Taliban Shuts Down 'queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance
Taliban Shuts Down 'queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance
After years in limbo, the Taliban recently began reoperating Afghanistan's .af TLD, which is breaking parts of the internet.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11820406
Do not use 2 letter country TLDs!
People have been using country TLDs as cute URLs for years, and somehow it almost always ends up as a problem, or it furthers harms against the countries who own the TLDs (.io for example). Sure .tv or .io or .af sound fun, (anyone remember del.icio.us?) but it's just not worth it.
How does the use of ccTLDs furthers harms against the countries?
There are other reasons for choosing certain TLD's. I remember back when, the .tk domain was very popular, because it was completely free.
And because of that .tk ccTLD is completely disreputable now. Everyone and their mother had one back in the day, which included all the spammers/phishers and their mothers. Now no one trusts .tk domains. Or at least they shouldn't!
Remember goatse.cx ?
How do people using .tv and .io harm their countries?
Almost always? I have some strong doubts about that. It's just that you don't see articles about "Nothing is particularly going wrong with redd.it"
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml...
Do not use 2 letter country TLDs!
Well, there's another one!
It's not lost on me lol. The news site is also a .CO domain.
The headline is misleading. The Taliban did not shut down queer.af. The team behind the instance decided to move away from the domain so as to not support the Taliban through domain fees. Source: https://wedistribute.org/2024/01/queer-af-is-shutting-down-due-to-taliban/
The article explains that, yes, they did plan to move...in April. The Taliban government did, in fact, shut them down ahead of that schedule.
'idiots sign domain over to government, confused when government shuts down domain'
They knew it was risky AF (pun intended) but went for it anyway. It's not like they were confused, they expected this
Damn! Using .af for a LGBT+ site is insane! The country could have redirected the domain to their own servers and started learning the personal details of those on the site who I imagine wouldn’t be terribly thrilled having an anti-LGBT+ government learn their personal information (namely information not displayed publicly). Specifically, they could put their own servers in front of the domain so they can decrypt it, then forward the traffic on to the legitimate servers, allowing them to get login information and any other data which the user sends or receives.
Would they care enough to do all of this, though?
The Taliban could have done that if the site weren't secured with TLS, anyway.
Why not use two letter country tlds? I have a few .uk ones.
That’s what this is?
And don't be surprised when the shitty, anti-gay rights, anti-minority rights ethnocracy behind the .ml domains does the same.
Yeah, I'm really not looking forward to that day.
lol