dot-EU Kerfuffle: what’s in an email anyway?

You may remember that last year I complained about what I defined the dot-EU kerfuffle, related to the news that EURid had been instructed to cancel the domain registrations of UK entities after Brexit. I thought the problem was passed when they agreed to consider European citizen as eligible holders of dot-EU domains, with an agreement reached last December, and due to enter into effect in… 2022.

You would think that, knowing that a new regulation needs to enter into effect, EURid would stop their plan of removing access to those domains for the UK residents for the time being, but it’s not so. Indeed, they instead sent a notice that effectively suggests that any old and new domain that would be then taken off the zone by marking them as WITHDRAWN first, and REVOKED second.

This means that on 2020-03-30, a lot of previously-assigned domains will be available for scammers, phishers, and identity thieves, unless they are transferred before this coming May!

You can get more user-focused read of this in this article by The Register, which does good justice to the situation, despite the author seemingly being a leaver, from the ending of a previous article linked there. One of the useful part of that article is knowing that there are over 45 thousands domain name assigned to individuals residing in the UK — and probably a good chunk of those are of either Europhiles Brits, or citizen of other EU countries residing in the UK (like me).

Why should we worry about this, given the amount of other pressing problems that Brexit is likely to cause? Well, there is a certain issue of people being identified by email addresses that contain domain names. What neither EURid nor The Register appear to have at hand (and me even less) would be to figure out how many of those domains actually are used as logins, or receive sensitive communications such as GP contacts from NHS, or financial companies.

Because if someone can take over a domain, they can take over the email address, and very quickly from there you can ruin the life of, or at least heavily bother, any person that might be using a dot-EU domain. The risks for scams, identity theft and the like are being ignored once again by EURid to try to make a political move, at a time when nobody is giving a damn of what EURid is doing.

As I said in the previous post, I have been using flameeyes[dot]eu as my primary domain for the past ten or eleven years. The blog was moved on its own domain. My primary website is still there but will be moved shortly. My primary email address is changed. You’ll see me using a dot-com email address more often.

I’m now going through the whole set of my accounts to change the email they have on file for me with a new one on a dot-com domain. This is significantly helped by having all of them on 1password, but that’s not enough — it only tells you which services that use email as username. It says nothing about (say) the banks that use a customer number, but still have your email on file.

And then there are the bigger problems.

Sometimes the email address is immutable.

You’d be surprised on how many websites have either no way to change an email address. My best guess is that whoever designed the database schema thought that just using the email address as a primary key was a good idea. This is clearly not the case, and it has not been the case ever. I’d be surprised if anyone who got their first email address from an ISP would be making that mistake, but in the era of GMail, it seems this is often forgotten.

I now have a tag for 1Password to show me which accounts I can’t change the email address of. Some of them are really minimal services, that you probably wouldn’t be surprised to just store an email address as identifier, such as the Fallout 4 Map website. Some appear to have bugs with changing email addresses (British Airways). Some … surprised me entirely: Tarsnap does not appear to have a way to change email address either.

While for some of these services being unable to receive email is not a particularly bad problem, for most of them it would be. Particularly when it comes to plane tickets. Let alone the risk that any one of those services would store passwords in plain text, and send them back to you if you forgot them. Combine that with people who reuse the same password everywhere, and you can start seeing a problem again.

OAuth2 is hard, let’s identify by email.

There is another problem if you log into services with OAuth2-based authentication providers such as Facebook or (to a lesser extent) Google. Quite a few of those services would create an account for you at first login, and use the email address that they are given by the identity provider. And then they just match the email address the next time you login.

While changing Google’s email address is a bit harder (but not impossible if, like me, you’re using GSuite), changing the address you register on Facebook with is usually easy (exceptions exist). So if you signed up for a service through Facebook, and then changed your Facebook address, you may not be able to sign in again — or you may end up signing up for the service again when you try.

In my case, I changed the domain associated of my Google account, since it’s a GSuite (business) account. That made things even more fun, because even if services may remember that Facebook allows you to change your email address, many might have forgotten that technically Google allows you to do that too. While Android and ChromeOS appear to work fine (which honestly surprised me, sorry colleagues!), Pokémon Go got significantly messed up when I did that — luckily I had Facebook connected to it as well, so a login later, and disconnect/reconnect of the Google account, was enough for it to work.

Some things are working slightly better than other. Pocket, which allows you to sign in with either a Firefox account, a Google account, or an email/password pair, appears to only care about the email address of the Google account. So when I logged in, I ended up with a new account and no access to the old content. The part that works well is that you can delete the new account, and immediately after login to the old one and replace the primary email address.

End result? I’m going through nearly every one of my nearly 600 accounts, a few at a time, trying to change my email address, and tagging those where I can’t. I’m considering writing a standard template email to send to any support address for those that do not support changing email address. But I doubt they would be fixed in time before Brexit. Just one more absolute mess caused by Cameron, May, and their friends.

The dot-EU kerfuffle — or how EURid is messing with their own best supporters

TL;DR summary: be very careful if you use a .eu domain as your point of contact for anything. If you’re thinking of registering a .eu domain to use as your primary domain, just don’t.

I have forecasted a rant when I pointed out I changed domain with my move to WordPress.

I have registered flameeyes.eu nearly ten years ago, part of the reason was because flameeyes.com was (at the time) parked to a domain squatter, and part because I have been a strong supported of the European Union.

In those ten years I started using the domain not just for my website, but as my primary contact email. It’s listed as my contact address everywhere, I have all kind of financial, commercial and personal services attached to that email. It’s effectively impossible for me to ever detangle from it, even if I spend the next four weeks doing nothing but amending registrations — some services just don’t allow you to ever change email address; many requires you to contact support and spend time talking with a person to get the email updated on the account.

And now, because I moved to the United Kingdom, which decided to leave the Union, the Commission threatens to prevent me from keeping my domain. It may sound obvious, since EURid says

A website with a .eu or .ею domain name extension tells your customers that you are a legal entity based in the EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein or Norway and are therefore, subject to EU law and other relevant trading standards.

But at the same time it now provides a terrible collapse of two worlds: technical and political. The idea that you any entity in control of a .eu domain is by requirement operating under EU law sounds good on paper… until you come to this corner case where a country leaves the Union — and now either you water down this promise, eroding trust in the domain by not upholding this law domain, or you end up with domain takeover, eroding trust in the domain on technical merit.

Most of the important details for this are already explained in a seemingly unrelated blog post by Hanno Böck: Abandoned Domain Takeover as a Web Security Risk. If EURid will forbid renewal of .eu domains for entities that are no longer considered part of the EU, a whole lot of domains will effectively be “up for grabs”. Some may currently be used as CDN aliases, and be used to load resources on other websites; those would be the worst, as they would allow the controller of the domains to inject content in other sites that should otherwise be secure.

But even more important for companies that used their .eu domain as their primary point of contact: think of any PO, or invoice, or request for information, that would be sent to a company email address — and now think of a malicious actor getting access to those communications! This is not just the risk that me (and any other European supporter who happened to live in the UK, I’m sure I’m not alone) as a single individual have — it’s a possibly unlimited amount of scams that people would be subjected to, as it would be trivial to pass for a company, once their domain is taken over!

As you can see from the title, I think this particular move is also going to hit the European supporters the most. Not just because of those individuals (like me!) who wanted to signal how they feel part of something bigger than their country of birth, but also because I expect a number of UK companies used .eu domain specifically to declare themselves open to European customers — as otherwise, between pricing in Sterling, and a .co.uk domain, it would always feel like buying “foreign goods”. Now those companies, that believed in Europe, find themselves in the weakest of positions.

Speaking of individuals, when I read the news I had a double-take, and had to check the rules for .eu domains again. At first I assumed that something was clearly wrong: I’m a European Union citizen, surely I will be able to keep my domain, no matter where I live! Unfortunately, that’s not the case:

In this first step the Registrant must verify whether it meets the General
Eligibility Criteria, whereby it must be:
(i) an undertaking having its registered office, central administration or
principal place of business within the European Union, Norway, Iceland
or Liechtenstein, or
(ii) an organisation established within the European Union, Norway, Iceland
or Liechtenstein without prejudice to the application of national law, or
(iii) a natural person resident within the European Union, Norway, Iceland or
Liechtenstein.

If you are a European Union citizen, but you don’t want your digital life to ever be held hostage by the Commission or your country’s government playing games with it, do not use a .eu domain. Simple as that. EURid does not care about the well-being of their registrants.

If you’re a European company, do think twice on whether you want to risk that a change in government for the country you’re registered in would lead you to open both yourself, your suppliers and your customers into the a wild west of overtaken domains.

Effectively, what EURid has signalled with this is that they care so little about the technical hurdles of their customers, that I would suggest against ever relying on a .eu domain for anyone at all. Register it as a defense against scammers, but don’t do business on it, as it’s less stable than certain microstate domains, or even the more trendy and modern gTLDs.

I’ll call this a self-goal. I still trust the European Union, and the Commission, to have the interests of the many in their mind. But the way they tried to apply a legislative domain to the .eu TLD was brittle at best to begin with, and now there’s no way out of here that does not ruin someone’s day, and erode the trust in that very same domain.

It’s also important to note that most of the bigger companies, those that I hear a lot of European politicians complain about, would have no problem with something like this: just create a fully-own subsidiary somewhere in Europe, say for instance Slovakia, and have it hold onto the domain. And have it just forward onto a gTLD to do business on, so you don’t even give the impression of counting on that layer of legislative trust.

Given the scary damage that would be caused by losing control over my email address of ten years, I’m honestly considering looking for a similar loophole. The cost of establishing an LLC in another country, firmly within EU boundaries, is not pocket money, but it’s still chump change compared to the amount of damage (financial, reputation, relationships, etc) that it would be a good investment.

It’s 2014, why are domains so hard?

Last year I’ve moved to Ireland and as of last December, I closed the VAT ID that made me a self-employed consultant. The reason why it took me a while to close the ID was that I still had a few contracts going on, which I needed to have expire before. One of the side effect of closing the ID is also that I had/have to deal with all the accounts where said ID was used, including the OVH account where almost all of my domains, and one of my servers, were registered — notably, xine-project.org has been registered forever at a different provider, Register4less of UserFriendly fame.

For most accounts, removing a VAT ID is easy: you update your billing information and tell them that you no longer have a VAT ID. In some rare cases, you have to forgo the account, so you just change the email address to a different one, and register a new account. In the case of OVH, things are more interesting. Especially so if you want to actually be honest.

In this case, I wanted to move my domains out of my account, in Italy, with a VAT ID, to an account in Ireland, without said ID — one of the reasons is that the address used for registration is visible in most whois output, and while I don’t care for my address being public, the address is now my mother’s only, and it bothered me having it visible there. That was a mistake (from one point of view, and a godsend from another).

First problem is that you cannot change either your account or your VAT ID status out of an OVH account, which meant I needed to transfer the domains and server to a different account. There was (and possibly is, I don’t want to go look for it) some documentation on how to transfer resources across contacts (i.e. OVH accounts), but when I tried to follow it, the website gave me just a big “Error” page, unfortunately “Error” was the whole content of the page.

Contacted for help, OVH Italia suggested using their MoM management software to handle the transition. I tried, and the results have been just as bad, but at least it did error out with an explanation, about trying to cross countries with the transfer. I then contacted OVH Ireland as well as OVH Italia, with the former, after a long discussion where they suggested me to do … exactly what I did, “assured me” that the procedure works correctly — only for OVH Italia apologizing a couple of days later that indeed a month earlier they changed the procedures because of some contractual differences between countries. They suggested using the “external transfer” – going through your standard transfer procedure for domains – but it turns out their system fails when you try that, as the domain is already in their database, so they suggest using the “internal transfer” instead (which as I said does not work).

Since a couple of my domains were going to expire soon, this past weekend I decided to start moving them out of OVH, given that the two branches couldn’t decide how to handle my case. The result is that I started loading the domains onto Gandi — among the reasons, the VideoLan people and one of my colleague know them pretty well and suggested them warmly. This proved trickier, but it also provide one thing: not all French companies are equal!

I started by moving my .eu, .es and .info domains (I own among others automake.info, which redirects to my Autotools Mythbuster — the reason is that if you type the name of the info manuals on G+, it actually brings you there! I was actually planning to make them actually point to a copy of the respective info manuals, but I’ve not studied the GFDL enough yet to know whether I can). While the .info domains are still in limbo right now, as OVH has a five-days timeout before you transfer out, and the .es domains were transferred almost immediately (the Spanish NIC is extremely efficient in that regard, they basically just send you an email to confirm you want to change the registry, and if you accept, that’s it!), the .eu were a bit of a pain.

Turns out that EURid wants a full address to assign the domain to, including a post code; unfortunately Ireland has no post code, yet and even the usual ways to represent my area of Dublin (4, 0004, D4, etc) failed; even the “classical” 123456 that is used by many Irish failed. After complaining on Twitter, a very dedicated Gandi employee, Emerick, checked it out and found that the valid value, according to EURid (but not to Gandi’s own frontend app, ironically) is “Dublin 4”. He fixed that for me on their backend, and the .eu registration went through; this blog is now proudly served by Gandi and that makes it completely IPv6 compatible.

But the trial was not completed yet. One of the reasons why I wanted to move to Gandi now, was that Register4Less was requiring me sort-of-transfer the domain from Tucows (where they resold it before) to their new dedicated registry, to keep the privacy options on. The reason for that being that Tucows started charging more, and they would have had to charge me the extra if I wanted to keep it. On the other hand, they offered to transfer it, extend the expiration another year and keep the privacy option on. I did not like the option because I just had renewed the domain the past November for a bunch of years, so I did not want to extend it even further already — and if I had to, I would at that point try to reduce the number of services I need to keep my eyes on. Besides, unlike Register4Less and OVH, Gandi supports auto-renewal of domains, which is a good thing.

Unfortunately, for ICANN or whoever else manages the .org decided that “Dublin 4” is not a valid postal code, so I had to drop it again off the account, to be able to transfer xine-project.org. Fun, isn’t it? Interestingly both the .org and .it administrators handle the lack of a post code properly — the former as N/A and the latter as the direct translation N.D.. Gandi has been warned, they will probably handle it sometime soon. In the mean time it seems like the .eu domains are not available to Irish residents, as long as they don’t want to fake an address somewhere else.

And the cherries on top, now that I’m migrating everything to Gandi? Their frontend webapp is much better at handling multiple identically-configured domains, to begin with. And as they shown already their support is terrific especially when compared to the mirror-climbing of their other French competitors. But most importantly, have you read a couple of weeks ago, the story of @N? How an attacker got a hold of GoDaddy and caused trouble for the owner of the @N twitter account? Well, turns out that Gandi people are much more security conscious than GoDaddy (okay that was easy) and not only they provide an option to disable the “reset password by email” option, but also provide 2FA through HOTP, which means it’s compatible with Google Authenticator (as well as a bunch of other software).

End of story? I’m perfectly happy to finally having a good provider for my domains, one that is safe and secure and that I can trust. And I owe Emerick a drink next time I stop by Paris! Thanks Gandi, thanks Emerick!

A story of a Registry, an advertiser, and an unused domain

This is a post that relates to one of my dayjobs, and has nothing to do with Free Software, yet it is technical. If you’re not interested in non-Free Software related posts, you’re suggested to skip this altogether. If you still care about technical matters, read on!

Do you remember that customer of mine that almost never pays me in time, for which I work basically free of charge, and yet gives me huge headaches from time to time with requests that make little to no sense? Okay you probably remember by now, or you simply don’t care.

Two years or so ago, that customer calls me up one morning asking me to register a couple of second-level domains in as many TLDs as I thought it made sense to, so that they could set up a new web-end to the business. Said project still hasn’t delivered, mostly because the original estimate I sent the customer was considered unreasonably expensive, and taking “too much time” — like they haven’t spent about the same already, and my nine months estimate sounds positively short when you compare it with the over two years gestation the project is lingering on. At any rate, this is of no importance to what I want to focus on here.

Since that day, one set of domains was left to expire as it wasn’t as catchy as it sounded at first, and only the second set was kept registered. I have been paid for the registration of course, while the domains have been left parked for the time being (no they decided not to forward them to the main domain of the business where the address, email and phone number are).

The other day I was trying to find a way to recover a bit more money out of this customer and, incidentally, this blog, and I decided to register to AdSense again, this time with my VAT ID as I have to declare eventual profits coming from that venue. One of the nice features of AdSense allows to “monetize” (gosh how much I hate that word!) parked domains. Since these are by all means parked domains, I gave it a chance.

Four are the domains parked this way: .net, .com, .eu and .it. All registered with OVH – which incidentally has fixed its IPv6 troubles – and up to now all pointing to a blackhole redirect. How do you assign a parked domain to Google’s AdSense service? Well, it’s actually easy: you just have to point the nameservers for the domain to the four provided by Google, and you’re set. On three out of four of the TLDs I had to deal with.

After setting it up on Friday, as of Monday, Google still wouldn’t verify the .it domain; OVH was showing the task alternatively as “processing” and “completed” depending on whether I looked at the NS settings (they knew they had a request to change them) or at the task’s status page (as it’ll be apparent in a moment, it was indeed cloesd). I called them — reason I like OVH: I can get somebody on the phone to eat least listen to me.

What happens? Well, looks like Registro.it – already NIC-IT, the Italian Registration Authority – is once again quite strict in what it accepts. It was just two years ago that they stopped requiring you to fax an agreement to actually be able to register a .it domain, and as of last year you still had to do the same when transferring the domain. Luckily they stopped requiring both, and this year I was able to transfer a domain in the matter of a week or so. But what about this time?

Well, it turns out that the NIC validates the new nameservers when you want to change them, to make sure that the new servers list the domain, and configure it properly. This is common procedure, and both the OVH staff and me were aware of this. What we weren’t aware of (OVH staffers had no clue about this either, they had to call NIC-IT to see what the trouble was, they weren’t informed properly either) is the method they do that: using dig +ANY.

Okay, it’s nothing surprising actually, dig +ANY is the standard way to check for a domain’s zone at a name server… but turns out that ns1.googleghs.com and its brothers – the nameservers you need to point a domain to, for use with AdSense – do not support said queries, making them invalid in the eyes of NIC-IT. Ain’t that lovely? The OVH staffer I spoke with said they’ll inform NIC-IT about the situation, but they don’t count on them changing their ways and … I actually have to say that I can’t blame them. Indeed I don’t see the reason why Google’s DNS might ignore ANY queries.

For my part, I told them that I would try to open a support request with Google to see if they intend to rectify the situation. The issue here is that, as much as I spent trying to find that out, I can’t seem to find a place where to open a ticket for the Google AdSense staff to read. I tried tweeting to their account, but it seems like it didn’t make much sense.

Luckily there is an alternative when you can’t simply set up the domain to point to Google’s DNS, and that is to create a custom zone, which is what I’ve done now. It’s not much of a problem, but it’s still bothersome that one of Google’s most prominent services is incompatible with a first-world Registration Authority such as NIC-IT.

Oh well.

I’m just absolutely insane at this point

You might remember that I have had some nasty problems with my surname and internationalisation in general. What I didn’t post at the time, because I was still unsure about it, was something very Internet-related, with my surname.

A few months ago, in a job-related call, I had to leave my email address to someone, who either is not much practical with English or just didn’t like the “hackers’ way” of having a pseudonym, and suggested that “flameeyes” is too difficult to write and I should just use my full name, at least for job-related mail. Beside the obvious concern that if I am to work for somebody who think “flameeyes” is not good, I’m probably not doing a job I’d enjoy (I sincerely hope to find something that would let me just use “flameeyes” as company’s username, although I admit it might not be that feasible unless I’m self-employed, ~~which I guess I could be~~ ironically since I drafted this post things changed and I am now self-employed…), I have two main drawbacks of doing that. Again, my surname hits, since I doubt any mail server would be able to accept “pettenò” as part of the username, not even in punycode, and then probably “diego.elio.pettenò@something” is unlikely to be easy to spell.

I actually thought about making a point. I am disappointed when people seem to think that “Pettenò” and “Petteno” are just the same and equivalent; sorry they are not. It’s not just a decoration on the “o”; I can understand if an English speaker wouldn’t know how to differentiate, I’m sure they also find it difficult to type, but beside the fact they can copy it, what I get upset about is when it’s not handled in the databases where I register myself. I’m sure if I have to spell it out on the phone it’s going to be a problem, but I get upset if the automated systems can’t handle it, because we have the tools. We’re not in the ‘80s where multiple 8-bit ASCII codepages were cool, we’re in 2009 and UTF-8 is available everywhere.

Or almost everywhere; although IDN (Internationalised Domain Names) actually exist, which allow UTF-8 characters to be used for domain names, they are not enabled by default on all TLDs, and they are not for instance in either the .it ccTLD (which would be my country’s), nor on the .eu TLD (which would be my choice, as you can see from my own blog), nor they enable all the symbols in all the TLDs. This is of course because there have been quite a few security concerns regarding their use, as differentiating between variant of the same character as allowed by UTF-8 is far from trivial for the human eye and that allowed for some quite elaborated phising attack. Indeed if I were to use an UTF-8 encoded domain name with the .it TLD in Firefox, it would show up with its punycode encoding because it’s just not safe.

Interestingly enough, the Spanish ccTLD .es not only allows IDN, with the “ò” character, but also seems not to have limitations on registration of domains from foreigners (I have to thank Santiago – Coldwind – for letting me know about that!); while my local registar does not seem to have .es as an option, the one on the other side of the ocean does; while r4l isn’t cheap, it does a good job for the xine domain and since I’m likely to do some tricky stuff with it I might as well have need for some help on the domain handling side (TopHost, with whom I registered this domain, is quite cheap, but still does not allow me to drop the “www.” third-level domain for the main site, and doesn’t have a quick resolution; R4L, while having had some trouble when I registered the domain in the first place, has always been quick and friendly). The choice of R4L was really a good one, thanks to the guys there I could get the IDN domain registered, which failed at the first automated attempt!

So at the end I decided to bite the bullet and basically waste sixty of our eurobucks on this crazy idea, registering three .es domains: pettenò.es, petteno.es and petten.es; I really don’t like the idea of having the last two myself, that is not my surname and I probably am open to just transfer them to someone else if they were to be used by someone having that name; on the other hand I’m expecting disaster from most applications so I’m trying to cover my asses to avoid that non-IDN-enabled software would send mail to the wrong address (that would be a funny security issue).

I want to set up a few things before starting but I’m going to start using some new addresses on the main domain (pettenò.es) quite soon; you probably won’t see my mail going out with that domain in the first place, but I’m going to use it to register on sites and try accessing mailing lists. It’s going to be fun.

I know there are people probably already using IDN domains out there in the wild, but the reason why I want to look at this at first hand is that, first of all, I’m quite the nitpicker especially for Free Software; you most certainly are going to see changes in Free Software I work on if it doesn’t work with my new shiny IDN-enabled domain. Second, I’m going to try them in an environment where they are not expected; Spanish web developers have more chance to have encountered IDN before (I remember www.elpaís.es used as an example), and thus to have taken care to support that than their colleagues in Italy. I’m going to have so much fun with the Italian bureaucracy with this, I’m sure.

But I’m sure I can find enough problems with Free Software especially in configuration files; I’m also sure that a lot of projects wouldn’t consider those problems, because, you know, supporting UTF-8 everywhere would be like accepting that English is not the only language… it so happens that it is not! And I get pretty vocal when it comes to supporting my full name properly. Maybe I just have problems, and I need the help of someone good, or maybe I’m just not ready to settle for mediocre software.

We’ll see.

Update (2016-04-29): These domains are no longer under my control, although I still own http://pettenò.eu.

Renewing domains

In exactly two months it’ll be one year since the new xine tracker was put up and made operative. This means that the domain, which I registered as a test, is going to expire and I’ll have to renew it first.

Because I have some availability right now and it should make quite sense to do it this way, I decided to make it a five years renewal; it’s a long time but xine should well outlast it, and I think it’s easier to do it once rather than doing it every year with the risk I might be in the hospital and let the renewal time lapse.

Just so that everything is transparent, the renewal will cost around $75, which is about €50, which will come from the Yamato fund, so thank you to everybody who contributed.

Hopefully in the next future xine-project.org might host more than just the bugtracker, in line with Mike’s FATE testing for FFmpeg, once I’ll have written unit tests for xine and maybe even more complex tests, like making sure the metadata of a file are properly read, and so on to make sure video and audio play in a decent way (it’s going to be difficult as here we might not have exact conversions like FATE does).

I haven’t lost my faith in xine, I think we can do great, we just need to find enough people to help with it though, because alone is not going to work very well.

Proud to be European

And no, it’s not a matter of not liking Americans, it’s just a matter of being more proud being an European than being an Italian ;)

A couple of discussions in a few different channels, involving quite some different people, in the last few days, ended up with me deciding to actually register a domain for myself (which also wouldn’t be tied to dyndns), and of course such a domain had to be a .eu domain :)

The reason why it had to be a .eu is actually pretty simple: .com is in one of the common domain traps, it seems, .net had nothing to do with me, .org was already misused by the previous domain (flameeyes.is-a-geek.org), .it is a pain in the ass to register…

I actually like it this way, I wrote before that I like living in the European Union, as I can shop in Germany to get around stupid Italian prices. So I decided to change (maybe temporarily, not decided yet) the logo on the homepage with a slightly different version, thanks Angela for preparing it for me :)

The old URLs will be redirected to the new one, but you might want to update your bookmarks and feeds nevertheless: the URL is now https://blog.flameeyes.eu/ enjoy! :)

(It’s also shorter to write, 17 versus 32 characters, no dashes, no fourth-level domain, which makes it quite easier to remember).

goes away whistling the Ode to Joy