Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended

kiwifarms and sci-hub have been kicked off .is

.is is a very resilient TLD indeed, and it's well known in some communities.

I think you also misunderstood, they are suggesting OP redirect to a telegram domain that isn't on the .me TLD, as the other .me is potentially at risk of also being taken down.

(Yes, but it expires at 2035-05-20. If you count years by rounding up to integers, there's not enough time room to renew it an additional year. It would make it 11 years.)

I don't think anyone cares about E2E encryption as much as tech people think.

For all of the much-vaunted complains about their lack of it, I am not aware of any proof or credible claims that Telegram the company has ever revealed the contents of non-encrypted messages or group chats.

Meanwhile, I don't think any authorities actually care about to what extent E2E Encryption makes it harder for Signal the corporation to extract message data. There's plenty of other ways to skin that cat - on-device compromises, abuse of backup mechanisms, abuse of mechanisms to manage linked devices, etc. They'd go after them just the same if they thought there was anything they really wanted on there.

If there's any real difference, I think it's most likely because many more of the group chats that such authorities are aware of and find "interesting" are on Telegram because basically nobody really does E2E well in medium-large groups right now.

They generally don't have to proactively police it, but they have to answer court orders in every country that has courts, or they'll be in trouble in that country. And countries are free to cooperate with each other to enforce these.

Pavel Durov was arrested when he traveled to France because Telegram was noncompliant with French court orders. You can ignore them in Russia... you can't ignore them in France. And you can ignore Russian court orders in France but not in Russia. And the Russian or Indian court is free to ask the Montenegrin government to suspend your domain name and the Montenegrin government is free to agree or disagree.

Signal is already well known to governments. In fact a few years ago there was a report in the UK media about how some governments used signal instead of official channels like email and did so because of Signals disappearing messages feature (ie making those MPs less accountable).

in fact, telegram does support e2e encryption ("secret chats")

It's more likely they did go after the individual users, by sending a demand to Telegram to identify the users, and Telegram refused.

Yep.

clientHold = registrar (GoDaddy)

serverHold = registry (Montenegrin Registry)

Since when did registars care about the political positions of its clients? They could have registered on cloudflare or namecheap and I doubt they'd bat an eye. Telegram is mainstream enough that nobody is going to cancel them, unlike kiwi farms or 4chan.

Matrix the protocol is just fine, and all features you expect are there. Their problem is with actual apps that either don't support most of good features, are unpolished to the degree of being unusable, or both.

I agree that Matrix has a lot of problems, at least when used with the Element app, but I've found that voice calls are much better with Matrix compared to Signal over a flaky network. It was as good as WhatsApp in my experience.

For matrix, I don't use the original client but rather cinny. This client is so good that I wish that other clients and it looks really good in UI/UX, honestly I have had some serious thoughts of porting this UI sometimes: https://cinny.in, so I would be curious what you think about this as well.

(Side note: Fractal and the matrix element fork called schildichat are interesting as well. It is also possible to run matrix in terminal for what its worth as well, and nhekochat is good as well. Fractal runs on gtk and nheko runs on qt. I do agree though that running matrix homservers is a bit bulky sometimes from what I have heard but the client scene is probably really good so I am curious what you think about cinny :-D )

Not available for private use isn't exactly true...

They moved to Dubai?

So if a court order is obtained in UAE then they will likely comply, but not from other countries?

The ad is not sexist, it's sexy/sexualized and humourous, which is something else. And of course it is from 2010, just before the great ... cultural shift.

They used to, before they got bought out by private equity and started jacking up the rates. Moved all my domains to porkbun since then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45243123

Not so much any more but I don't remember why. At least they started raising prices. Porkbun is the new Namecheap.

If you are set on Namecheap anyway, Spaceship is a suggested replacement. It's run by Namecheap but with a new codebase.

What’s with the shade on Montenegro? .me is a perfectly normal domain.

And the government doesn’t even operate the registrar, it’s operated by doMEn d.o.o. which is a Montenegro version of an LLC.

There is nothing Porkbun or any other registrar can do if Montenegro decides to suspend the domain, which seems to be what actually happened.

I also recommend porkbun

Never had any trouble with them, but also moving away from them is unnecessarily hard (the code sometimes takes a day to arrive) and they cover the entire interface with their paid hosting stuff which makes them a poor registrar. I ended up on them because of Google Domains selling off but got off them because very annoying to use.

I'd honestly be careful with squarespace. They are owned by private equity, advertise on countless YouTube channels, and at the same time their core market is under a looming threat from the AI companies.

You need your domain registrar to be stable and predictable. Their profile is not that.

My understanding is that both GoDaddy and Namecheap used to do domain front running[0] at the time I was registering my first handful of commercial domains, so I've always avoided even using their search engines.

I wonder if the practice still exists.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_tasting#Domain_name_fro...

My bank automatically blocks payments to Namecheap. When I had domains with them, I had to call and give prior approval for the exact amount I would be paying. My bank claimed it was because of a high number of fraudulent charges.

Namecheap got bought by private equity fairly recently, so i switched away from them. Wouldn’t recommend starting with them just in time for the enshittification to start.

FYI - Gandi was great, but they got bought by private equity a few years back and the price skyrocketed and service went downhill super fast after the buyout.

Stupid fucking name

So far so good, for personal use; they have the lowest renewal prices for top level domains.