Just wanted to get this thought out there. Space on the internet is infinite, and changing to a new domain is easy and cheap. Let the people who have poisoned their brains with anti tankie rhetoric pay the DNS landlord hundreds of dollars for the privilege of setting up a redirect to NATO's website or whatever, our money and effort is better spent on literally anything else.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 37 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (4 children)

The reason to pay is not to keep the domain for sentimental reasons or whatever but because it's an actual security risk to allow someone to jack your domain.

A bad actor who has the domain can very easily setup an identical looking site that can capture login attempts along with ips allowing them to put a username to an ip and and with additional resources could put an ip and therefore a user name to a real name.

They could also use the fake site to do all sorts of phishing scams like fake mutual aid requests, linking to external sites that are also honeypots to get more personal info than most would be willing to divulge on hexbear itself and could also ~~send DMs~~ impersonate any user on the site including to scam users on other servers like lemmygrad who might not know what is going on.

It's easily worth a few hundred to prevent some comrades getting scammed and doxxed.

[–] MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net 17 points 3 weeks ago

Also if we lose the domain we could lose some users who will never come back and think that we no longer exist. Some of those users could be relying on us for mutual aid and stuff like that.

[–] bleepbloopbop@hexbear.net 16 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

:this:

not 100% sure that's true about sending DMs to users on other instances (activitypub uses public key signing to ensure data integrity so I'm assuming they couldn't do so without those keys from our DB), but certainly they could put up a honeypot and try to ID users.

[–] Enjoyer_of_Games@hexbear.net 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Didn't know that about DMs but the point remains that impersonation is possible and they could trick people into DMing on other platforms by including false matrix IDs in profiles or posts.

[–] bleepbloopbop@hexbear.net 5 points 3 weeks ago

yep, it's still a big fucking problem.

[–] Carl@hexbear.net 14 points 3 weeks ago

fair point, I hadn't considered this

[–] Speaker@hexbear.net 4 points 3 weeks ago

Plus we have to update all the meme slop to have a big ❌ over the old domain. Danger lurks around ever corner.