Robosane.Zapto.Org is Offline


July 2, 2014

Robobenklein

EDIT: This issue has been resolved, and our domain is functioning again.

We’re sorry to inform you that robosane.zapto.org has been taken offline due to actions by Microsoft. The domain robosane.tk robosane.net wil still remain functioning and it serves the same purpose as robosane.zapto.org. We are sorry for any inconvenience. If you wish to know more about why, please read further on this article.

 

Just to remind everyone reading this, we as a company are using solely open-source Operating Systems, namely Ubuntu, and we are not vulnerable to any kind of Windows or Mac viruses, trojans, or malware.

All of our servers are completely unaffected by this change, and they all will remain available through robosane.tk robosane.net no matter the issue.

This is the notification we recieved from No-Ip informing us about the domain confiscation by Microsoft:

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 No­IP have a very strict abuse policy. Our abuse team is constantly working to keep the No-­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. 

We aren't asking you to respond in any way, however, the best way you can help is when a friend asks "Is Robosane down?" please inform them of this unfortunate occurrence.