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Namecheap gave my account to an unverified third party

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49028037

Namecheap banned a few domain names purely based on an ambiguous tweet that got 6 likes

https://x.com/Namecheap/status/1489485337885921284

Namecheap suspended Imgur in 2013 for 1 CSAM image out of millions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5276648

Namecheap snipes your domains

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28732510


A namecheap bug got my domain suspended: https://captnemo.in/blog/2026/05/05/namecheap-whois/

I'm planning to migrate out.


Namecheap turned me into a newt

did you get better?

Did you get better?

Burn them!

I did a whois lookup now, and it seems like your domain still has privacy protection (or it was applied by Namecheap again) and is violating the registry rules.

So what company are people switching to? Namecheap used to be a reasonable choice -oh wait there is another thread with that discussion

- Porkbun (see the thread below https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50144164)

- Cloudflare


Porkbun for me. I tried using CF's domain service and at least at that time it was hard for me to tell head from the tail on their interface. Hope that has changed. (I just wanted to distribute my domains between the two serices, otherwise Porkbun is fine as it is).

edit: I remember now – I could't even see pricing easily on their domains page and I still can't. If I am picking a domain registrar I'd rather pick just a domain registrar that does normal domain regisrar things (and preferably nothing else, or not much).


Porkbun is using surveillance tech to combat fraud now so I would be careful[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110362


Something to take note is domain transfers between Porkbun accounts requires ID verification now [1].

[1]: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/72-how-to-push-a-domain-into-...


Thanks for the heads up. Not a good outcome for a trusted domain provider like Porkbun

Why is that bad?

Sounds like a great way to prevent domain theft.


I’ve got some domains in Cloudflare and some in Porkbun. No issues yet. I also like how straightforward Porkbun is while still supporting API automation and team accounts.

Cloudflare banned 8chan and Kiwifarms for political reasons.

What is political about mass murder or maliciously distributing stolen intimate photographs? Seriously. I want an answer.

Definition of politics: "the total complex of relations between people living in society", or in a particular sector, such as "office politics"

"Political reasons"

Kiwifarms is literally a doxxing site.


I could see Cloudflare randomly deciding that my single-employee company domain name needs an enterprise plan in a few years from now.

Domain names aren't the money maker for Cloudflare. Having the domain with them so that you'll eventually use them for other things is. That's why everything is at cost.

It's a great place to keep your domain names. Beyond that is up to you.


Right, their main money maker is $150k enterprise plans you gave them a large amount of leverage to declare you suddenly require.

Not really. I've had about 50 domains with them for the last few years and have never seen them reach out do to something like that.

But they can do it. And they have done it to some people. So you shouldn't give them that power.

How is that any different than any other domain registrar though? There's nothing stopping you from just moving the domain to another provider if it's a problem.

Compared to the Namecheap and GoDaddy stories, Cloudflare has been a gift to use.


Does cloudflare support transferring domains? And you have to do it before your registrar extorts you, not when it happens.

Just like any other registrar, yes.

The process is standardized.


Wanted to dog pile on this - Godaddy gave away my entire account back when I was younger. I lost lots of domains, including my website, "strategywiki.org".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38062595

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32470260

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24507411

Looks like I'll be transitioning off of Namecheap now too.


I lost a successful ecommerce domain to what seemed like a GoDaddy inside job. Now it points to an offshore casino...

You clearly gave your partners more access than necessary and the loss the result of your own foolishness.

I don’t know if there’s enough context in those links to say that anyone’s foolish.

Porkbun was very pleasant to use, would definitely recommend them!

I wanted something in the EU, so I went with INWX - their UI is quite unintuitive/bad in my eyes though. I guess Hostinger/IONOS/Gandi/... would also be pretty popular for anyone like me.


I have good experiences with both porkbun and INWX as well. INWX could indeed use a UX update.

I used to use TransIP.nl and while they are still good, they’ve gotten expensive over the last few years.


Yes, TransIP is good, but expensive. I always liked their service, when you have questions getting an answer within the hour via their online support interface. But I'm migrating away now (esp. with VPS'es as the prices here are waaay too high). Using OVHCloud now.

Gandi used to be ok before they got PE'd. Now the prices are just ridiculous and I'm sure the enshittification will continue.

Amazon Route 53, Cloudflare and NearlyFreeSpeech

S&Ps use MarkMonitor.


+1 For Amazon Route 53 - one of the services that they don't nickel and dime you on.

Very surprised they don’t charge you per GB of DNS traffic and per million DNS requests

I was just checking them out as a possible place to move my DNS names to. Looks like it's a whopping $0.50/month if you use their nameservers per address, plus $0.40 per million queries, prorated, So probably tough to spend more than $1 a month on without having Google-scale and spending way more than that on servers.

Yeah me too - they charge for name servers but I figured out after a while that Linode did the same thing for none of the cost.

But for domain registrations alone it's fine.


is not Amazon Route 53 more expensive than Cloudflare?

Cloudflare requires you use their name servers

I switched to Hover. Part of TUCOWS. Yes, that one [0].

[0] Tucows, which stands for "The Ultimate Collection Of Winsock Software"


I’ve seen many tucows domains which just stop being published for no apparent reason and it takes a support request to get them working again

Been using them for over a decade no problems fwiw

I've used them for like 15 years

i use joker.com and gigahost.no for .no

joker.com

They have been around forever. I registered my first domain from them sometime during the early internet era.

I like Hover.com a lot.

Based on just my multi-year experience with a reliable interface.

So anyone else with a view on the company might chime in. But I am writing this because I have been very happy with them. None of the glitchy inscrutable experiences so many companies manage/love to design into their services.

Oh, the checkbox that turns off automatic renewal can take a second or two to register. So not perfect, but close. If that sounds trivial, you have understood why I like them.


EasyDNS

CloudFlare

Then you need a new username

Dynadot

No, they also disabled a domain with 20k user subdomains without notice based on an abuse report that was weeks old and the site long disabled. Wouldn't trust them with a proper abuse process.

It asks you to choose 4 (four!) "secret questions" as a "security" measure. I decided that keeping your domains with an organization that insists on idiotic practices that are firmly forbidden by every sensible security practices guide (OWASP, NIST 800-63, anything, really) since like 2015 is not a very wise choice.

Tell that to the banks, alarm companies, etc that do the same thing :-/

I just always use a plausible but false and unique answer, which I just keep track of in my password manager.


You do you, but that is enough of a red flag to actually mention when somebody recommends Dynadot to everyone else without much elaboration.

Also, banks are really different from domain registrars in several important and relevant respects, but, for the record, I don't have to tell it to the banks I use, and if I did, I'd probably be looking for a bank that I don't have to tell it to.


mother's maiden name: 14t&7--ghv&32@/apER;Aa0)/90sIs

> mother's maiden name: 14t&7--ghv&32@/apER;Aa0)/90sIs

This isn't a good idea....

If using random text, there are many examples of, when asked to answer a secret question, telling the call centre droid "I just hit a few random keys for that one" and this being accepted.

You would do well to assume each call centre droid is a board kid more interested in his co-workers tits than your clever answers to security questions.


Good luck reading that out loud over the phone to technical support if you get locked out of your account.

Technical support sees the answer to the question in plain text, so after you read first three random characters correctly they will confirm your identity and then patiently wait until you finish reading.

Also my real mother maiden name is almost equally hard to comprehend for english-speaking tech support, so it doesn't make much of a difference.


If my mother's real maiden name is Johnson, I write in random false name like Smithers-James.

It's plausible, hard to guess, and harder to social enginer than "It's a bunch of random letters and numbers."


- I don’t get locked out of my account.

- Porkbun doesn’t have this bullshit, how do they get by?


Just since 2015? Also, thanks, now I feel old.

Porkbun

Yeah, I'm not waiting around for Namecheap to screw me, I'm moving to porkbun. They do all the stuff Namecheap does for me now.

I've been waiting for the "porkbun screwed me" stories, but haven't seen any yet.


There are in that very Reddit thread though.

Honestly, so far Porkbun haven't fucked me yet but sad to see them going down the same route as namecheap

Are there any decent non-US based domain provider remaining at all?


Mythic Beasts.

That is the actual name of the company, not a statement on the scarcity of decent non-US based domain providers.


Hover

njal.la

That is not actually a registrar - it's a proxy service that registers the domain for you and lets you use it.

They also make no secret they have a political slant and use their power to enforce it - they will defend a piracy website from legal attacks but they will take down a neonazi website even without receiving any letter about it.


internet.bs

>I'm planning to migrate out.

Where to?

I have like 20 domains with them, this is really bad news for me.

I was at GANDI but they became absolute trash and hostile towards their customers as well, hence why I left for Namecheap.


+1, unfortunately.

A few years ago, I experienced absolutely stellar service from Gandi when (due to negligence of the previous registrar) I had trouble moving a domain in.

A couple of months ago, my main domain was offline for over a day due to a configuration snag that I could not resolve on my own, and Gandi's customer service now has ridiculously short hours (pretty much only in the morning), took quite a while to respond, and didn't provide much background info on the underlying issue.

I was amazed by the drastic change in quality, and I'll move my domains out soon. Where to is a still open question, though.

EDIT: I just read in a sibling thread that Gandi has been bought by private equity a while ago, that explains a lot.


> Namecheap banned a few domain names purely based on an ambiguous tweet that got 6 likes

I can't believe this is real.


I cann.

Hilarious because namecheap is the number 1 provider of lookalike domains that we see in our incident response actions.

If your business strategy involves going with a vendor with 'cheap' in the name, that's probably the Root Cause of most issues that arise from that vendor

They used to be great, I had 30+ domains with them and support used to be great. They got acquired by PE and went downhill.

Some of us are old enough to remember the great GoDaddy-Namecheap exodus!

These days I can't imagine using anything other than AWS or Cloudflare.


namecheap was decent, unfortunately the lesson people need to learn is that not everything stays decent, not in the current share-holder asskissing climate

If the business proposition is being "cheap", then they will have to undercut everyone

If you undercut everyone, they will undercut competitors with the same strategy

If a cheap competitor undercuts a cheap competitor margins will tend to zero

If a competitor is pricing at zero and you need to undercut them, you will operate at a loss

Eventually the company will either shut down, or be liquidated, its valuable assets (the existing contracts and list of customers) will be bought by competitor or Private Equity.

This is common in domains, thousands of registrars get acquired by a megacorp, see NewFold Digital.

So in essence, when the business proposition is being cheap, the natural consequence is the business dying and being sold for parts to a purchaser that will have to degrade the cost to value relationship that got the customers in the first place.


> If the business proposition is being "cheap", then they will have to undercut everyone

Consider a market with three suppliers.

Supplier A charges $12.00 and is widely regarded to be The Worst. Their only support is a broken chatbot with a tendency to lock your account at random and their UI is full of dark patterns that trigger hidden fees.

Supplier B charges $12.50 and is widely regarded to be a reasonable operator that will rarely screw you and offers basic no-frills service.

Supplier C charges $20.00 and is widely regarded to be a reasonable operator that will rarely screw you and offers a bunch of convenience features and integration with WordPress or something.

Which one are you going to choose? Maybe C if you want the convenience features, maybe B if you want the lower price, but never A, right?

Now suppose you're B and you want to pick a name that emphasizes that you have a lower price than C.


That's a nice thought experiment, but in practice, there's plenty of actors that provide good service at the cheapest prices.

How? Magic? No, they operate at a loss for years, (especially if the loss is very marginal, which is the case for selling domains at 10$ instead of 11$).

The profit is pushed in the temporal scale into the future through investment, instead of needing to extract profit instantly at every moment.

This is known as price dumping and it occurs in thousands of industries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_dumping


At scale, A. At scale people are going to choose A.

The market of people who have been burned and value support is <<< everyone else who is just getting stuff done and don’t care, or don’t have the money to care.


> At scale, A. At scale people are going to choose A.

That's what the cynics always say, but do people actually choose A when B is available?

It's not just cars, look at landscaping, cleaning or handyman services, barber shops, etc. These are all commodities. How many coffee shops stay in business by providing poor service and bad coffee?

People mainly pick A when there isn't a B.


> At scale people are going to choose A.

Is this why Kias are the most popular cars in North America?


For a car, yes. But yes I do get the point being made.

I was lazy and didn’t want to specify the constraints based on the specific economic good.


That's a lot of extrapolation from a word in a name though. Brands evolve, it's now 26 years and in particular the main stakeholder changed last year.

I'm all for understanding what went down the drain, pondering on the name doesn't help much IMHO.

I'd love to get a bit more info on how CVC Capital Partners handle their purchases, what I get online is extremely generic and non descript.


namecheap was created in 2000, maybe today cheap is such a bad word to have in the name but not in the year 2000, when buying .coms was the hype equivalent of chatting with AI today

These apply to literally all businesses in a competitive marketplace.

Only in a commodity market

This is an interesting chain of events, but PE will buy the company regardless of whether the four steps you've listed took place or not. Hell, they'd rather buy companies with fat margins, than ones with near-zero margins.

doas jexec -U opengrass tellyjail env DISPLAY=:0 Telegram

Yeah, something like that would not have prevented the account takeover part, though, which relies on Telegram's own files; or the access to cached files.

Docker services with TSDProxy. No Tailscale container needed per service, one proxy handles everything.

https://almeidapaulopt.github.io/tsdproxy/


>1 commit 2 hours ago

>domain registered 7 hours ago

>ghost pusher named Dev


Pretty sure all the upvotes came from folks nostalgic about FoxPro development days. I don't think anyone is actually upvoting the quality of the seemingly fully AI written website, documentation, and application.


People want instant gratification like they stopped doing paper math in the 1980s.


Avoid pre-orders and new. The BB Key One launched at $729, I got it off local classifieds for $30.


A new QWERTY is a blessing, but please, open the bootloader and drivers so users can install whatever they want.


The bootloader is unlockable.


You can already do that without being a trusted device.


For the longest time, you couldn't. It wasn't until this release I realised that had changed. If it changed before, it wasn't well communicated to me as an Android signal user. I was on beeper and then molly precisely because there was so little traction on changing this. You could install signal fine, but you couldn't QR code or secret phrase mesh it with your android handset. Oddly, iPad meshed fine with iPhone or Android, and OSX desktop likewise. Just Android tablet which didn't.

Do you think this changed in over 18 months? I think it changed in under 18 months.


I think this is pretty recent, I'd never heard of it before. I even got a new phone a month ago and didn't notice this being an option.


Definitely under 18 months.

If I’m not fully mistaken, I checked for the combination of iPhone as main device/Android tablet as iPad-like second device sometime in the past six months, at most since the beginning of the year, and it wasn’t possible (unlike phone + iPad as tablet, which seemed quite strange to me).

In any case, it’s a recently released change.


Per the commits, this will require a purchase with Google Play Billing to mitigate spam while keeping the SMS verification option.


Ah OK, I wondered where is the "catch".

You cannot keep all 3 of "no gatekeeping" - "anyone can message anyone" - "low spam".


It says something about Play Billing being used specifically to mitigate spam?

I understand using play payments initially but hopefully eventually there's a way to buy an account without going through google.



Wouldn't that be related to data storage? Which they offer now? Or is that different?


Ah, I thought you meant using google play to do the payments to prevent spam unrelated to the cost. I know they are costing something.


Ugh wtf so I need a Google account on Android? That's not going to happen.

For an org that pretends to care about privacy you'd imagine there'd be a way to avoid, you know, the biggest privacy invader on the planet.

Just allow monero payments or something. Alongside Google play for the sheep that want to use that.


> Just allow monero payments or something.

This is the right solution. A one-time payment in crypto, say $5, ought to be enough to prevent spam. That being said, Signal has demonstrated (when presented a warrant) that they do not store phone numbers. If I remember correctly all they stored was an account ID and a UNIX timestamp such as the last login.


> If I remember correctly all they stored was an account ID and a UNIX timestamp such as the last login.

How do they perform address book matching without an phone number? It just being accessible by SGX does not really count as not storing it.

Problem with phone numbers is they are to short to store as a hash, since you can brute force the sha256 of an phone number in a trivial amount of time on a single consumer device


Wouldn't a payment of about $0.05 do the trick? My understanding of most kinds of spam is that it relies on being able to deploy hundreds of thousands of bot accounts just to get a few hits.


This is for registering an account that can then send many many messages.


Are you being hyperbolic, or do you really consider Google the worst with regards to privacy.


The most ubiquitous, absolutely. Their data collection is unparalleled. They're on almost every website, app, they have fingers into payment and browsers and mobile OSes.

In terms of what they do with big data there's more evil parties like Palantir but data abuse starts with collecting it, and I would object to it even if Google promised to only use it for good. For me my privacy is already violated when my data is collected, not just when it's abused. And I do consider Google's use of that data abusive, just not in the worst ways.


The idea that Google isn't the worst in respects to privacy is not an idea I've seen. Is there a company you propose as being worse? I think Meta is the next contender but they don't have nearly the same influence, so its still Google. Not for a lack of trying though. Mark would love to have the data and infrastructure dependence that Google holds over the internet.


Google is a bad as a phone number since it also has strong ties to your real identity


Yes. Google is even worse imho.


Google is objectively the worst


Hopefully they eventually make a way to pay without it.


You wouldn't believe the spam if they did that


Why? Just raise the prices if they get more spam on non-google payments.

I've literally registered a Signal account on one of the free SMS sites floating around. Why would spammers choose the payment route over phone numbers? They would just choose the one that's cheaper.


Can you actually make a Google account without a phone number these days?


googles obligation to hand out all account linked info notwithstanding, one may still create google accounts without associating a phone number, by doing so on old android versions. signal does however explicitly force credit card info here, thus providing direct individual traceability ..


Plus they are mandating you give your details to Google. So much for privacy


What about their built-in cryptocurrency? It's a perfect use for it. They could require payment post-install yet before message can be sent.


Nobody uses that and I think it was pre-mined. They should have implemented Monero but the UX isn't there. Maybe a Monero light wallet server run by Signal.

They probably avoided Monero to not attract the additional scrutiny. They don't even accept donations in Monero.


I always thought they didn't want monero because they were pushing their own crypto thingy. Which indeed nobody uses.


They avoid Monero because Signal and the EFF are actually the feds and this is all theater.


Claims without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Signal is not robust for metadata protection. Neither do they advertise anonymity. They take steps to protect metadata but it's nothing compared to SimpleX.

If it's "the feds", then how? There's reproducible builds on all platforms except iOS so we know the source code is what's running on our devices. Can you point to the code where the E2EE is compromised?

They are the largest messenger that has E2EE backups by default.


If I was the NSA, I would be using the fact that signal uses AWS for their backend combined with the cudgel that .us.gov has with the AWS govcloud contract to mandate that all traffic to and from signal's backend also gets routed to NSA traffic analysis servers, which could then be correlated with other sources like ISP data to get a pretty complete record of all Signal message metadata.

To be clear, I use signal pretty heavily, but that's because my threat model doesn't really include competent .us.gov actors. I don't think that they'd either prove they're doing this or go through the trouble of parallel construction over anything in my messages or who I'm talking to.


Nobody is arguing the e2ee isn't valid, its useful as a metadata collection platform, which is all they care about. Former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden famously stated: “We kill people based on metadata." and then he tried to hold back a smile and said "but not with this metadata". It's usefulness as a metadata collection platform becomes much less useful if people don't trust it, so of course it's secure.

If you can convince as many of your enemies (the american people who politically organize against them) to use the same platform, your job becomes easier than having to ETL from 20 different privacy platforms..

To be honest, I use signal, I have nothing to hide but it is useful in that nobody can spoof me (easily). I even talk to my 60 year old mother on signal. It has it's uses. But the EFF is definitely a federal psyop to get people using tools and techniques they control.

Just look at the people who created TOR, they're all feds. All these projects are funded by feds. These tools are advertised in CIA recruitment campaigns, they are literal weapons to circumvent nation state firewalls and deliver psychological weapons, overthrow governments or allow covert recruitment of foreign traitors.


I'll see your conspiracy theory and raise you one: What if the feds fund tech privacy projects specifically so that people like you won't trust them, and instead embrace privacy nihilism?

This is a known strategy of the Kremlin, by the way. They fund opposition groups which protest them, and then leak the fact of that funding so that people who are genuinely upset at the Kremlin get confused about who is captured opposition and who is legitimate.

It can be a signal in some cases, but funding sources are not a reliable way to make a conclusion about a group's motivations.


They funded it from the start via Radio Free Asia (CIA) and the Open Technology Fund.

Signal is for protecting opposition groups that help in regime change operations.

Why would people embrace privacy nihilism? The Signal shills also agitate against gpg/PGP, so we know it is secure and you should use that instead.


>Signal is for protecting opposition groups that help in regime change operations

SMS registration flow is trivially blocked in places where regimes are controlling telecom infra. And Twilio is unreliable in dozens of places for non-political reasons. Signal is very first-world centric from this point of view.


True, if they're not even going to allow that for payment then they might as well remove it from the app altogether. Because what's the point if they don't even believe in it themselves.


I've literally never seen anybody mention it, much less use it since it was announced.


RTMFers will inherit the earth.


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