The company blog of easyDNS, a domain registrar and DNS provider, covering DNSSEC, domain seizures, ICANN policy, and DDoS incidents.
HN commenters cite its pro-DNSSEC post as a counterpoint to critics, and praise founder Mark Jeftovic and the service's clean interface.
Do you have other clients who are in Germany?
It appears that you do act as a registrar for .DE domains. At least, entering "ascascdasdcascascascasdcasdc.de" on the search on the front page at https://easydns.com/ offers to register it for me. It's purely a guess on my part, but I'd expect that most people who purchase .DE domains are in Germany, so if you've actually sold a few .DE domains you probably have some German customers.
That might not be enough to open you up to having to worry about German law...but it is enough that I would not dismiss that possibility out of hand.
PS: your site seems partly broken. I first tried to check for .DE on this page: https://easydns.com/domains/register/
Entering "ascascdasdcascascascasdcasdc.de" on the search there does nothing for me in Firefox. I had uBlock Origin on, so turned it off. Still nothing. Then I switched to Chrome, using a profile with no relevant extensions, and still nothing.
So instead I just went to the list below that lists all the TLDs you handle, and went through to find DE. That has a "Special Requirements" link, which doesn't do anything for me in either Firefox or Chrome.
PPS: in Firefox's console, it shows these messages for that page that isn't working right:
'Loading failed for the <script> with source “https://matomo.int.easydns.net/piwik.js”." at register:1:1
'unreachable code after return statement' at signup.js:15:1
Sorry, IANAL, so maybe this advice is useless. I just spent a little bit doing some research and discovered that EasyDNS has a history of defending their customers from similar sorts of thuggery[0]. It may be worth your while to research an option like this, i.e. switching your DNS service (and domain registration, if they offer it) to EasyDNS or someone that would be willing to help you defend against sociopaths bent on stealing your domain and brand. It seems like now would be the time to research a more defense-oriented domain registrar and DNS provider that won't simply hand your domain over to the person with the most pull, as No-ip.com learned when Microsoft stole their domain. I can't really help you in this regard, but you will definitely want to transfer your domain to a registrar that doesn't have a history of caving to the first lawyer letter they get, which is probably most of them. Perhaps you may find both a name registrar and a DNS provider that will help you. Good luck!
[0] http://blog.easydns.org/2014/08/22/we-are-being-sued-for-refusing-to-takedown-a-website/
It may be just an ad for easyDNS' Proactive Nameservers [1] product but it provides a roadmap for one possible solution to this type of problem. From a quick reading of the marketing info, the solution can be summarized as "Provision, Monitor, and Fail-Over DNS Name Servers across multiple DNS-as-a-Service providers". The question I have is whether the following constraint is artificially introduced or not:
> We must be your domain registrar for this to work...
IIRC, Netflix OSS published some tools quite some time ago to support multiple DNS providers but I don't know/remember if they tackled the availability problem. The question comes down to build vs buy and whether the solution is general enough to warrant an Open Source Software solution.
[1] https://easydns.com/dns/proactive-nameservers/
Obligatory responses to tptacek's article:
- http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
- http://www.circleid.com/posts/20150318_is_dnssec_worth_the_effort/
Collectively thousands of words have been written on this topic within HN - and there are stark divisions between those who oppose DNSSEC and those who believe DNSSEC is a helpful and useful method of adding a layer of security to the Internet.
We don't agree. We won't agree.
Meanwhile, those of us who want to see DNSSEC more widely deployed applaud this move by CloudFlare because it both makes deployment simpler for many people and also advances the usage of stronger crypto (ECDSA) within DNSSEC.
This is great news!
> Then don't use DNS if you can't trust it?
Same with CAs, but I believe it's easier to distrust a rogue CA than a rogue name registry. I mean, if there's a news that some .example TLD is in bed with NSA, Chinese government and Russian FSB - there isn't much we can do about that, isn't it? And I guess most businesses won't go as far as changing their domain name.
At the same time, on most devices I saw, distrusting a CA wasn't terribly complicated. And can be done by a browser or OS vendor, with a version upgrade, as well.
> http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/
Thanks for the link. Looks like an interesting reading.
> You never control a domain
Then don't use DNS if you can't trust it? You have to trust at some point. Or create your own infrastructure and convince others to trust you, if you want more than a private network.
> Anyone who can feed you spoofed DNS responses
The tendency goes towards running your own local DNS resolver. It was not possible in the 90s, but since then both the network and computer got a lot faster and smarter.
DNSSEC has also evolved quite a bit and is the best we will get for long time. I really encourage to have a look again before dismissing it outright.
http://blog.easydns.org/2015/08/06/for-dnssec/