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No-IP and Microsoft: DNS Servers Shut Down

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ATMINSIDE

Sim Racing Aficionado Co-Owner
Joined
Jun 28, 2012
Source

We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. It is not a technical issue. This morning, Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 22 of our most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware. We were very surprised by this. We have a long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us. Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives...... (Continued on link)

Anyone using No-IP, check your DNS to see if it resolves.
I was having issues getting people into TeamSpeak last night, turns out this is why.

A big :mad: to Microsoft.
 
There has GOT to be MUCH more to the story than this. MS doesn't typically run to court INSTANTLY.

Here's more in an email I got today:

No-IP said:
We want to update all our loyal customers about the service outages that many of you are experiencing today. This is NOT A TECHINCAL ISSUE WITH NO-IP.
This morning, Microsoft served a federal court order and seized 22 of our most commonly used domains because they claimed that some of the subdomains have been abused by creators of malware. We were very surprised by this. We have a long history of proactively working with other companies when cases of alleged malicious activity have been reported to us. Unfortunately, Microsoft never contacted us or asked us to block any subdomains, even though we have an open line of communication with Microsoft corporate executives.

We have been in contact with Microsoft today. They claim that their intent is to only filter out the known bad hostnames in each seized domain, while continuing to allow the good hostnames to resolve. However, this is not happening. Apparently, the Microsoft infrastructure is not able to handle the billions of queries from our customers. Millions of innocent users are experiencing outages to their services because of Microsoft’s attempt to remediate hostnames associated with a few bad actors.

Had Microsoft contacted us, we could and would have taken immediate action. Microsoft now claims that it just wants to get us to clean up our act, but its draconian actions have affected millions of innocent Internet users.

Vitalwerks and NoÂ*IP have a very strict abuse policy. Our abuse team is constantly working to keep the No-Â*IP system domains free of spam and malicious activity. We use sophisticated filters and we scan our network daily for signs of malicious activity. Even with such precautions, our free dynamic DNS service does occasionally fall prey to cyber scammers, spammers, and malware distributors. But this heavy-handed action by Microsoft benefits no one. We will do our best to resolve this problem quickly.
We are working through the night on an alternative solution to resolve these issues. Please know that we are on your side with this issue and are doing everything we can to resolve it as quickly as possible. You can also read our formal response on our blog.
After you read it, please to share it on Twitter and tag your responses with #FreeNoIP.
 
Like I said, MS doesnt typically go immediately to the court and seizure route. There is something else going on that the Court/Lawyers/Companies don't want publicly posted.

Seizing the domains in order to simply eradicate a "few" bad actors is akin to burning the house down to kill a spider.
 
Like I said, MS doesnt typically go immediately to the court and seizure route. There is something else going on that the Court/Lawyers/Companies don't want publicly posted.

Seizing the domains in order to simply eradicate a "few" bad actors is akin to burning the house down to kill a spider.

That's what I thought too, this post was really just to let anyone with a No-IP domain know about the incident, whatever the reasoning behind it.

I know it caused me some pretty decent headache already, and will effect many others as well.
 
More news here dragon, apparently Microsoft admitted an error, but No-IP's servers are still down.

PCWorld Link
 
buy a real domain name :) its like $5 a year
 
That's exactly along the lines of what I was thinking. Either malware that they wanted to catch the operators of OR MS pirates that they wanted to catch the operators of.

Gotta love MS going, "Oops, we fixed it! Nope problem is your side NOT ours! LALALALALALALA"

Mmhm, if Microsoft had just said "Hey, by the way, there's some malware here" then No-IP could have fixed it...
 
Since when did m$ become the police and have this ability to do what they did?

This is old m$. Makes me want to go to strictly Linux out other os's but I guess I haven't given them any money considering I've not paid for Windows for several years being a student and all
 
Since when did m$ become the police and have this ability to do what they did?

This is old m$. Makes me want to go to strictly Linux out other os's but I guess I haven't given them any money considering I've not paid for Windows for several years being a student and all
Ya I got windows free also with student too, but microsoft still got money for it.

As for linux, there is actually a lot of software out for it now. Also indie games seem to actually bother with linux so its getting there. Also with things like apt-get/YUM and an actual terminal its really tempting. Only main thing holding me back from using it over windows is that AAA games often don't work with it, but hopefully SteamOS will change that!


It sounds like microsoft really handled this whole situation completely the wrong way and then made a ton of mistakes on top of that! Just horrible on their part!
 
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