Registering a domain name
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How does one register a domain name? Gandi requires proprietary JavaScript.
"Gandi requires proprietary JavaScript."
I'm not aware of anyone that doesn't.
But at least it's not needed in the normal method of operation:
https://github.com/Gandi/gandi.cli#registering-a-domain-name
Of course, you still have to get over the initial hurdle of creating an Gandi account and getting the API keys.
You can minimize it. It just takes some experimenting. Without JavaScript: https://account.gandi.net/en/create_account
Submitting it will appear not to work; but actually does create the account.
You'll get an email from them to confirm your email address.
https://admin.gandi.net/dashboard/ does seem to need JavaScript though.
I find the whole domain name shabang really confusing. I mean... why do someone own the names in the first place? Why them?
Did they just at the start of the internet era just "Hey yeah I wanna buy the rights for this and that domain name". And who did they buy it from?? God??
This seems to be a misunderstanding. No one can "own" a domain name that doesn't exist (i.e., isn't registered.)
It's important to remember things in their historical context. The Internet was born out of the ARPANET, which started off as a project of the United Stated Department of Defense. Also, DNS didn't used to exist either. There was a HOSTS.TXT file contains names and addresses that you'd need to download and periodically update yourself. This was manually maintained by a single person. If you needed to add a new host name or make a change to an existing one you had to call them. In the United States. During day time business hours. Then, other people on the ARPANET wouldn't know about your changes until they updated their HOSTS.TXT file. Whenever it was that they got around to doing that.
Fast forward into today's world and this is more decentralized, at least a bit. ICANN exists, which runs IANA and who operates the root nameservers. Now you have a big choice of places: You can register your domain name with lots of different companies and you can freely update your DNS records yourself instead of calling a single person in the United States during day time business hours. Those changes are then visible to the entire world, and you don't have to wait for people to manually update their HOSTS.TXT file, and deal with problems when people are using out of date copies.
But it costs money to run ICANN and operate critical internet infrastructure because system and network administrators and etc aren't going to come and work for you for free hahahahahahaha. It costs money to run a domain registrar for the same reason. You need employees to keep things going. And other stuff too but this isn't a post about what's needed to run the internet and organizations so I'll move on. So domain names aren't free. But, to answer your question, nobody "owned" a domain name that didn't exist before it was registered. And once it was registered it was then "owned" by the person that registered it. Indeed, once you have a domain name you can freely transfer it around from one domain registrar to another. But you still need to use a registrar because you can't register domain names directly with ICANN yourself. Well, actually you *could* but you'd need to get set up as a domain registrar yourself. ICANN charges money for this of course, which helps to support their operations in running critical internet infrastructure.
Hmm, I think I kind of understand it a little bit better now. Thank you for writing this. Is it difficult/expensive to get set up as a domain name registrar?
I mean could I as the person I am get set up as "GrevenGull Domain Name" with only me employed and I only managed my own name(s)? :p
It is quite difficult. For instance, you must respect https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registration-data-specs-en
It costs US$4,000 per year of annual fee to the ICANN plus variable and transaction-based fees: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/registrar-fees-2018-08-10-en
so ICANN is like the Lord of Internet?
They used to call Jon Postel "the God of the Internet".
https://news.usc.edu/9865/Jon-Postel-Internet-Pioneer-Dies-at-55/
interesting :)
> so ICANN is like the Lord of Internet?
Decentralization is desirable, but it is not always simple.
This is all quite confusing to me really :P
I think I probably should start reading up on the C programming language and work my way from there possibly.
> This is all quite confusing to me really :P
I'll try to explain with something simpler than domain names:
Your username on this forum is Grevengull because Trisquel says so. If
the moderator wanted they could change your username to something else
and let someone else be Grevengull. Usernames on the Trisquel forum are
not decentralized, because there is an authority who decides who gets
what username.
Suppose that there were no authority enforcing usernames. That would be
decentralized, but it wouldn't be secure, because I could just change my
username to Grevengull right now and trick people into thinking I'm you.
We could all generate keypairs with GPG, use our public keys as our
username, and sign our posts with our private keys. This would be
decentralized and secure, but the names would just be random strings of
characters, name human-meaningful names.
Decentralization, security, and human-meaningful names are all
desirable, and it's easy to have two of those things but tricky to have
all three. It would be nice if domain names were decentralized so that
we don't need "Lords of the Internet," but it would be tricky to do this
without giving up security or human-meaningful names. That said, there
are proposals to do so:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle#Solutions
Ok, I see :)
But I am still intrigued to learn more about what GPG (and Namecoin and Twister etc) actually does and how and why it works. And for that the responsibility lies with me to actually learn the languages.
GnuPG is not a language. It is a free implementation of PGP. Search the Web to discover how PGP works.
I meant learning the languages in which these programs are written :)
To have a high-level understand of PGP, you do not want to read source code (whose language is quite irrelevant: it could be written in any Turing-complete language).
As Magic Banana says, learning the language is different from understanding conceptually how these programs work and how to use it. If you want to get started with GPG, I recommend starting with this page.
Say a book (GPG) is written in English (C). There is no need to read the book to understand what the book is about. Because you can always get it explained by people who have read and or read summaries.
But if you learn English and read the book you would have more first-hand relationship with the content of the book, no?
gnupg-2.2.13 "weights" 245k lines of code:
$ sloccount gnupg-2.2.13
(...)
Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC) = 244,944
That is 11 times the total number of lines in all Shakespeare's plays: https://www.stagemilk.com/length-of-shakespeare-plays/
Except that gnupg is only the main package of GnuPG, which relies on several libraries (not to mention the generic libraries these libraries include): https://gnupg.org/download/
Source code is extremely detailed. It is worse than a cooking recipe that would explain how to grow every required vegetable from its seed and how to manufacture the kitchenware: you might want to read about that only after at a high-level understanding of the recipe.
Even if you want to read the source code (probably only a tiny part of it) to study it in detail, maybe audit it, or modify it (correct a bug or add a feature), you first need to have that high-level understanding. A well-structured and well-commented (that is *English* alongside the code) code helps a lot. But even higher-level explanations (articles) are the first thing you want. Especially to understand encryption: the basic concepts are purely mathematical.
Right. This means though that the number of people who actually first-hand knows exactly what GnuPG does is probably quite few?
name at domain wrote:
> Right.
Please note, that Drupal → Mailman gateway breaks threading, so subscribers have no idea, what are you replying to, until they found you message at Drupal, which is not trivial task, since mailed messages lack ‘Archived-At’ header with a link.
So the old good quotations are indispensable there as nowhere else, please do not disregard them.
> This means though that the number of people who actually first-hand knows exactly what GnuPG does is probably quite few?
Yes, only barely more than of any other popular free program, I guess. What point are trying to make?
> So the old good quotations are indispensable there as nowhere else, please do not disregard them.
Good point. I'll try to remember it.
> Yes, only barely more than of any other popular free program, I guess. What point are trying to make?
Not trying to make any point. I was asking, hence the question mark. But since you ask; I'm all for being skeptical about everything, even GNU Project and FSF. Not to blindly trust anything. FSF's endorsement to PureOS is an example of that I reckon. So yeah maybe I kinda was trying to make a subtle point.
For some even larger projects (say GCC or Firefox), the number of people who have read the whole source code is probably 0. But that is not really a problem: people focus on studying/modifying specific parts they have interest in. Notice also that there are tools that help with the automatic detection of bugs, that good code often includes tests that can be automatically executed whenever the code is modified (to see if nothing "broke"), and that security-critical parts (hash functions, random number generators, encryption algorithms and protocols, etc.) are usually isolated in libraries that should be under far more scrutiny. "Usually" and "should be"... See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed for an horror story.
Very interesting. Unfortunately I know too little about how this works. How programs utilize certain "isolated libraries" etc. This I should work to try to understand.
A library is just a bunch of functions (kind of "sub-programs") that can be useful across to several different programs. Programmers do not want to reuse the code that others have already written, probably better than what they can achieved (including security-wise) because the authors of the libraries focus on the library and not on the programs using it. OpenSSL is a library providing functions for encrypted communication over a network, an implementation of SSL and TLS.
A :) cool!
name at domain wrote:
> Say a book (GPG) is written in English (C). There is no need to read the book to understand what the book is about. Because you can always get it explained by people who have read and or read summaries.
>
> But if you learn English and read the book you would have more first-hand relationship with the content of the book, no?
With software, unlike books, you normally early get explanations from people who _wrote_ it. They are called ‘manuals’. :-)
However, learning even basic programming indeed should benefit your personal¹ freedom much more than finding a registrar, which does not impose you nonfree javascripts. So rank your priorities. On the other hand, GnuPG is definitely _not_ the software, you want to execute your right to modify any time soon. There are better choices for starting, such as GNU Emacs, for instance, which was designed with that purpose in mind.
_
¹ As opposed to collective total.
> However, learning even basic programming indeed should benefit your personal¹ freedom much more than finding a registrar, which does not impose you nonfree javascripts.
I'm sorry, what imposes me nonfree javascripts? :)
On 03/13, name at domain wrote:
> I'm sorry, what imposes me nonfree javascripts? :)
The website of the registrar from which you buy a domain name.
name at domain wrote:
>> ...benefit your personal¹ freedom much more than finding a registrar, which does not impose [on] you nonfree javascripts.
>
> I'm sorry, what imposes me nonfree javascripts? :)
The lack of ways to get a domain name otherwise. That’s already a norm of the Internet, and the tendency is unfavourable. Paradoxical enough, that was a direct consequence of advances in developing free software for the ‘open Web’.
We’re going to pay our respects to the late IE6 after all!
Sorry for the late reply.
> The lack of ways to get a domain name otherwise. That’s already a norm of the Internet, and the tendency is unfavourable. Paradoxical enough, that was a direct consequence of advances in developing free software for the ‘open Web’.
We’re going to pay our respects to the late IE6 after all!<
Would you mind elaborating on this? :)
name at domain wrote:
> Hmm, I think I kind of understand it a little bit better now. Thank you for
> writing this. Is it difficult/expensive to get set up as a domain name
> registrar?
>
> I mean could I as the person I am get set up as "GrevenGull Domain Name" with
> only me employed and I only managed my own name(s)? :p
First of all, I would call your premise, that dealing directly with ICANN & PIR / Verisign (in the case of gTLDs) would free you of the necessity to run nonfree programs, being too optimistic. They are ubiquitous now.
You might easily became a reseller, though, to provide access to services of some large registrar (Gandi or otherwise) in a computing-freedom-friendly way to anyone interested in them. That is, to became a scapegoat who takes all the sin of using nonfree software on himself. :-D.
Above I, supposedly, found someone(s), who have been doing this for a while already.
>Above I, supposedly, found someone(s), who have been doing this for a while already.
?
Cal <name at domain> wrote:
> How does one register a domain name [without running] proprietary JavaScript.
An nice question! But somewhat incomplete: _in which_ domain do you want to register it? Let suppose, you imply gTLDs.
There are still some registrars, who are somewhat freedom-friendly for same reason as Google Mail still is. That is, solely for legacy causes. So, they might change in any minute, and their support would not even understand your discontent.
, for instance. I linked their control panel rather than the main page, since the latter is not operational without nonfree programs already. (Note, that this is not a recommendation to use their services, moreover, I have no idea, whether they work with foreign individuals at all.)
So, we have to search for a registrar with distinct thrust on computing freedom or at least on computing _simplicity_. If we start digging in that direction, we might find something relevant: :
| REGIS [Domain Registration] ($15 annual)¹
|
| — registration for your domain name
| − most TLDs (Top Level Domains) available - including .com, .net, .org, .tv, .uk, .info, .cc etc.
| — DNS membership included
| — free to VHOST members with annual dues
Apparently, they are reselling domains from .
_
¹ As far as I got it, a one-time initiation fee of 36 $ is also required.
Thanks for your message. Anything enclosed in angle brackets doesn't
display in the forum, so I'm going to remove them so that your links are
visible to forum users.
On 03/11, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
> Cal <name at domain> wrote:
> > How does one register a domain name [without running] proprietary JavaScript.
>
> An nice question! But somewhat incomplete: _in which_ domain do you want to register it? Let suppose, you imply gTLDs.
>
> There are still some registrars, who are somewhat freedom-friendly for same reason as Google Mail still is. That is, solely for legacy causes. So, they might change in any minute, and their support would not even understand your discontent.
>
> https://client.naunet.ru, for instance. I linked their control panel rather than the main page, since the latter is not operational without nonfree programs already. (Note, that this is not a recommendation to use their services, moreover, I have no idea, whether they work with foreign individuals at all.)
>
> So, we have to search for a registrar with distinct thrust on computing freedom or at least on computing _simplicity_. If we start digging in that direction, we might find something relevant: https://sdf.org/?join:
>
> | REGIS [Domain Registration] ($15 annual)¹
> |
> | — registration for your domain name
> | − most TLDs (Top Level Domains) available - including .com, .net, .org, .tv, .uk, .info, .cc etc.
> | — DNS membership included
> | — free to VHOST members with annual dues
>
> Apparently, they are reselling domains from https://www.tucows.com.
>
> _
> ¹ As far as I got it, a one-time initiation fee of 36 $ is also required.
Mason Hock <name at domain> wrote:
> Thanks for your message. Anything enclosed in angle brackets doesn't
> display in the forum, so I'm going to remove them so that your links are
> visible to forum users.
Oops. Does it mean, that one can use HTML markup here? Any way, thanks, I’ll try to keep this peculiarity in mind.
Actually, this forum seems to be broken in many ways. First of all, I do not receive messages from the _most_ of posters here. And this is not a problem with some setup on my side only, local pipermail archive [1] lacks mail form the very same people. I did mail name at domain few days ago, but have not got any reply yet.
Is it a known issue?
[1] https://listas.trisquel.info/pipermail/freedom-misc/2019-March/thread.html
On 03/12, Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
> Oops. Does it mean, that one can use HTML markup here? Any way, thanks, I’ll try to keep this peculiarity in mind.
Yeah, the forum supports HTML, which as a side effect means that things
between angle brackets can get misinterpreted as tags.
> Actually, this forum seems to be broken in many ways. First of all, I do not receive messages from the _most_ of posters here. And this is not a problem with some setup on my side only, local pipermail archive [1] lacks mail form the very same people. I did mail name at domain few days ago, but have not got any reply yet.
Yeah, I've encountered this too. It seems that with the freedom-misc
list (I don't have the same problem with trisquel-users) the mailing
list only receives messages from a few people. It seems that what these
people have in common is that they are mailing list users, so my first
thought was that the mailing list is mirroring to the forum but not vice
versa. However, I then started using the forum for freedom-misc, and
found that I still get my own posts as emails. My suspicion is that if a
user has used the mailing list at least once, their messages go through,
but if they have only ever used the forum then their messages won't go
through.
> Is it a known issue?
I emailed David (the forum's moderator) about it a few months ago. I
never got a response so it must have slipped by him. I'll forward this
discussion to him.
Mason Hock <name at domain> wrote:
> It seems that with the freedom-misc list (I don't have the same problem with trisquel-users) the mailing list only receives messages from a few people. It seems that what these people have in common is that they are mailing list users, so my first thought was that the mailing list is mirroring to the forum but not vice versa. However, I then started using the forum for freedom-misc, and found that I still get my own posts as emails. My suspicion is that if a user has used the mailing list at least once, their messages go through, but if they have only ever used the forum then their messages won't go through.
I guess, that might be explained simpler: if a user is subscribed, his mail is passed, otherwise is not. Given that Mailman default is to put mail from nonsubscribers on premoderation, that likely means that listmaster just forgot to change it for this ML.
> I emailed David (the forum's moderator) about it a few months ago. I never got a response so it must have slipped by him. I'll forward this discussion to him.
Thanks. If you could keep me carbon-copied, I’d appreciate it.
Hello!
Thank you all for the reports and sorry for the inconvenience of this bug, I'll get back at it and try to fix the synchronization between the mailing list and this forum.
I temporarily gave up quite some time ago because all the needed configuration seemed to be ok even though the behavior was inconsistent with the other lists and forums, but I'll take another (better) look and hopefully fix it soon.
I have to apologize again because most probably while I fix this behavior you'll all receive all the messages that you've been missing; if this would be a problem for any of you please write me and I'll try to avoid that effect.
Thanks again!
name at domain wrote:
> ...I'll get back at it and try to fix the synchronization between the mailing list and this forum.
>
> I temporarily gave up quite some time ago because all the needed configuration seemed to be ok even though the behavior was inconsistent with the other lists and forums, but I'll take another (better) look and hopefully fix it soon.
I’m looking forward to that moment!
And while it has not come yet, may I kindly ask you to connect to Mailman the last remaining English group there — the “Troll’s lounge”. ;-)
> I have to apologize again because most probably while I fix this behavior you'll all receive all the messages that you've been missing; if this would be a problem for any of you please write me
As for me, on the contrary, that would be only good.
Hi David,
On 03/13, name at domain wrote:
> Thank you all for the reports and sorry for the inconvenience of this
> bug, I'll get back at it and try to fix the synchronization between the
> mailing list and this forum.
Have you had a chances to look into this?
> I have to apologize again because most probably while I fix this behavior
> you'll all receive all the messages that you've been missing; if this
> would be a problem for any of you please write me and I'll try to avoid
> that effect.
I personally don't mind receiving the missing messages if that's needed
to fix the problem
Thanks
On Tue, 12 Mar 2019 01:47:40 +0300 Dmitry wrote:
> Actually, this forum seems to be broken in many ways. First of all,
> I do not receive messages from the _most_ of posters here.
i can confirm that - i noticed that *most* messages posted on the web
do not get mailed to me - and the replies i send via email do not get
posted on the web, including this one i replied to - i got the delivery
of my own reply via email, but i had to post this to the web separately
Clicking around https://www.internic.net/origin.html I found this one has no JavaScript on its pages at all:
I have no more information about it though. All I can see is that it has no redirect to HTTPS (although it supports it) and has serious security issues even with HTTPS:
https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=neonic.com&latest
You can research further and share your findings. Also there may be others worth checking on the InterNIC list.
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