in the space of 2 days, all great SEO or desirable names and all were caught by you. That's cheating the system, multiple tags or gangs of catchers, and lately using other people's quota by hosted catchers (wink wink). Most of us here have alternative means of income and we don't care much about drop catching but some are dedicating most of their time and resources to it. Normally people who have the most to lose will speak out, create petitions etc etc.
     
  11. Hay

    Hay Active Member

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    Go and find me "just one" other tag holder then that is using my so-called nonexistent hosted chasing lol... you cant. Like i said... Acorn archives have hundreds of posts over the years where pretty much every member has been told they are cheating...

    Everyone likes to play the victim, i could out multiple members on here that have/control multiple tags (Most of them are the ones currently moaning because their old dac script which was dependent on the dac flaws no longer work).

    Those people that didnt use that script just called everyone a cheater when in reality they wasn't cheating... they were using a competitive edge which anyone else could have used at that time...

    Anyway ive made my point, ill leave you to ponder on it.
     
  12. Murray

    Murray Well-Known Member

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    The only times I remember people really getting annoyed is one when tag starts catching everything. I'm not sure what year but I know there was a period where Denys was catching everything for months

    In those times is it not because they found a bug? flaw? something that shouldn't be possible but is

    Fair enough people are smart enough to find these flaws but if they shouldn't be there in the first place aren't Nominet accountable? shouldn't they patch them quicker?
     
    Last edited: Aug 4, 2020
  13. Breakline

    Breakline Active Member

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  14. Hay

    Hay Active Member

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    They cant patch something they dont know about, they rely on people telling them and most of the people back then using said flaws were to interested in lining their pockets than telling nominet... However, once Nominet are informed (Which they have been about the recent ip issue on DAC) it then takes them time to implement the fix... First they need to replicate, code a solution, run it through a staging test, switch to a backup while the fix is implemented into production and the switchback... all of this isnt done in a day when your an organization working remotely... i agree the IP issue should have been fixed weeks ago when me and rob reported it, especially given there has been multiple maintenance windows in between... Why has this not been fixed? Who knows, one can only assume its a trap to link all the multi taggers who use it because i can confirm im unable to
     
  15. As a CTO and large scale software developer, if that was my role at Nominet and this landed on my desk as a bug, if it wasn't overly impacting the day to day running of the whole system I'm not sure how desperate I'd be to fix urgently, presumably there is some complexity to it, along side that you've got many hoops to jump through (as Ben has mentioned) with testing in a staging environment, planning releases, actually releasing the fix etc.

    This forum is looking at it from a drop catchers point of view, but in the grand scheme of things 10 million extra queries a day on a system built to provide query responses you'd imagine it hasn't impacted them that much, hence it not being top of the list. Add on top of that remote working, building an auction platform ;) and dealing with the large scale registrars which presumably take up more of their time than 50 people drop catching and registering 100 names a day between them i'm not surprised it hasn't been fixed yet.
     
  16. Murray

    Murray Well-Known Member

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    In the bigger picture if Nominet want to offer security services doesn't it reflect badly on them they they can't enforce rules and allow exploits on their own systems?
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  17. davedevelopment

    davedevelopment Well-Known Member

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    I agree with most of what you say, but only if it was taken without the context of the consultation. The impression I'm given from the material I've seen around the expiring domain consultation, is that the DAC is a strain on resources, so finding out that those that strain it the most are probably doing so at multiple times their allowed limits, I'd probably want to address it sooner rather than later. Unless of course, that wouldn't fit the narrative...
     
  18. super-whois

    super-whois Active Member

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    Doesn't explain the lack of acknowledgement as a known issue.
     
  19. Just to clarify, I'm in no way defending Nominet's lack of response or ideas surrounding the DAC, auctions or anything related.

    Really depends how you use the term, the slow DAC response wasn't a Nominet specific "error", my understanding on their database structure is they use oracle database replication and in the setup they had configured there was always going to be a "cache" delay when they processed changes on the database before replication to the live system.

    I'd be more concerned from a security point of view if our information was getting leaked, not calculating DAC queries correctly on it's own doesn't scream security risk to me, but I do take on board what you are saying.

    Arguably them saying the DAC is a strain on resources fits the rhetoric they are trying to push with regards to an auction move, i don't for a second believe in this day and age that really anything as simple as checking data should be a strain on anything.

    I guess that's up to them to decide, if it's non system breaking and not causing problems why do they need to announce it? I'm sure they have a project management system with thousands of bugs that have been fixed or due to be fixed, we don't need to know all of them. This DAC "issue" is really only an issue because drop catchers are exploiting it, I doubt GoDaddy have implemented something so they can over use their quota on people checking if domain names are available to register.
     
  20. Siusaidh

    Siusaidh Well-Known Member

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    I feel more than willing to believe that patching/resolving the flaws may be a significant undertaking.

    However, as super-whois says, I think it's respectful to members that they at least engage, and answer concerns, and clarify if the flaws or vulnerabilities are still there.

    The last two large.uk name events (July 2019 and January 2020) for different reasons, the catching rate of a dominant party seems to have been about 20 times the rate of the regular and skilled domain catchers on average, hoovering up close on half of some categories of the most valued domains.

    That is NOT equal access to domains.

    Now sure, Nominet may focus their priorities on their top 4 registrars, because that's where most of their business and money lies, but surely small registrars and members have equal rights to expect a resilient system that provides fair and equal access. We don't even know if the flaw(s) still exist, because Nominet haven't said whether they do or not. In short, will yet another great .uk name dump be exploited by weaknesses in the operations of this cyber-security company? That's a fair concern, given past performance:

    Will weaknesses in Nominet's rules and processes mean that history repeats itself in September 2020?

    I think it's disrespectful for Nominet to just stay silent and detached on these voiced concerns. Disrespectful to legitimate, rule-abiding members. In my view it almost borders on arrogance.

    It gives the impression that some members don't really matter enough to spend a few minutes explaining what's happened, why it's taken so long to resolve, and whether it's still a problem now.

    Meanwhile we only have this name dump of about 1,300,000 .uk names next month because some important members (who clearly DO matter) were allowed to circumvent the RRA which applies to all, and do their own thing, regardless of the fact that the rules say registrars can't register domains unless registrants ask them to. Nominet provided the free registrations, knowing their big registrar 'friends' were likely to mass-register what - in the event - turned out to be over 2 million domain names.

    My concern is more the future than the past, and we have what we have: over a million names that were supposed (in agreed process) to have dropped 14 months ago. And a process for registering them which, on past performance, is going to provide far from equal access. And people voicing concerns about that. And Nominet not replying.

    Meanwhile we have directors who are employees of the huge registrars - and indeed a competing Registry - whose parent companies were involved in the hugely unproductive mass-registrations. Let's face it, the bottom line was that these 2 million+ 'ghost' registrants didn't renew because they just didn't want the domains, they never asked for them, they still haven't asked for them.

    It was a misjudged policy that achieved minimal results for considerable negative PR. But there seemed to be a 'laissez-faire' attitude of letting valued big companies 'do their own thing', setting RRA rules aside and, arguably facilitating the process with promotions that made it all possible. To me there's a cultural issue here, which I've seen with ICANN, and Registries, and big tech companies - again and again: of too-close relationships between powerful interests, affording them influence, sway, and reciprocal financial benefits.

    So as Aaron says, and I agree, the domain catching fraternity is a quite small and niche market in the overall picture of registrations. I suspect they are not Nominet's priority at all. Nevertheless, they have a right to expect systems and processes that are watertight, and equal access to the UK's namespace. They have a right to expect there are no conflicts of interest in the company's governance (not saying there is, I don't know, but I still think the very large registrars [and one now a Registry too] should be kept at arm's length from the company's operations).

    And, like all members, they should expect to have their concerns, affecting their livelihoods, responded to in helpful detail.
     
  21. Hay

    Hay Active Member

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    @Siusaidh Maybe im wrong in thinking this but personally i believe that due to all the emails they keep receiving and forum posts... i suspect they will listen but it wont be in favor of what you all want... instead i think they will just pull the plug and go down the auction route as this stops all these posts about "will September repeat its self ect ect" because by going down the auction route they know it puts a stop to everything and it will be the posts, threats and hundreds of emails which force them to do so.

    Maybe im wrong, i want to be wrong of course but based on what i see posted week in week out i highly suspect they will be pulling the plug to put a stop to everything.