Taliban Shuts Down 'queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance

thejevans@lemmy.ml to Technology@lemmy.world – 213 points –
Taliban Shuts Down 'queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance
404media.co

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11820406

Do not use 2 letter country TLDs!

17

That's some perfect irony. A queer instance using the Afghanistan domain.

Yeah but now it's owned by the Taliban meaning the queer is coming from inside the house.

Gottem.

Always has been. Bacha bazi is still common in Afghanistan.

The irony of this being crossposted from ML.

Oh I'm fully aware haha, and the article is on a CO site. At the time I made my account, lemmy.ml seemed to be the best option, even with the poor TLD choice.

Oh I'm not giving you grief, I just think it's funny.

the article is on a CO site

🤌

I'm honestly surprised how long it took. As soon as I saw the server's domain I thought, "that's not going to go over well in Afghanistan." I didn't realize that the Taliban just hadn't gotten around to reviewing their TLD yet.

What's wrong with 2 letter country TLDs?

.uk .de .us .nl etc all seem like okay candidates

They used .af because in modern english, "af" stands for "as fuck"

As in "queer. As fuck", meaning VERY queer

The problem is who controls them. The government of each country can decide at any moment that they want to take control of their TLD and remove any sites that they don't like. It's just not good practice if you want your site to stick around.

Right. So how do you differentiate between the 2-letters ones and 3+? Each TLD can have domains requisitiioned by a government, even if its indirect through ICANN.

ICANN is certainly not perfect, but there is a difference between the automatic control that countries have over their ccTLD and the control they have through ICANN.

The US regularly seize domains, even those with foreign registrars. I don't feel that any tld is immune from this. Sure there are some TLDs more at risk than others, like .af being in control of the Taliban, but I'd also say US controlled TLDs are not the least at risk.

Some interesting articles about this

https://www.securityweek.com/country-specific-web-domains-cant-be-seized-icann/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_In_Our_Sites

https://www.wired.com/2012/03/feds-seize-foreign-sites/