Am Freitag, den 7. August, war die Domain indymedia.org für einige Zeit nicht erreichbar. Der Grund war, dass die für indymedia.org zuständige Registrierungsfirma Dotster den DNS-Eintrag eigenmächtig geändert hat. Dotster ging davon aus, dass indymedia.org nicht korrekt registriert sei und führte keine seriöse Prüfung dieser Falschinformation durch. Als Reaktion werden wir die Registrierungsfirma wechseln. Wir bitten die temporäre Nichterreichbarkeit zu entschuldigen.
Nähere Informationen gibt es in einer auführliche Erklärungsmail auf der IMC Tech Mailingliste:
Hi,
as you may have realized by now, the indymedia.org domain name does
again work as it used to do.
I think someone should provide the Indymedias with an update on what
happened along the last couple of hours, why it came to this and what is
planned for the future to - hopefully - prevent this from happening
again. This someone will be me for now.
So, what happened is that Dotster Inc. (dotster.com), the (US based)
company which has been contracted to provide the indymedia.org domain
name registration, has been (or claims to have been) informed by a (so
far unknown to us) third party that the indymedia.org domain name
registrant information would be incomplete or false. In such cases,
domain name registrars are supposed to verify whether the information
they have on file is really (still) correct.
As such, they sent an email on june 24th to abdecom at riseup.net, the
email address they had on file, to ask for confirmation that the contact
information would still be current. However, the email they sent was not
really coming from them, but from some unrelated server using some
unrelated domain name. As such, it was easy to miss this email, or to
mix it up with similarily formatted scam emails (where people actually
try to steal your domain name), which have been a widespread trend for a
while. Also, while the word 'Dotster' was mentioned within some legal
footnotes contained in those emails, it was by far not obvious that it
would have been communication coming from them.
Anyway, thinking it would be spam or phishing or scam, nobody did
respond to said email for two weeks, and apparently Dotster considered
at ths point that they had tried enough to get in touch with their
client whose postal address and phone number they also had on file but
never used, and decided to change the DNS servers for the indymedia.org
domain into some which do not actually act as domain name servers. These
different DNS servers they put in place, stopped the indymedia.org and
IMCNAME.indymedia.org hostnames from working, since there was no way to
determine the IP addresses (not in a way the web browsers and other
client applications could understand, though) anymore. They sent another
email to report this. This happened on August 6th, I think.
This was resolved today, when someone of the indymedia.org domain name
registrant (ABDECOM foundation, São Paulo, Brasil) called the domain
name registrar (Dotster), and confirmed that ABDECOM does still exist,
and asked for the domain name to be put back in service.
Someone else who takes part in ABDECOM, had already sent an email to
Dotster several hours before this, asking the same, which they only
responded to after the phone call had been made.
As a result of these annoyances, it is currently planned
* to no longer use the Dotster service but to use serious and reliable
domain name registration providers
* to have increased monitoring and maintenance of the email account
associated with the indymedia.org domain name registration
> <@Zapata> if you ever need to register a domain ... please don't do it on dotster.com
Please note that this summary is written from my personal point of view
and may or actually will thus contain subjective views and
interpretations, and also miss facts others may be aware of and I am not.
Alster