16 ms·

Itch.io Taken Down by Funko

1197 points by spiralganglion 2y ago

ailurooo 2y ago
ugh this kind of stuff just makes me wish DNS was less centralized, even though it's already incredibly uncentralized.. of course it's just all registrars just being a weak point.. as always
- TZubiri 2y ago
  It is as decentralized as you can get. Dns is the entire foundation of decentralization, any more and you get into schizo hyperprivacy protocols.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    It's federated, not decentralized. For decentralized you need something like https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      Are there any well established definitions for these terms as separate?
      - viraptor 2y ago
        Yes? Basically half of them? Some people put federation in decentralised group, some say only distributed is decentralised. In short: centralised = 1 owner/operator, federated = many semi-autonomous operators to choose from, decentralised/distributed = everyone's an operator on the same level. With DNS you still have groups of operators who can tell you what to do and they have the main agencies on top of that. I subscribe to the "it's not really decentralised" view.
        TZubiri 2y ago
        Source: It came to me in a dream.
        viraptor 2y ago
        Alternatively, do a quick search for "decentralised vs federated" yourself. People here don't owe you basic explanations.
        TZubiri 2y ago
        It's not that I am dumb and I am asking for help with info. I'm questioning the existence of this, there is no reliable source because these are not standard terms in any discipline. It's not that you are not giving me source because your time is valuable and I'm dumb. It's because there is no source and these concepts don't have any standard rigorous definition. https://www.google.com/search?q=decentralized+vs+federated https://www.google.com/search?q=decentralized+vs+federated Google gives me trash. These are trash concepts, nothing written by academics or professionals or standard textbooks, or proceedings of magazines or publications. Just blogs and cryptonerds (with different definitions).
  - jstanley 2y ago
    So, it's not as decentralised as you can get, you just personally don't like decentralisation?
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      *Without descending into a madness that decentralizes your very thought process and identity
  - remram 2y ago
    The network is decentralized, but each domain still has a single registrar, making the service you (domain owner) receive very centralized. If that one registrar misbehaves or is unresponsive, you're out of luck.
    - TZubiri 2y ago
      You can switch registrars if you want.
      - remram 2y ago
        This requires cooperation from your current registrar, and involves the registry operator for your TLD which is again a single entity.
        TZubiri 2y ago
        You are consistently objectively wrong on the facts. So your subjective take that dns is decentralized is again wrong. You can choose different TLDs. Don't like VeriSign's .com? Go with a country tld or make your own tld. Also tld are regulated it isn't even an independent private entity. Finally switching registrars does NOT require cooperation of the losing registrar, but of the upstream DNS. The sane take is just don't chose a meme registrar from a bullshit country just because it sounds like something else.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bpye 2y ago
The registrar in question is iwantmyname, so I guess you can add them to your "do not use" list.
- paxys 2y ago
  I feel like it's better to have a "do use" list for something as important as a domain name registrar. - Namecheap - Cloudflare - Route 53 (if on AWS) Any others?
  - Ylpertnodi 2y ago
    I'd prefer a 'do not' list, because 'experience quoted'. Any one of the names you mention could be bought/ new CEO etc tomorrow and start the turdification (tm) slide.
  - bpye 2y ago
    Porkbun seem popular, I do use them for a couple domains. I haven't heard of anything egregious.
    - spiffotron 2y ago
      I use porkbun for all my domains, I’ve never had any issues and they don’t seem to gouge you on price for the smallest things.
  - tucnak 2y ago
    Gandi?
    - jarofgreen 2y ago
      They were sold to another company a year or two ago and now some people are a bit wary
      - NetOpWibby 2y ago
        I've noticed that Gandi has become SUPER expensive as opposed to Hover lately as well. I'm just letting domains expire instead.
rf15 2y ago
Brand Shield and other AI slopware needs to be sued to death for all the damage they cause, including their customer's reputation and bottom line
- kvdveer 2y ago
  Of course the problem is that legally speaking, they don't cause any damage - service providers they target cause the damage. BS have no true authority over these service providers, just the threat of some legal claim. The service providers comply voluntarily as they don't want to spend time checking if the claim is valid.
  - PostOnce 2y ago
    I don't think this is the kind of advice a good lawyer would give. BrandShield, Funko, and iwantmyname all caused serious financial harm through, at a minimum, tortious negligence. I'm not a lawyer, but even a yokel like me knows there's more to this legally than a shrug and "the software did it".
    - RichEO 2y ago
      It’s clear that you’re not a lawyer, because if you were you’d know that there’s no established duty of care between BrandShield and web masters.
      - klez 2y ago
        Clearly I'm not a lawyer either, but isn't accusing someone of doing something that is not true and that can have legal ramification a suable behavior in the US?
        pera 2y ago
        According to this no one has ever been prosecuted just for sending false DMCA takedown notices: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-been-convicted-of-perjury-for-false-dmca-takedown-notices https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-bee... They do mention a case where the defendant acted in bad faith and was found liable for damages though.
KingOfCoders 2y ago
"Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain" One registrar off the list of registrars you wanna use.
- jamil7 2y ago
  They used to be really good, independent registrar from New Zealand but I think got acquired sometime a few years ago and went down hill.
  - BrandiATMuhkuh 2y ago
    Yes that's true. Just yesterday I bought a new domain through them. I'm surprised about their slowness. Again, 2 days ago I sent a request via their web-form and less than 24h later it was resolved. Disclosure: I know the founder (Lenz).
    - MortyWaves 2y ago
      Is Lenz happy with how he operates his company?
      - willvarfar 2y ago
        The GP says they were acquired a few years ago. So the question should be if Lenz is happy with how those who brought his company are now running it? Of course that is not the kind of question that a founder should ever answer candidly on the internet :)
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        BrandiATMuhkuh 2y ago
        Correct. The company was sold many years ago. So I have no idea if he is happy
      - 2y ago
juped 2y ago
Everyone involved in this is terrible except itch.io; it's a shame litigation, the available method for redressing this, is often avoided due to the high expense.
- zo1 2y ago
  As a naive and new adult entering the world, I would have assumed that all you need to do is report this to your police/government, and they'll start a case, preliminarily determine that "Yeah, some sort of fraud happened" and then proceed to start a court case against the accused party so that a jury/judge can determine it's validity. The fact that lawyers and the "lawyer system", in conjunction with prosecutorial offices and the police, has made this expensive and pretty impossible for 99% of people and companies is a huge problem. It basically nullifies the whole point of government as protector of people's rights and enforcer of laws.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    It's very unlikely that anything criminal has happened here, so government is irrelevant. I'm not even sure we're seeing any malevolence, just rank incompetence.
    - runevault 2y ago
      Not Criminal but invalid DMCA takedowns do open you up to lawsuits. I'm curious if both sides (aka the registrar and Funko) are liable or only Funko.
      - masklinn 2y ago
        > invalid DMCA takedowns do open you up to lawsuits Invalid takedowns don’t open you up to anything. The only risk to takedowns is misrepresenting the purported owner but that’s not the case here and the risk would be from Funko not Itch. Much of the reason for DMCA abuse is that beyond the notice being assumed legitimate there is basically no risk to the complaining party until they dispute a counter-notification. Not that this is relevant in this case, as it was not a DMCA takedown. A takedown notice would have been addressed to Itch.
haunter 2y ago
Slight off topic but interesting that the post has similar interaction stats (replies and reposts/quotes) between Twitter and Bluesky except the likes which are 3x higher on the former https://files.catbox.moe/82x7ue.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/82x7ue.jpeg
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  Interesting - most Bluesky accounts, especially those related to gaming, are reporting higher engagement stats on Bluesky, at least relatively if not absolutely.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - MortyWaves 2y ago
      Thanks for making the internet shittier
    - Etheryte 2y ago
      Well of course, your bot is having a wonderful time interacting with other bots. A whole bunch of resources wasted while making everything worse for real humans.
      - tbatchelli 2y ago
        This is a fair description of our future. I’m stealing it
        Etheryte 2y ago
        See also: the Dead Internet Theory [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
    - rsynnott 2y ago
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
Question to lawyers: is there a colorable lawsuit against Funko and/or Brand Shield if itch.io can demonstrate quantifiable lost revenue for those N days of being offline?
- lmm 2y ago
  Given that this was apparently a false (and recklessly so, though that's going to be the hard part) report of fraud/phishing and not a DMCA takedown, yeah that sounds like tortious interference.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
slippy 2y ago
How many other domains were knocked off by this AI reporting? Seems to me that if you make claims that have business repercussions, you need to be suable for fraud and face civil and possible criminal complaints.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Criminal seems like a stretch (at least for this sort of damaging-a-business stuff), but making false claims can absolutely have all sorts of civil consequences.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
leafo 2y ago
I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you: From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of this. Their website, if you care: https://www.brandshield.com/ https://www.brandshield.com/ About 5 or 6 days ago, I received these reports on our host (Linode) and from our registrar (iwantmyname). I expressed my disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded. This evening, I got a downtime alert, and while debugging, I noticed that the domain status had been set to "serverHold" on iwantmyname's domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one. I'm assuming no one on their end "closed" the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days. I've been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so I decided to "escalate" the issue myself on social media.
- rpastuszak 2y ago
  Is it possible/worth to hold them financially accountable for this? (them being IWMN or BrandShield)
- seanthemon 2y ago
  man, this shit is ridiculous.. now we can't even make fan pages? Will you be moving away from this registrar? It seems like it could very easily be abused again.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    After this, everyone will be moving away from this registrar...
sureglymop 2y ago
A similar thing has happened to me before. There is a company with the same name as my surname with a trademark for it. When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the registrar had an automatic process in place that checked for this trademark and took away access of the domain. So far so good. The problem was that the registrar and its support then ghosted me and also never refunded me for the money already paid to lease the domain for a year. Overall it was a bad experienced with bad communication that made me switch registrar (note: this was a different registrar than mentioned here). I think one of the problems is that as more and more individual consumers buy domains, certain legal processes and automation are not ready for that. A good registrar should anticipate that an individual private consumer may not have the legal experience or knowledge to deal with just being hit with something they were never explicitly warned of.
- moralestapia 2y ago
  Trademarks are country specific while domain names are not. Would be interesting to know what happens if they took this to trial (in which country though).
  - lxgr 2y ago
    Of course domain registrations are also subject to national law. .io in particular is (currently) under UK jurisdiction.
    - moralestapia 2y ago
      Hmm ... you're right, I could have worded that differently to help people like you understand the point being made. s/domain names are not/DNS is not/
      - lxgr 2y ago
        I still don't get the point (presumably due to being in the set of "people like me") – could you please elaborate? And I don't get what DNS has to do with any of this; this is a registrar/legal dispute, not a nameserver/technical one.
Animats 2y ago
Hm. So Funko sells merchandise related to the Jurassic World franchise.[1] But, according to Licensing International, Mattel licenses the toy rights to that franchise from Universal Products and Experiences, the merchandise arm of Universal Pictures. [2] Also, Funko sells Disney Princess dolls.[3] Mattel announced a multi-year licensing deal with Disney to license the doll rights for Disney Princess dolls. “The courage and compassion found throughout our Disney Princess and Frozen stories and characters continue to inspire fans around the globe,” said Stephanie Young, President of Disney Consumer Products, Games and Publishing. “By furthering our longstanding relationship with Mattel, we look forward to expanding the worlds of Disney Princess and Frozen, introducing an innovative new era of these beloved franchises through captivating products and play opportunities.” Might be useful to send letters to Disney's and Mattel's legal departments. Mattel paid a lot of money for that Disney license. Disney is very protective of those licenses. Mattel lost the Disney license to Hasbro for a few years due to overproduction of low quality dolls. I'm surprised to see Funko selling low-quality Disney dolls. They degrade a Disney brand. [1] https://funko.com/pop-tyrannosaurus-rex-fossil/80225.html https://funko.com/pop-tyrannosaurus-rex-fossil/80225.html [2] https://licensinginternational.org/news/mattel-and-universal-renew-jurassic-world-licensing-partnership/ https://licensinginternational.org/news/mattel-and-universal... [3] https://funko.com/fandoms/animation-cartoons/disney-princess/ https://funko.com/fandoms/animation-cartoons/disney-princess... [4] https://corporate.mattel.com/news/mattel-and-disney-announce-multi-year-global-licensing-agreement-for-disney-princess-and-disney-frozen-franchises https://corporate.mattel.com/news/mattel-and-disney-announce...
- Freak_NL 2y ago
  Why on earth would you send letters? These are all huge corporations with sizeable legal departments. They either know or they should, and most importantly, are paid to handle this. Moreover, you're not likely to be heard or understood by the first line of customer care there, even if this was something they weren't aware of (quite unlikely) but wished they were. It's a waste of time, and something even the biggest altruist would find hard to defend as a sensible effort. Besides, Disney is perfectly capable of degrading their own brand.
  - 2y ago
timvdalen 2y ago
I got a "cease and desist" type email from one of these (Tracer AI) last week. Really annoying, but I guess spam is a prime LLM use case...
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Spam is, when it comes to it, basically the only proven LLM usecase at this point. Everything else is all a bit 'jam tomorrow', "doesn't really work now, but it'll be magic soon, we promise!", but it has very much revolutionised the spam industry.
nicoloren 2y ago
I've experienced the same thing: a YouTube channel deleted without any explanation (the email from Google mentioned spam, even though I filmed all the videos myself), Facebook preventing me from sharing posts from a website (without any explanation), and of course, domain names that get deindexed from Google without any reason (no message in Google Search Console). I believe we've reached a point where any activity on the web can vanish overnight due to an AI or an algorithm making decisions based on obscure criteria.
- subarctic 2y ago
  I mean at least those are walled garden platforms where this sort of thing we've come to expect. An independent website as big as itch.io going down because of a bogus complaint is a big surprise
  - Aachen 2y ago
    That's what I thought. Last week, two of my domains were frozen by the TLD owner without notice, and they'd take them offline altogether in 7 days if I didn't supply some paperwork to my registrar I've had these domains for ten years, now all of a sudden this is super urgent and if I'm on holiday that'd be a real shame I guess So I contact the registrar and a link to the relevant legislation was sufficient to send them a perfectly agreeably censored version of my identity document (removing just irrelevant information they can't use or verify anyway), but apparently all they do is forward it to support@afnic.fr and not actually mark the domain holder as verified. So AFNIC, predictably, rejects it because GDPR doesn't exist in France I saw no other choice but to send everything into AFNIC's email inbox / support system, which famously never get leaked and they assured me was "highly" secured when I asked to at least remove it after verification With just 7 days' notice and half of that going to the distraction of a registrar, there's also no way to figure out what's even going on or have any sort of conversation. They hold all the cards and you jump when they say hop I'm considering my options for any TLDs owned by AFNIC... evidently .io isn't better, but how to know who is
    - nicoloren 2y ago
jerrre 2y ago
[flagged]
- Dansvidania 2y ago
  I am pretty disturbed by the same as well. I am hoping it's all internet machismo. Not that it makes is any better..
  - CaptainFever 2y ago
    Same. It's a normalization of murder as a way to seek redress.
    - seabass-labrax 2y ago
      I feel that it's been coming for a while though - the first time I noticed this sentiment was when a businessman drowned after his luxury yacht sank in in a storm[1], and there were comments on social media celebrating the event. Whatever you think of the individual or millionaires in general, I wouldn't wish that fate on my worst enemy. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/04/mike-lynch-died-from-drowning-bayesian-yacht-inquest-hears https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/04/mike-lynch-d...
    - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
      You've seen death threats on Bluesky aimed at the CEO over this?
      - nicwest 2y ago
        https://bsky.app/profile/karmn.bsky.social/post/3lcuc4dqudc24 https://bsky.app/profile/karmn.bsky.social/post/3lcuc4dqudc2... It's hard for me to read this any other way.
        oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        I saw that too. While the jury's out, this is clearly not an obvious "call to arms" or any kind of threat. It may be read that way, so I'd prefer not to have it, but if even stating the name of a CEO is off the table, then that's far too much 'protection', IMO. But, yeah, "fix this" isn't great wording to be using.
edent 2y ago
[flagged]
- SuperHeavy256 2y ago
  I appreciate you trying to be an unbiased voice of reason in this time.
- N-Krause 2y ago
  It seems like the owner of the domain received notice from the registrar 6 days ago and immediately took action by removing the content referenced in the trademark claim and notifying the registrar. But they got no response and instead the domain went down today.
- javawizard 2y ago
  You probably want to read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364033 I've never heard of itch.io before but from what I can tell: - Itch.io is a platform where people unaffiliated with itch.io can create pages and sell video games - An itch.io user created a game that used Funko's brand without authorization - Itch.io (correctly) removed that page when they were made aware of that by their registrar and server host, then responded to both letting them know they'd taken care of it - The server host (Linode) said that was great and closed the issue. The registrar (iwantmyname) did not respond, then a few days later yanked the domain. This is exactly the sort of thing the DMCA exists for (assuming itch.io is located in the United States) and it's exactly why the safe harbor provisions exist. It's like if someone posted a copyright-infringing picture to Facebook and Facebook's registrar responded by taking down the entirety of facebook.com. So no, this is not on itch.io's shoulders, this is on iwantmyname's (for disabling itch.io's domain even after being made aware of the circumstances) and Brand Shield (for not submitting a complaint to itch.io first and waiting to see if they'd take down the infringing user's content before escalating to itch.io's ISP and server host).
  - edent 2y ago
    I have read that. Itch Corp might be in the USA - but their registrar is in New Zealand. That seems like a poor strategic choice for both customer service reasons and legal compatibility reasons. I never said this was Itch's fault. But I do wonder how many takedown requests iwantmyname received, and whether that caused them to drop their customer. E.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22tagged+marvel%22+site%3Aitch.io&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22tagged+marvel%22+site%3Aitch.io...
leonard-somero 2y ago
I am Leonard Somero, I run verysoftwares.itch.io. I have over 300 followers and a game with 20k+ plays that has been repeatedly featured on the front page. This certainly changed my morning routine! I am glad to hear that the reason wasn't me deleting my Twitter from my page. My first panic reaction was thinking it was me who's caused it, due to some kind of ad revenue conflict. Ever seen the movie Summer Wars? I felt like the protagonist for a moment there, but glad it turns out it was just some 2020s AI nonsense. Either way, there's surely an engineer somewhere who's very busy right now.
- Shank 2y ago
  > Ever seen the movie Summer Wars? I felt like the protagonist for a moment there, but glad it turns out it was just some 2020s AI nonsense. Love Machine was a rouge AI in Summer Wars, though.
  - gessha 2y ago
    Rouge or rogue :D
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
disjunct 2y ago
Funko as a brand exists entirely on derivative content, albeit licensed. Seems like exactly the sort of brand that would trip auto-DMCA software.
- YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
  It also works out pretty well for them, as they’re basically /the/ symbol of soulless commercialism, sanding down everything distinctive about characters and producing a cuboid of concentrated Brand. Anyone who voluntarily looks at that and decides they want to be a part of it is already on board with the corporate hellscape, so nothing they do could possibly harm their reputation among their customers.
totetsu 2y ago
Is it possible for itch.io to follow the advice of putting user generated content onto a seperate domain from their main one?
- gsck 2y ago
  The entire site is user generated content
HelloNurse 2y ago
Congratulation for the return of the site!
mrdoe 2y ago
[flagged]
- HelloUsername 2y ago
  Here you go? https://x.com/itchio/status/1866017758040993829 https://x.com/itchio/status/1866017758040993829
- Duralias 2y ago
  It is the same info, you don't need to be logged in to see it (including comments) and can directly verify that it is someone with control over the domain who controls the account. I think that sounds like a good source.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  I mean, with Bluesky you can see the replies; with Twitter if you're not logged in you either get _just_ the post, or you get an error message, depending on phase of the moon. For this sort of thing, Bluesky's clearly more user-friendly.
cherryteastain 2y ago
How are all these "DMCA Ignored" domain registrars? Do they actually send all DMCA requests to /dev/null? Sounds like using one of those would have "fixed" the problem here.
- qingcharles 2y ago
  I used to host my TV torrent tracker with one of these that would ignore literally everything. Was expensive, but was factored into the costs.
TophWells 2y ago
It's back up now!
CM30 2y ago
It should be illegal for any company to rely on AI or automation to handle legal risks, especially without any human driven support to fall back on. The fact we're handling over things this serious to unreliable and poorly configured systems feels like absolute insanity to me. Also, why is the domain registrar even being contacted here? I thought the general idea was that you'd first contact the site owner and wait for a response, and if there's no response in a certain amount of time, then you might contact the registrar or something. No one should be going over the heads of website owners and creators for matters like this, especially not as their first resort. In a logical world, they'd contact Itch.io and Itch.io would take down the page (which they did), and that would be it. No need to involve the registrar at all in a case like this one.
- lxgr 2y ago
  I don't think it needs to be illegal – it should be enough to just hold companies responsible for the consequences, just like they are for using any other kind of technical system without appropriate supervision.
teddyh 2y ago
Like I frequently¹ advise²: Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address. Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are not in our target market. 1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499> 2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507784>
- remram 2y ago
  How do you monitor for when they inevitably get acquired?
  - teddyh 2y ago
    That’s a very SV view on things; i.e. that small companies inevitably get acquired. Most small companies don’t actually get acquired, and are not looking to be acquired. The simple answer is: Choose a registrar without significant external investors.
ivanjermakov 2y ago
Since when it is registrar responsibility to take down domains based on third-party reports? I would think to do it registrar needs at least a warrant from officials, and not without a notice of domain owner.
Jdfmiller 2y ago
I sent a request to the registrar, and they emailed with this response. They're claiming it wasn't their fault. -------- Your request has been updated. To add additional comments, reply to this email. 9 Dec 2024, 10:57 UTC Hello and thank you for your message. The domain name was already reinstated earlier today after the registrant finally responded to our notice and took appropriate action to resolve the issue
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  The registrant is itch.io. Sounds like victim blaming.
Beijinger 2y ago
There are some recommendations of registrars here in the chat. Let me recommend two: 1. internet.bs No Bullshit Domains. I am using them since 10 years, and I am very happy. Email is comparatively expensive, but you can buy this separately from infomaniak.com for 18 EURO a year. 2. If you need country TLDs, this may be a good option: inwx.com
josefritzishere 2y ago
It may ultimately be lost revenue and lawsuits that protect us from the tidal wave of AI garbage.
6bb32646d83d 2y ago
One of my .xyz domain was taken down because one it somehow ended up on a single spam list as Phishing (it was not hosting any phishing, and all the code is actually open source). I never was able to get it cleared. It's crazy the power that those spam list can have and they care very little about false positives
drusepth 2y ago
We actually had almost the exact same thing happen to Notebook.ai last month: - automated notice of trademark infringement from some posted user content, accusing us of "fraud and phishing" (filed by a third party on behalf of Meta) - that user content was immediately deleted upon receiving the notice - exactly a week later, our host (Heroku) banned our account with a generic no-reason "Your account has been banned." Total downtime of about 24 hours until it was resolved; luckily, Heroku's support simply unbanned the account whenever I reached out to ask why we were banned. Migrating to another host wouldn't have taken much longer, but would have been a pain. Goes to show layering a couple automated processes together can have pretty devastating false-positives. I'm glad there was a human in the loop at Heroku I could reach to get things sorted out relatively quickly; also glad to see Itch.io is back up and got it sorted out relatively quickly as well.
StuntPope 2y ago
easyDNS here. Our ears were burning as multiple people have mentioned us in this thread. If you want to get with a registrar who is actually clueful about takedowns, we can help you out.
jamessbutler322 2y ago
[flagged]
tekknik 2y ago
who exactly is taking bluesky seriously? what’s their moderation policy?
- przmk 2y ago
  What does that have to do with the official itch account posting there? How would your seemingly personal beef with Bluesky impact the credibility of that?
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Some followup/developments (Dec 9th): Itch.io: "This is not a joke, Funko just called my mom" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371481

1197 points by spiralganglion 2y ago

ugh this kind of stuff just makes me wish DNS was less centralized, even though it's already incredibly uncentralized.. of course it's just all registrars just being a weak point.. as always

TZubiri 2y ago
It is as decentralized as you can get. Dns is the entire foundation of decentralization, any more and you get into schizo hyperprivacy protocols.
- viraptor 2y ago
  It's federated, not decentralized. For decentralized you need something like https://ens.domains/ https://ens.domains/
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    Are there any well established definitions for these terms as separate?
    - viraptor 2y ago
      Yes? Basically half of them? Some people put federation in decentralised group, some say only distributed is decentralised. In short: centralised = 1 owner/operator, federated = many semi-autonomous operators to choose from, decentralised/distributed = everyone's an operator on the same level. With DNS you still have groups of operators who can tell you what to do and they have the main agencies on top of that. I subscribe to the "it's not really decentralised" view.
      - TZubiri 2y ago
        Source: It came to me in a dream.
        viraptor 2y ago
        Alternatively, do a quick search for "decentralised vs federated" yourself. People here don't owe you basic explanations.
        TZubiri 2y ago
        It's not that I am dumb and I am asking for help with info. I'm questioning the existence of this, there is no reliable source because these are not standard terms in any discipline. It's not that you are not giving me source because your time is valuable and I'm dumb. It's because there is no source and these concepts don't have any standard rigorous definition. https://www.google.com/search?q=decentralized+vs+federated https://www.google.com/search?q=decentralized+vs+federated Google gives me trash. These are trash concepts, nothing written by academics or professionals or standard textbooks, or proceedings of magazines or publications. Just blogs and cryptonerds (with different definitions).
- jstanley 2y ago
  So, it's not as decentralised as you can get, you just personally don't like decentralisation?
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    *Without descending into a madness that decentralizes your very thought process and identity
- remram 2y ago
  The network is decentralized, but each domain still has a single registrar, making the service you (domain owner) receive very centralized. If that one registrar misbehaves or is unresponsive, you're out of luck.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    You can switch registrars if you want.
    - remram 2y ago
      This requires cooperation from your current registrar, and involves the registry operator for your TLD which is again a single entity.
      - TZubiri 2y ago
        You are consistently objectively wrong on the facts. So your subjective take that dns is decentralized is again wrong. You can choose different TLDs. Don't like VeriSign's .com? Go with a country tld or make your own tld. Also tld are regulated it isn't even an independent private entity. Finally switching registrars does NOT require cooperation of the losing registrar, but of the upstream DNS. The sane take is just don't chose a meme registrar from a bullshit country just because it sounds like something else.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bpye 2y ago

The registrar in question is iwantmyname, so I guess you can add them to your "do not use" list.

paxys 2y ago
I feel like it's better to have a "do use" list for something as important as a domain name registrar. - Namecheap - Cloudflare - Route 53 (if on AWS) Any others?
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  I'd prefer a 'do not' list, because 'experience quoted'. Any one of the names you mention could be bought/ new CEO etc tomorrow and start the turdification (tm) slide.
- bpye 2y ago
  Porkbun seem popular, I do use them for a couple domains. I haven't heard of anything egregious.
  - spiffotron 2y ago
    I use porkbun for all my domains, I’ve never had any issues and they don’t seem to gouge you on price for the smallest things.
- tucnak 2y ago
  Gandi?
  - jarofgreen 2y ago
    They were sold to another company a year or two ago and now some people are a bit wary
    - NetOpWibby 2y ago
      I've noticed that Gandi has become SUPER expensive as opposed to Hover lately as well. I'm just letting domains expire instead.

rf15 2y ago

Brand Shield and other AI slopware needs to be sued to death for all the damage they cause, including their customer's reputation and bottom line

kvdveer 2y ago
Of course the problem is that legally speaking, they don't cause any damage - service providers they target cause the damage. BS have no true authority over these service providers, just the threat of some legal claim. The service providers comply voluntarily as they don't want to spend time checking if the claim is valid.
- PostOnce 2y ago
  I don't think this is the kind of advice a good lawyer would give. BrandShield, Funko, and iwantmyname all caused serious financial harm through, at a minimum, tortious negligence. I'm not a lawyer, but even a yokel like me knows there's more to this legally than a shrug and "the software did it".
  - RichEO 2y ago
    It’s clear that you’re not a lawyer, because if you were you’d know that there’s no established duty of care between BrandShield and web masters.
    - klez 2y ago
      Clearly I'm not a lawyer either, but isn't accusing someone of doing something that is not true and that can have legal ramification a suable behavior in the US?
      - pera 2y ago
        According to this no one has ever been prosecuted just for sending false DMCA takedown notices: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-been-convicted-of-perjury-for-false-dmca-takedown-notices https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-bee... They do mention a case where the defendant acted in bad faith and was found liable for damages though.

KingOfCoders 2y ago

"Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain" One registrar off the list of registrars you wanna use.

jamil7 2y ago
They used to be really good, independent registrar from New Zealand but I think got acquired sometime a few years ago and went down hill.
- BrandiATMuhkuh 2y ago
  Yes that's true. Just yesterday I bought a new domain through them. I'm surprised about their slowness. Again, 2 days ago I sent a request via their web-form and less than 24h later it was resolved. Disclosure: I know the founder (Lenz).
  - MortyWaves 2y ago
    Is Lenz happy with how he operates his company?
    - willvarfar 2y ago
      The GP says they were acquired a few years ago. So the question should be if Lenz is happy with how those who brought his company are now running it? Of course that is not the kind of question that a founder should ever answer candidly on the internet :)
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - BrandiATMuhkuh 2y ago
        Correct. The company was sold many years ago. So I have no idea if he is happy
    - 2y ago

juped 2y ago

Everyone involved in this is terrible except itch.io; it's a shame litigation, the available method for redressing this, is often avoided due to the high expense.

zo1 2y ago
As a naive and new adult entering the world, I would have assumed that all you need to do is report this to your police/government, and they'll start a case, preliminarily determine that "Yeah, some sort of fraud happened" and then proceed to start a court case against the accused party so that a jury/judge can determine it's validity. The fact that lawyers and the "lawyer system", in conjunction with prosecutorial offices and the police, has made this expensive and pretty impossible for 99% of people and companies is a huge problem. It basically nullifies the whole point of government as protector of people's rights and enforcer of laws.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  It's very unlikely that anything criminal has happened here, so government is irrelevant. I'm not even sure we're seeing any malevolence, just rank incompetence.
  - runevault 2y ago
    Not Criminal but invalid DMCA takedowns do open you up to lawsuits. I'm curious if both sides (aka the registrar and Funko) are liable or only Funko.
    - masklinn 2y ago
      > invalid DMCA takedowns do open you up to lawsuits Invalid takedowns don’t open you up to anything. The only risk to takedowns is misrepresenting the purported owner but that’s not the case here and the risk would be from Funko not Itch. Much of the reason for DMCA abuse is that beyond the notice being assumed legitimate there is basically no risk to the complaining party until they dispute a counter-notification. Not that this is relevant in this case, as it was not a DMCA takedown. A takedown notice would have been addressed to Itch.

haunter 2y ago

Slight off topic but interesting that the post has similar interaction stats (replies and reposts/quotes) between Twitter and Bluesky except the likes which are 3x higher on the former https://files.catbox.moe/82x7ue.jpeg https://files.catbox.moe/82x7ue.jpeg

oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
Interesting - most Bluesky accounts, especially those related to gaming, are reporting higher engagement stats on Bluesky, at least relatively if not absolutely.
- blitzar 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - MortyWaves 2y ago
    Thanks for making the internet shittier
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    Well of course, your bot is having a wonderful time interacting with other bots. A whole bunch of resources wasted while making everything worse for real humans.
    - tbatchelli 2y ago
      This is a fair description of our future. I’m stealing it
      - Etheryte 2y ago
        See also: the Dead Internet Theory [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
  - rsynnott 2y ago

CobrastanJorji 2y ago

Question to lawyers: is there a colorable lawsuit against Funko and/or Brand Shield if itch.io can demonstrate quantifiable lost revenue for those N days of being offline?

lmm 2y ago
Given that this was apparently a false (and recklessly so, though that's going to be the hard part) report of fraud/phishing and not a DMCA takedown, yeah that sounds like tortious interference.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

slippy 2y ago

How many other domains were knocked off by this AI reporting? Seems to me that if you make claims that have business repercussions, you need to be suable for fraud and face civil and possible criminal complaints.

rsynnott 2y ago
Criminal seems like a stretch (at least for this sort of damaging-a-business stuff), but making false claims can absolutely have all sorts of civil consequences.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

leafo 2y ago

I'm the one running itch.io, so here's some more context for you: From what I can tell, some person made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game. The BrandShield software is probably instructed to eradicate all "unauthorized" use of their trademark, so they sent reports independently to our host and registrar claiming there was "fraud and phishing" going on, likely to cause escalation instead of doing the expected DMCA/cease-and-desist. Because of this, I honestly think they're the malicious actor in all of this. Their website, if you care: https://www.brandshield.com/ https://www.brandshield.com/ About 5 or 6 days ago, I received these reports on our host (Linode) and from our registrar (iwantmyname). I expressed my disappointment in my responses to both of them but told them I had removed the page and disabled the account. Linode confirmed and closed the case. iwantmyname never responded. This evening, I got a downtime alert, and while debugging, I noticed that the domain status had been set to "serverHold" on iwantmyname's domain panel. We have no other abuse reports from iwantmyname other than this one. I'm assuming no one on their end "closed" the ticket, so it went into an automatic system to disable the domain after some number of days. I've been trying to get in touch with them via their abuse and support emails, but no response likely due to the time of day, so I decided to "escalate" the issue myself on social media.

rpastuszak 2y ago
Is it possible/worth to hold them financially accountable for this? (them being IWMN or BrandShield)
seanthemon 2y ago
man, this shit is ridiculous.. now we can't even make fan pages? Will you be moving away from this registrar? It seems like it could very easily be abused again.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  After this, everyone will be moving away from this registrar...

sureglymop 2y ago

A similar thing has happened to me before. There is a company with the same name as my surname with a trademark for it. When I registered a domain with my surname in it, the registrar had an automatic process in place that checked for this trademark and took away access of the domain. So far so good. The problem was that the registrar and its support then ghosted me and also never refunded me for the money already paid to lease the domain for a year. Overall it was a bad experienced with bad communication that made me switch registrar (note: this was a different registrar than mentioned here). I think one of the problems is that as more and more individual consumers buy domains, certain legal processes and automation are not ready for that. A good registrar should anticipate that an individual private consumer may not have the legal experience or knowledge to deal with just being hit with something they were never explicitly warned of.

moralestapia 2y ago
Trademarks are country specific while domain names are not. Would be interesting to know what happens if they took this to trial (in which country though).
- lxgr 2y ago
  Of course domain registrations are also subject to national law. .io in particular is (currently) under UK jurisdiction.
  - moralestapia 2y ago
    Hmm ... you're right, I could have worded that differently to help people like you understand the point being made. s/domain names are not/DNS is not/
    - lxgr 2y ago
      I still don't get the point (presumably due to being in the set of "people like me") – could you please elaborate? And I don't get what DNS has to do with any of this; this is a registrar/legal dispute, not a nameserver/technical one.

Animats 2y ago

Hm. So Funko sells merchandise related to the Jurassic World franchise.[1] But, according to Licensing International, Mattel licenses the toy rights to that franchise from Universal Products and Experiences, the merchandise arm of Universal Pictures. [2] Also, Funko sells Disney Princess dolls.[3] Mattel announced a multi-year licensing deal with Disney to license the doll rights for Disney Princess dolls. “The courage and compassion found throughout our Disney Princess and Frozen stories and characters continue to inspire fans around the globe,” said Stephanie Young, President of Disney Consumer Products, Games and Publishing. “By furthering our longstanding relationship with Mattel, we look forward to expanding the worlds of Disney Princess and Frozen, introducing an innovative new era of these beloved franchises through captivating products and play opportunities.” Might be useful to send letters to Disney's and Mattel's legal departments. Mattel paid a lot of money for that Disney license. Disney is very protective of those licenses. Mattel lost the Disney license to Hasbro for a few years due to overproduction of low quality dolls. I'm surprised to see Funko selling low-quality Disney dolls. They degrade a Disney brand. [1] https://funko.com/pop-tyrannosaurus-rex-fossil/80225.html https://funko.com/pop-tyrannosaurus-rex-fossil/80225.html [2] https://licensinginternational.org/news/mattel-and-universal-renew-jurassic-world-licensing-partnership/ https://licensinginternational.org/news/mattel-and-universal... [3] https://funko.com/fandoms/animation-cartoons/disney-princess/ https://funko.com/fandoms/animation-cartoons/disney-princess... [4] https://corporate.mattel.com/news/mattel-and-disney-announce-multi-year-global-licensing-agreement-for-disney-princess-and-disney-frozen-franchises https://corporate.mattel.com/news/mattel-and-disney-announce...

Freak_NL 2y ago
Why on earth would you send letters? These are all huge corporations with sizeable legal departments. They either know or they should, and most importantly, are paid to handle this. Moreover, you're not likely to be heard or understood by the first line of customer care there, even if this was something they weren't aware of (quite unlikely) but wished they were. It's a waste of time, and something even the biggest altruist would find hard to defend as a sensible effort. Besides, Disney is perfectly capable of degrading their own brand.
- 2y ago

timvdalen 2y ago

I got a "cease and desist" type email from one of these (Tracer AI) last week. Really annoying, but I guess spam is a prime LLM use case...

rsynnott 2y ago
Spam is, when it comes to it, basically the only proven LLM usecase at this point. Everything else is all a bit 'jam tomorrow', "doesn't really work now, but it'll be magic soon, we promise!", but it has very much revolutionised the spam industry.

nicoloren 2y ago

I've experienced the same thing: a YouTube channel deleted without any explanation (the email from Google mentioned spam, even though I filmed all the videos myself), Facebook preventing me from sharing posts from a website (without any explanation), and of course, domain names that get deindexed from Google without any reason (no message in Google Search Console). I believe we've reached a point where any activity on the web can vanish overnight due to an AI or an algorithm making decisions based on obscure criteria.

subarctic 2y ago
I mean at least those are walled garden platforms where this sort of thing we've come to expect. An independent website as big as itch.io going down because of a bogus complaint is a big surprise
- Aachen 2y ago
  That's what I thought. Last week, two of my domains were frozen by the TLD owner without notice, and they'd take them offline altogether in 7 days if I didn't supply some paperwork to my registrar I've had these domains for ten years, now all of a sudden this is super urgent and if I'm on holiday that'd be a real shame I guess So I contact the registrar and a link to the relevant legislation was sufficient to send them a perfectly agreeably censored version of my identity document (removing just irrelevant information they can't use or verify anyway), but apparently all they do is forward it to support@afnic.fr and not actually mark the domain holder as verified. So AFNIC, predictably, rejects it because GDPR doesn't exist in France I saw no other choice but to send everything into AFNIC's email inbox / support system, which famously never get leaked and they assured me was "highly" secured when I asked to at least remove it after verification With just 7 days' notice and half of that going to the distraction of a registrar, there's also no way to figure out what's even going on or have any sort of conversation. They hold all the cards and you jump when they say hop I'm considering my options for any TLDs owned by AFNIC... evidently .io isn't better, but how to know who is
  - nicoloren 2y ago

jerrre 2y ago

[flagged]

Dansvidania 2y ago
I am pretty disturbed by the same as well. I am hoping it's all internet machismo. Not that it makes is any better..
- CaptainFever 2y ago
  Same. It's a normalization of murder as a way to seek redress.
  - seabass-labrax 2y ago
    I feel that it's been coming for a while though - the first time I noticed this sentiment was when a businessman drowned after his luxury yacht sank in in a storm[1], and there were comments on social media celebrating the event. Whatever you think of the individual or millionaires in general, I wouldn't wish that fate on my worst enemy. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/04/mike-lynch-died-from-drowning-bayesian-yacht-inquest-hears https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/oct/04/mike-lynch-d...
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    You've seen death threats on Bluesky aimed at the CEO over this?
    - nicwest 2y ago
      https://bsky.app/profile/karmn.bsky.social/post/3lcuc4dqudc24 https://bsky.app/profile/karmn.bsky.social/post/3lcuc4dqudc2... It's hard for me to read this any other way.
      - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        I saw that too. While the jury's out, this is clearly not an obvious "call to arms" or any kind of threat. It may be read that way, so I'd prefer not to have it, but if even stating the name of a CEO is off the table, then that's far too much 'protection', IMO. But, yeah, "fix this" isn't great wording to be using.

edent 2y ago

[flagged]

SuperHeavy256 2y ago
I appreciate you trying to be an unbiased voice of reason in this time.
N-Krause 2y ago
It seems like the owner of the domain received notice from the registrar 6 days ago and immediately took action by removing the content referenced in the trademark claim and notifying the registrar. But they got no response and instead the domain went down today.
javawizard 2y ago
You probably want to read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42364033 I've never heard of itch.io before but from what I can tell: - Itch.io is a platform where people unaffiliated with itch.io can create pages and sell video games - An itch.io user created a game that used Funko's brand without authorization - Itch.io (correctly) removed that page when they were made aware of that by their registrar and server host, then responded to both letting them know they'd taken care of it - The server host (Linode) said that was great and closed the issue. The registrar (iwantmyname) did not respond, then a few days later yanked the domain. This is exactly the sort of thing the DMCA exists for (assuming itch.io is located in the United States) and it's exactly why the safe harbor provisions exist. It's like if someone posted a copyright-infringing picture to Facebook and Facebook's registrar responded by taking down the entirety of facebook.com. So no, this is not on itch.io's shoulders, this is on iwantmyname's (for disabling itch.io's domain even after being made aware of the circumstances) and Brand Shield (for not submitting a complaint to itch.io first and waiting to see if they'd take down the infringing user's content before escalating to itch.io's ISP and server host).
- edent 2y ago
  I have read that. Itch Corp might be in the USA - but their registrar is in New Zealand. That seems like a poor strategic choice for both customer service reasons and legal compatibility reasons. I never said this was Itch's fault. But I do wonder how many takedown requests iwantmyname received, and whether that caused them to drop their customer. E.g. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22tagged+marvel%22+site%3Aitch.io&t=ffab&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22tagged+marvel%22+site%3Aitch.io...

leonard-somero 2y ago

I am Leonard Somero, I run verysoftwares.itch.io. I have over 300 followers and a game with 20k+ plays that has been repeatedly featured on the front page. This certainly changed my morning routine! I am glad to hear that the reason wasn't me deleting my Twitter from my page. My first panic reaction was thinking it was me who's caused it, due to some kind of ad revenue conflict. Ever seen the movie Summer Wars? I felt like the protagonist for a moment there, but glad it turns out it was just some 2020s AI nonsense. Either way, there's surely an engineer somewhere who's very busy right now.

Shank 2y ago
> Ever seen the movie Summer Wars? I felt like the protagonist for a moment there, but glad it turns out it was just some 2020s AI nonsense. Love Machine was a rouge AI in Summer Wars, though.
- gessha 2y ago
  Rouge or rogue :D

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

disjunct 2y ago

Funko as a brand exists entirely on derivative content, albeit licensed. Seems like exactly the sort of brand that would trip auto-DMCA software.

YurgenJurgensen 2y ago
It also works out pretty well for them, as they’re basically /the/ symbol of soulless commercialism, sanding down everything distinctive about characters and producing a cuboid of concentrated Brand. Anyone who voluntarily looks at that and decides they want to be a part of it is already on board with the corporate hellscape, so nothing they do could possibly harm their reputation among their customers.

totetsu 2y ago

Is it possible for itch.io to follow the advice of putting user generated content onto a seperate domain from their main one?

gsck 2y ago
The entire site is user generated content

HelloNurse 2y ago

Congratulation for the return of the site!

mrdoe 2y ago

[flagged]

HelloUsername 2y ago
Here you go? https://x.com/itchio/status/1866017758040993829 https://x.com/itchio/status/1866017758040993829
Duralias 2y ago
It is the same info, you don't need to be logged in to see it (including comments) and can directly verify that it is someone with control over the domain who controls the account. I think that sounds like a good source.
rsynnott 2y ago
I mean, with Bluesky you can see the replies; with Twitter if you're not logged in you either get _just_ the post, or you get an error message, depending on phase of the moon. For this sort of thing, Bluesky's clearly more user-friendly.

cherryteastain 2y ago

How are all these "DMCA Ignored" domain registrars? Do they actually send all DMCA requests to /dev/null? Sounds like using one of those would have "fixed" the problem here.

qingcharles 2y ago
I used to host my TV torrent tracker with one of these that would ignore literally everything. Was expensive, but was factored into the costs.

TophWells 2y ago

It's back up now!

CM30 2y ago

It should be illegal for any company to rely on AI or automation to handle legal risks, especially without any human driven support to fall back on. The fact we're handling over things this serious to unreliable and poorly configured systems feels like absolute insanity to me. Also, why is the domain registrar even being contacted here? I thought the general idea was that you'd first contact the site owner and wait for a response, and if there's no response in a certain amount of time, then you might contact the registrar or something. No one should be going over the heads of website owners and creators for matters like this, especially not as their first resort. In a logical world, they'd contact Itch.io and Itch.io would take down the page (which they did), and that would be it. No need to involve the registrar at all in a case like this one.

lxgr 2y ago
I don't think it needs to be illegal – it should be enough to just hold companies responsible for the consequences, just like they are for using any other kind of technical system without appropriate supervision.

teddyh 2y ago

Like I frequently¹ advise²: Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address. Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are not in our target market. 1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32095499> 2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32507784>

remram 2y ago
How do you monitor for when they inevitably get acquired?
- teddyh 2y ago
  That’s a very SV view on things; i.e. that small companies inevitably get acquired. Most small companies don’t actually get acquired, and are not looking to be acquired. The simple answer is: Choose a registrar without significant external investors.

ivanjermakov 2y ago

Since when it is registrar responsibility to take down domains based on third-party reports? I would think to do it registrar needs at least a warrant from officials, and not without a notice of domain owner.

Jdfmiller 2y ago

I sent a request to the registrar, and they emailed with this response. They're claiming it wasn't their fault. -------- Your request has been updated. To add additional comments, reply to this email. 9 Dec 2024, 10:57 UTC Hello and thank you for your message. The domain name was already reinstated earlier today after the registrant finally responded to our notice and took appropriate action to resolve the issue

KerrAvon 2y ago
The registrant is itch.io. Sounds like victim blaming.

Beijinger 2y ago

There are some recommendations of registrars here in the chat. Let me recommend two: 1. internet.bs No Bullshit Domains. I am using them since 10 years, and I am very happy. Email is comparatively expensive, but you can buy this separately from infomaniak.com for 18 EURO a year. 2. If you need country TLDs, this may be a good option: inwx.com

josefritzishere 2y ago

It may ultimately be lost revenue and lawsuits that protect us from the tidal wave of AI garbage.

6bb32646d83d 2y ago

One of my .xyz domain was taken down because one it somehow ended up on a single spam list as Phishing (it was not hosting any phishing, and all the code is actually open source). I never was able to get it cleared. It's crazy the power that those spam list can have and they care very little about false positives

drusepth 2y ago

We actually had almost the exact same thing happen to Notebook.ai last month: - automated notice of trademark infringement from some posted user content, accusing us of "fraud and phishing" (filed by a third party on behalf of Meta) - that user content was immediately deleted upon receiving the notice - exactly a week later, our host (Heroku) banned our account with a generic no-reason "Your account has been banned." Total downtime of about 24 hours until it was resolved; luckily, Heroku's support simply unbanned the account whenever I reached out to ask why we were banned. Migrating to another host wouldn't have taken much longer, but would have been a pain. Goes to show layering a couple automated processes together can have pretty devastating false-positives. I'm glad there was a human in the loop at Heroku I could reach to get things sorted out relatively quickly; also glad to see Itch.io is back up and got it sorted out relatively quickly as well.

StuntPope 2y ago

easyDNS here. Our ears were burning as multiple people have mentioned us in this thread. If you want to get with a registrar who is actually clueful about takedowns, we can help you out.

jamessbutler322 2y ago

[flagged]

tekknik 2y ago

who exactly is taking bluesky seriously? what’s their moderation policy?

przmk 2y ago
What does that have to do with the official itch account posting there? How would your seemingly personal beef with Bluesky impact the credibility of that?

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Some followup/developments (Dec 9th): Itch.io: "This is not a joke, Funko just called my mom" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371481