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Comment by hendersoon | Hacker News Reader

It's just plain outrageous that this court order was granted. It essentially puts no-ip out of business when they were not complicit in anything illegal.

It took me 5 minutes to switch my completely legitimate hosts over to ddns.net. I'm sure the evil botnet owners have backup hostnames and will do the same, or more likely switch to another provider entirely.

The end result will be a short-lived dip in criminal activity over the next 72 hours or so, inconveniencing many thousands of legit users, and putting a completely innocent company out of business. Nice move, MS.

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The argument seemed to be no-ip wouldn't stop people who were reported for malware/abuse. If other DDNS providers are less complicit with malware/abuse then it should be harder for them to continually operate. Sure, it won't stop it. But if the most friendly DDNS host is gone, it seems like a marginal victory for everyone else.

> It took me 5 minutes to switch my completely legitimate hosts over to ddns.net.

Unfortunately .net is also under the jurisdiction of US courts so it's not any 'safer' from seizure

The registry for .info and .mobi is in Ireland, .me is Serbia and Montenegro. Might be worth looking for dynamic DNS options in those TLDs if you seek future-proofing.

How did you do? what was so simple to do in 5 min? Did you redirected your no-ip.org DNS to the ddns.net? How did you do it? thanks

No-ip was complicit in the illegal activity.

If you use a car wash that is also laundering money, your legitimate need for a clean car is not a defense against shutting the business down.

So if some number of people use cars for illegal activities should we shut down the gas stations that they use to fuel them?

But that's an awful analogy and frankly you should be ashamed for even trying to paint it in that light. NOIP did nothing illegal whatsoever, their only "crime" was that they didn't do enough about malware distribution to keep Microsoft happy- which last I heard wasn't illegal.

To use your car wash analogy, it's more like the car wash unknowingly washed the car of a drug trafficker and then was essentially put out of business the next day for being "complicit in the illegal activity".

I am uneasy about this situation, but the car wash in question is more like the car painting shop in Grand Theft Auto. Even if painting cars is a legitimate activity, when 75% of your customers are trying to mask illegal activity you should be doing some due diligence to ensure that you're not enabling illegal activity.

I'm not totally okay with what happened here, but I'm confident that it was not a "oops, sorry, we'll ban that botnet" situation. no-ip's primary use case is botnets, and they do have a responsibility to minimize botnet use. They can't claim ignorance given the widespread use.

no-ip primary use case is certainly not botnets. It's used by dsl users to connect to their home network, or to get an easy to remember address for a vps, or maybe while developing something before getting a proper domain.

75% is a HUGE overstatement, No-IP allegedly has ~4 million active accounts. Of those 4 million, 3rd party security firms claimed ~12k of them were involved in the distribution of these two bits of malware, No-IP said the number was more like 2k. If those numbers are correct then you're talking thousandths of a percentile being the reason for this domain seizure.

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