The Taliban Stole My Domain

Welcome to Syntax.

On this Monday, hasty treat. We're gonna be talking all about how the Taliban took Wes domain.

What a wild way to start an episode.

And it's gonna be a really wild story. And you know what? Sometimes my code gets a little wild. When my code gets wild, I reach for Sentry. Why? Well, because Sentry helps me find my bugs. And that sounds like an ad, but, hey. We both use SENTRY long before, we became part of SENTRY. Now we get to use and work with the product that we like so much. Sanity is the perfect way to track all of your errors and exceptions. Not only that, but it really helped us identify some key performance metric stuff on our site on syntax.fm.

It helped me find some slow queries where I was actually doing the wrong style of query, and it really just, gave me confidence that when I shipped our Redis caching, that it made a huge impact on the loading times of each of our pages. So, shout out to Sanity for that. They've been an awesome partner for Syntax, and this show is presented by Sentry at century.i0forward/ syntax.

Alright.

The Taliban.

So we're gonna first tell the story because I think it's kinda interesting. Yeah. And and second, have some, like, like, cautionary tales about, like you should think about what you're doing. You might think that your domain name is hilarious, but you should think about, what could happen if your domain name goes missing or is revoked. So I owned Bos dotaf, and dotaf t l d is Afghanistan.

Right? And I had I've had it for, I don't know, probably 6 or 7 years, and I used it to sell my stickers on because it's it's funny. It's short. I thought it was a a good domain name. And I've I've I've told the story on the show. When I initially got it, I was unable to get an SSL certificate for it because, of sanctions between who was offering the SSL certificate, which was Cloudflare, an American company.

And, they wouldn't do business with Afghanistan.

So I had to use, Let's Encrypt to to get an SSL certificate for it.

And I got an email probably about a year ago from Gandhi. Gandhi is who I registered the domain name with. They do a lot of odd domain names that you might not be able to get anywhere else. And generally, the way it works is that they they have a business in each of these countries, and they sort of just proxy register it for you. That's that's how you're able to get some of these domain names when it's restricted to people of the country.

And I got an email probably about a year ago from Ghani being like, hey. Like, heads up.

We've lost all contact with the, Afghanistan network information center, due to the Taliban taking over, the country, in Afghanistan. And they said, if you have anything important on it, contact us, or start making other arrangements. So I was like, oh, contact you. Maybe they have something like backdoor or something like I can keep the the domain Node. And they didn't reply at all. You know? I've I I contacted, like, a couple times, and just just nothing. So Mhmm. I was like, alright. Well, like, the the time is gonna come someday, that that that domain name is gonna go away. And I I because I couldn't renew it, and I knew that it was gonna expire at some point. And I had about 3 months left, but couple days ago, I got an email, and we'll throw it up on the video right now. It just says, Bos AF has been suspended in the registry and will no longer be included in the zone file generation.

This means that any service connected with this domain, such as websites or email addresses, will cease working shortly. So meaning that, the people that control the dotaf domain name have taken my domain name out of their zone file, and it's no longer going to resolve to anything.

So I was kinda kinda out of luck.

Luckily, it wasn't mission critical for me. It's I'm selling stickers on it. I can find another domain name for it. It's kind of annoying because I have links pointing to it and and whatnot, but, not not the end of the world for me. So at the same time, I was like, did anyone else get their their Node man name? And Scott sent me a link to this mastodon and since queer dotaf, and they got theirs pulled as well. And, like, I can't seem to find any information about why ours got taken and others didn't. There's certainly lots of domain names still up and running.

But, yeah, I've all those people say I can't find a way to reregister it or had to renew it because it's it's a hard thing to get money to a country that you're not allowed to send money to. You know? It's I have the same thing with people who wanna take my courses from Iran as they have a hard time trying to buy my courses because of sanctions and limitations on their credit cards.

So when you purchase a domain Yeah. Like that, that is country specific, like cat.cat, I wanted to get I had a company a long time ago, like 2012, called Folded Cat Creative was my company, And the logo was a little origami cat. It was actually super cute. And, I really wanted to buy folded Scott cat, but cat was Catalonia.

And when you buy something like that from a country, does that country themselves get the registration fee?

Yeah. They they do. They they either run it themselves or they have a another service sort of run on behalf of them. In in in the case of of Afghanistan, they ran their own. They have a Gmail address and a phone number on their website.

And they have a Twitter account that says, our website is down because of lack of knowledge of technology.

So yeah. Like, they they will get the registration, And more importantly, that country controls that TLD, meaning that if they want to, they can take the domain back from you, which a lot of people were really surprised to hear that, oh, yeah. Country it's it's not some, like, GoDaddy or something like that that has control of of the Internet. It's every single country that has their own TLD controls what websites are allowed to be under that TLD. And if they do not like Bos dot a f, they are able to take it out of that zone file, and you are out of luck.

Wow.

Yeah. I thought that was was really, really interesting. So I am trying to go through a process with another registrar that will register it on my behalf, and you can pay with crypto.

I just don't know if it's worth it or if they will even do it. Because I just tried to buy it online, and it says pending, pending, pending, pending, and that it hasn't gone through yet. So I don't even know if it's gonna gonna go through or not, but I thought that was kinda interesting. Yeah. That's all all very wild to me. Yeah. Yeah. I always just looked at fun domains as kind of cute, fun little

additions. You know? But you never, like, think about, the intricacies there beyond Yeah. Just a few Intercompany

fuse.

Sanity also happened to Notion.

I don't know if you remember. A couple Yarn ago, Notion went totally black, and it's because Notion was running at Notion dotso, Somalia. What what was SO? Like, why would they pick SO out of everything? Because they said because everything else was taken.

And, like, a single word dot something that is very short is is doable, and it it seemed kinda cool. However, what what happened in Notion's case was Somalia said, hey.

Listen up.

We don't want anybody outside of Somalia using the domain names anymore. And then also sometimes what they do is they just go, like, you can't have a second level domain Node, like a Node dot s o. They only want to have, like, notion Scott gov dot s o. You know? They they only wanna be able to do three level domain names. But in the case of Notion, they said, hey. Like, only Somalian companies can use dot s o, and you have, like, a year, a year and a half to to sort of get off this.

And at some point, that time ran up, and Notion hadn't got everything in order. A lot of their APIs were still pointing towards the old they they were doing forwarding, but a lot of their APIs were still DNS resolving to dot SEO.

So so when they had pulled the domain name, Notion went black, which is very scary.

The whole point of a domain name is that if your server's IP address changes, not the whole point. One of the points of a domain name is your server IP address changes, then you you you can still, like, redirect. Like, imagine you had to remember the IP address of your your server.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. So Notion had to scramble and and get that fixed. And then who art artsy?art.s y Wes was Syria, and they had they got pulled. And, I recently learned that, AI is Anguilla, which is pretty interesting. Apparently, they're making bank on,

everybody registering AI domain names. And then in Hey. What? Scott TV. Yeah? Sorry. Let me interrupt there. If you wanna see Anguilla, that's where I went last year for my vacation. Oh, really? Anguilla. Yeah. There's a on my Instagram, on one of my stories, there's photos of my wife and I hanging out in Anguilla. And you know what? That's a a very awesome little island. So, shout out to Anguilla. If they're getting cash from the Scott a I, I gotta love that for them.

Yeah. And what else is there? Like, TV and IO? People a while ago, people were like, don't register I o domain names because of I forget the reason why, but there Wes some, like, controversy around it as well.

So it might be funny. It might might be cool, but, also, sometimes you you gotta think, like, are these countries going to pull it? But on the flip side, you also have, like these new there's millions of new domain names which are Scott country level domain names. They're Scott, these, which is generic these Scott, .net, .org, biz.

But they're they're just like custom ones like limo and.

What are some of the fun ones? Scott limo.accountant.

There's all kinds. There's millions and millions of them out there, and I was thinking

ski.

Dot ski. What's what is just is that for skiing? That's not a country, is it? It is literally just for skiing. Yes. There you go. So Yep. I was, like, wondering, what's to stop the people? These these are businesses that paid a $150,000 just to be considered to apply for these custom TLDs. Like, if you want if we wanna Scott syntax, we would have to apply for it. And then the the businesses go into business saying, alright. We're gonna get Scott ski, and now we're gonna go start selling dot ski domain names.

What's to stop somebody from just saying, alright. You know, dot ski domain names? $10,000 a year.

And I looked into it, and the answer to that is nothing, which is kind of scary that if you choose one of these funny domain names and I I often wonder, like, are the people that own Scott limo, are they gonna are they gonna jack it? Or are they gonna say, alright. There's there's a couple of businesses on Node Limo.

I think that we could change it to $10,000 a year, and they're gonna just pay it because it's too much of a pain to to move away from it or their SEO is worth too much. So kinda scary in that regard as well. And, obviously, I don't know if that will will totally happen, but it is certainly a possibility.

Yeah. That's domain names. I'm just I wanna end off. What are the best TLDs? What do you think the best TLDs are?

Ski. Ski. Obviously. Yeah. My don't my domain is Tolinski, which one of the syntax listeners came up with and luckily told me to go buy it before, they told me about it because, hey. You Node, the moment you put anything like that online, somebody's gonna try to snatch it. Yeah. Those ones are are really good.

I have a Scott I o that I use for my domain name shortener. I still own Wes Dot Tech. I think when Dot Tech used to sponsor this podcast and I Wes, like, hey. So their their company and, like, their domain names are are very affordable. But if you want a 3 letter one, the price goes up a lot. Lots of domain Node. Just do that. You Node, that dev is expensive.

Dev is really expensive. Yeah. Yeah.

So, like, if somebody's, like, trying to sell you something, I think, like obviously, .com is is probably the best, but a lot of those are are totally gone. You don't see a whole lot of people doing .netor.org anymore these days, unless it actually is, like, a a not for profit. They'll maybe throw it on a .org.

I I just wanna I this website, I want my name JS is the best because it will give you a list of absolutely every single possibility that is out there. And if you're sort of, like, looking for something that is available, then you can grab it. Like, let let's see. Let's see what's available for React.

React dot accountants, $159.

React dot clothing, $50.

Mhmm.

React dot estate. I owned React dot pizza for a while because I was doing a a class that needed it was a React application where you order pizzas. Right? And, I wanted to show people what we're building, so I threw it on react dot pizza. I don't think I own that anymore, though. I I let it I let it absolve Absolve? What's the word there? I let it expire.

Expire.

Yeah.

So some pretty interesting ones there.

Certainly check out I Want My Name, but that's the story of the Taliban taking my domain name.

And, that's sad, but, like, obviously, I I knew it was a joke. And, obviously, I should have known better, but I thought I would use this chance to sort of say, hey. This could happen to you too. So think twice before you register that funny domain name.

Yeah. You know Node? It's funny because I'm I'm glad you said that at the end there because that was the first thing that I think about every single time that I see some of these don't buy whatever domains. They could take it. I think, oh, yeah. That's not going to happen to me.

That's the 1st thought that goes through my brain. So it's really helpful to, have this experience from somebody, you know, somebody I talk to every day. So There you go. Alright. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in. Catch you later. Peace. Peace.