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I've been working in a project in the free subdomain space that may help some people impacted by Freenom's failure.

https://www.getlocalcert.net offers free subdomains that are compatible with Let's Encrypt (including wildcard certs) but you've got to setup split-DNS on your local network as we don't allow public routing or email.

My hope is that this enables free subdomains for private use while avoiding the mess of self-signed certs and the spammer/malware issues that appear to have killed Freenom and plague FreeDNS.

Still in the early days, so there's some kinks getting worked out. I set up a number of ACME clients and web servers for demo just last week: https://github.com/robalexdev/getlocalcert-client-tests

Oh and if you need a different sort of domain, this list seems most up to date:

https://free-for.life/#/?id=domains

Freenom sucks; sad they're gone, so many domains lost.

But just to be exhaustive, Freenom was not the only place one were able to register a .ga domain: I still use a .ga domain registered a few years ago at France-DNS -- which merged with / was acquired by NETIM recently.

Registering the domain through a "real registar" allowed me to get something more reliable (than a free domain on Freenom) as well as whois privacy.

The official Gabonese whois/registar website [1] seems to be down at the moment but never seemed very legit/pro to me... [2] & [3]

[1] http://www.my.ga/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20220623223503/http://www.my.ga/... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20230423231601/http://www.my.ga/...

Why go through all this trouble vs just using a normal domain name on a gTLD? (Or your own country's ccTLD if widely used?) I've owned domains on .com, .net, and .org starting over two decades ago, and then more recently on new gTLDs like .dev, and never had a single problem. I don't see the appeal of hijacking poorly run ccTLDs for other purposes.

One appeal I've seen is if a ccTLD matches the last 2 letters of your last name. You can then set up a mail adres first@lastna.me. Or a personal website at http://first.lastna.me/

Not for everyone probably, but if it'd be easy for me, I'd go for it.

I can see the appeal of that, as my last name ends in *in, but .in is a registry notoriously unfriendly to foreigners (as are many ccTLDs), and it just doesn't make sense to build any kind of online presence around a domain name that could be taken away from me at any time for any reason, simply because I don't actually live in India.

I'd like an .er address. That's Eritrean. Last time I looked it up, that country was a mess. No telling who'd profit from domain registration, and not worth figuring that out for what amounts to vanity plates. Not gonna risk sponsoring bad guys for a funny domain name.

just anecdotal, but I've had a .in domain (as a foreigner) for years, and I've never had any problems—how do they normally arise?

and it's at namecheap, too, with whom I haven't historically had the greatest experiences

The two-letter TLDs are basically property of that country.

India makes the rules for .in, for example, and noone else gets much of a say. There's a registry, NIXI, and there are contracts between the registrars and NIXI, and between the registrars and registrants. I would expect the contracts involving NIXI to be under Indian law, and most registrars choose their home country for their customer contracts.

So if you use Gandi to register a .in domain, you have a French contract with Gandi and Gandi an Indian contract with NIXI. Gandi also has a contract with ICANN (all ICANN-accredited registrars do) but that may or may not matter for India; the Indians decide that.

The same applies for other countries. Gandi offers .ga domains, for example.

Your domain is as safe as the contract law of the two countries involved.

Some countries allow almost anyone to register domains, others make different rules. Some/many allow people in the country to register domains, but disallow foreigners in order to simplify name choice for their own residents, for example.

I know someone who registered a .no domain by lying about something, and lost the domain unceremoniously when the registry found out. And of course a few hundred thousand brits lost their .eu domains when they left the EU.

My last name is Daga and I hated that 2 letter .ga weren’t allowed. Would’ve snapped up da.ga

Actually 2/3 letters domains were accepted -- maybe not on Freenom though; you had to register on the official registry -- but were also prohibitively expensive.

What's the value in having a .ga domain? To me, a .ga domain indicates a scam website or a really short lived one at best.

Vanity domain (first two letters of my family name).

> Freenom sucks; sad they're gone, so many domains lost.

They do suck but are they gone? I have a paid .tk domain and am able to login and manage it. I thought they just halted registration of new domains?

> This server could not prove that it is aninf.ga; its security certificate is from aazerp.ga. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection.

Sign of competence by the new management organisation.

Oh wow. That's for https://aninf.ga itself.

So yeah, clearly no testing of their own infrastructure. :(

And the cert is expired.

I remember back in the day, I had a free .tk domain. Good times. Apparently dot.TK was run by Freenom as well.

I had a look in Wayback machine to see if they had a copy of my old site. But the first snapshot of the domain in the Wayback machine archive seems to have been after some random Chinese website started using the domain instead of me.

Makes sense though that the Wayback machine does not have my pages in their archive, I was in upper secondary school at the time and the only people that visited my website was probably myself and a handful of my friends from school.

I also went to dot.TK to see if it was possible to re-register my old .tk domain, but the search didn’t work. Guess if Freenom is giving up it may already be impossible to use dot.TK anymore.

I loved .tk domains. I used as them as hostnames for Minecraft servers. I would redirect play.[servername].tk to the server IP and the normal [servername].tk was the shop. Good times! Couldn't have learned more about DNS and domain names without them.

Yeah, despite all the (valid) concerns about spam and abuse of free domains, I think there's value in a "throwaway" TLD. I was grateful to be able to get free domains to play around with back when I was a broke teenager and couldn't justify a real domain.

> spam

How can you spam by creating a free domain? Or did you mean that search engines currently rely on fact that it is expensive to have many domains and their ranking algorithms get broken with free domains? Maybe they should just change their algorithms then, for example, have human-moderated search.

> and abuse of free domains

What harm can you do with a free domain? I don't understand.

There’s still https://freedns.afraid.org/

I've always been wanting to register a 2 letter domain on .ga though have never been able to. Their old site made it seems technically possible though every registrar I've tried fails in some way or another.

Alright. May the .io tld follow suit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.io#Controversy

Hmmm, that was nearly 10 years ago according to the wikipedia article.

Wonder if the problem is still occurring?

Is it considered ok or wise to obtain new .io (and .sh) domains today? In addition to the controversies (and more generally, misappropriating ccTLDs for funny domain names to result in a passive income benefitting only very few) there could also be a Brexit issue coming up here. Not that I have heard or expect the Brit gov to play hardball or something, but I could see closing .io to non-Brits be in-line with other decisions; for example, British citizens/companies can't use .eu domains post-Brexit AFAIK, with a grace period.

That's just how .eu has always worked? If you're not from the EU (okay EEA to be more precise), you can't have one. It was never open to those outside of it. It wasn't some "fuck you in particular" kind of deal you make it out to be, nothing changed in its requirements.

Many made the (somewhat reasonable) assumption that it was for EUrope, not the European Union.

Sure, but it never was — the .eu domain was for the European Union from the beginning, and the ISO code EU is for the European Union. The .eu domain was opened by agreement to the EEA (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway) countries as well. But Swiss registrants have never been eligible (except via citizenship/residency in one of the qualifying states), for example.

When the UK left the EU, they didn't negotiate any EEA-style agreement to get access to .eu in their Brexit deal.

Those are confused with *.eu.org which is a predecessor of the .eu TLD. See https://nic.eu.org

Does that mean Swiss people cannot acquire .eu domains, as Switzerland is not part of the EU or EEA?

That is correct.

.uk domains owned by Russian citizens were pulled from under them last year. Whatever your opinion on this issue might be, I would take it as a warning. That particular registry seems to have a history of controversies and questionable behavior.

Really? From what I could find, they only pulled Russian registrars, not the domains, which you could transfer to a non-Russian-based registrar to renew: https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/15/nominet_suspends_russ...

There is zero indication that the British government would close off .io to non-Brits. You don't have to be a UK citizen or resident to get a .uk domain either. .eu requires citizenship or residency for registration, but most ccTLDs don't. The UK would not benefit in any way from cutting off .io registrations (or .sh for that matter).

Brexit was just a way to distract fools while picking their pockets, I don't see a real connection here.

I would skip on .io. Consider .dev or something else

This has really no parallels to anything with .io. The Gabonese government has always controlled .ga. Since 2013, they had offered registrations for free through Freenom, but they got tired of rampant spam registrations.

.zip is probably next level stupidity. Although something like .gz would be, too.

Some notes about flushing GA zone:

- Whois ga server address: WEB+WHOIS whois.nic.ga (use whois -h whois.nic.ga some.domain.ga).

- Domains like TELE.GA got auto-transition. They were registered via Gandi (was not Freenom reseller? huh).

Now they have whois "Date de création: 2023-06-05T00:00:00Z". Exactly at midnight.

- Domain like GOOGLE.GA got VIP service. Engineer reported the problem at Mon Jun 5 02:33:22 UTC 2023 (https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2023-Jun...).

Less than 48 hours they've registered a new registrar(!) Markmonitor at ANINF (There is no such registrar in the list https://www.mon.ga/english.html). Faster than light.

- Domains like ASTI.GA spent around $25(year fee) + $50(corporate fee for manual processing) and registered domain via Gandi in a small window of time.

- Registrar Netim: $18 till end of month, then $26 per year.

- All other PAID ga domains squatted via Safe Names registrar around 2023-06-06 15:00. They pointed a delegation on one (sick!) NS server ns03.freenom.com

So you can switch delegation at freenom's dashboard to "Use default nameservers (Freenom Nameservers)" and set up needed records (only A, AAAA, CNAME, TXT, MX, LOC, NAPTR, RP).

- You cannot register at Safe Names site: Error "Update Unsuccessful Please fix the missing or invalid Data". All data is filled in.

Awesome businass.

- All registered domains have 06.06.2023 - 06.06.2024, 1 year registration.

- Same [s]sh..[/s] with ML zone. https://agetic.gouv.ml/note-dinformation-relative-au-rapatri... They wanted to switch at the end of March 2023, but nothing seems to have happened.

Wrote to safenames. Received an answer. Might be useful to someone.

Thank you for reaching out and I can appreciate your concern over the apparent transfer of your ".GA" domain name. Safenames is one of the leading Corporate Domain Name Registrars and we have been instructed by Freenom to register and manage their ".GA" domains moving forwards.

We are currently in the process of mapping registered domains to their current registrants which should start to be reflected on Whois lookups shortly.

All customers, as a result of this change, will be receiving emails from both Safenames and Freenom in due course, explaining this in more detail. If you have any urgent questions, please contact Freenom and they will be happy to help.

They haven't answered me since June 6th. When did you write to them? It looks like some domains got PRIORITY BALI.GA was registered via 101domain.com (freenom's reseller?) and now squatted by Safe Names with proper NS delegation to ns1.101domain.com & ns2.101domain.com

My domain got old DNS records back. But in the freenom's account "Use default nameservers (Freenom Nameservers)"

I wrote to them on June 7, they answered today

I'm the owner of the above mentioned asti.ga . Free to help anyone, if I can. Note that a list of registrars is here: https://mon.ga/english.html

Freenom has been in decline for a while.

It was great for a quick free domain for a temporary site - until all the phishers and spammers made the free extensions untrustworthy.

Swapped to using subdomains of a short domain I own for the few domains I had left at Freenom, ready for this moment.

I imagine .ml, .cf and .gq will be close behind.

Everything on the internet is ruined by "the phishers and spammers"

It's sad that we can't have nice things

Uh, let's see what will happen to the most abused free fishing domain, .TK as operated also by freenom. I use that and I am a bit worried by the spammers. Though freenom recently got better killing those.

> Though freenom recently got better killing those.

They recently got sued by Meta altogether and stopped registering new domains: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/03/sued-by-meta-freenom-hal...

Shitty Facebook is playing double-standards considering they themselves host a large amount of malicious pages for various illegal activities.

06.06 - PAID domains squatted by safenames (with 15 hrs delay)

12.06 - they pointed proper (before flushing) NS records. And broke it again, cause they took TOO old ns records (I've pointed to improper he.net servers once, with changing to proper in end)

Nobody answers, so PRETY GOOD JOB SO FAR

Try to change NS records in the freenom's account

freenom is dead in this way. You cant do anything with GA domains via freenom.

Whelp, there goes my personal site. DNS already stopped routing yesterday. Would've been great if the other registrars mentioned were actually allowing address transfers. Only one of them would allow a transfer and they wanted nearly $30/yr for it! For that much I'll just go get a .com for 1/3 the price...

Happy to hear, rather Gabonese management than Freenom, such an awful company in every way.

Is there anything to do if you "own" a .GA domain? I registered once a free .GA domain via freenom and would like to keep it.

All it would take is everyone to shift DNS servers, to say a project like OpenNIC [1] and the internet would be freer of capitalistic data packets.

[1] https://www.opennic.org/

Thanks for sharing - I didn't know about OpenNIC. It looks like an alternative to ICANN where the key distinguishing trait is that TLDs and domain names are awarded with a landrush model (whoever claims it first owns it.) If it gains popularity, I wonder how it will avoid squatting and after-market (i.e., after-registration) trading.

There are many root server alternatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root

"We only need the entire world to fight back against evil corporate interests"

Sent from my iPhone

> Sent from my iPhone

This is a little on the nose for a "Yet you participate in society" comment[1] - you even mention the iPhone!

1. https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

"All"

Just found out that my NAS is no longer available, didn’t get any heads up about the end of service. Naturally this happens when your on holiday, 2000km from home.

The .ga change is not happening until next week.

My domain has been purged from almost all dns providers so the bottom line is the same.

Mine also appears to be purged now, it was a free ga domain registered from Freenom for 3 years.

So, there's no way to get it back now I believe. Guess I'll have to find a new one..

I heard that several that million domains didn't have valid contact info. Was your domain one of those, perhaps?

Mine certainly did, plus we supposedly had purchased the domain until 2030. NXDOMAIN today though!

There's really no transparency about this, and I've no idea if my business has just been destroyed (or mortally wounded) overnight...

Really sucky that your registrar didn't write to you.

Thanks for your sympathy; par-for-the-course with Freenom, though.

They destroyed. Faster go to gandi.net and register your domain ($25). Recover dns records, then switch over to another domain in good zone.

Thanks for the suggestion. I've tried that, but the purchase is stuck at "Creation in progress". It wouldn't surprise me if new creations are being blocked while the new TLD registry is being setup.

Nope, it worked: https://asti.ga . Thanks for the suggestion @afnic_shitass (username checks out).

My ga. domains squatted by Safe Names. Lets check their privileges...

My domain has also moved to safenames according to Whois information, but I cannot register on the safenames website. Error "Update Unsuccessful Please fix the missing or invalid Data". All data is filled in

Cool story: the whois server for ga zone is not pointed in whole internet (iana empty records: https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/ga.html). Old working web-whois: https://whois.freenom.com/cgi-bin/whois?domainname=nic.ga&lo... Old canonical from whois utility: https://github.com/rfc1036/whois/commit/57a51c9fdb4d310e8deb...

So I just guessed it: whois.nic.ga (web&whois protocol)

Did you check whois via something like domaintools? I've got same error.

whois domaintools info of my domain: Registrar SAFENAMES LTD IANA ID: — URL: — Whois Server: —

I changed the DNS in my freenom account and it worked. My domain is up and running. It looks like the paid domains have transferred to SAFENAMES

Stupid nonsense. These idiots have deleted GOOGLE.GA And their government domains are registered on natural person (mon.ga, aninf.ga). SICK!

[flagged]

Why is it ironic?

That's how colonialism works. Rid the colony of resources, introduce tech and changes the local population has no experience with and make sure not to train them on it. Watch them attempt to get their freedom while at the same time being forced to come to you for help.

On this particular issue, Gabon never had to administer this, so they never had a need for this skillset.

> Watch them attempt to get their freedom while at the same time being forced to come to you for help

On the other hand, they obviously weren't forced to ask France to administrate their DNS, since they worked with Freenom for all this time (though maybe not the 30 years of so since .ga was allocated) until they just now turned to a French non-profit...

blancia.ga