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by sealeck 607 days ago
> what has actually happened is that the domain is blacklisted by entirely too powerful entities. The problem lies with these blacklisting entities, not with the domain, and the solution must be done there, too. It should not be a domain owner’s responsibility to get out of being unfairly blacklisted.

These kinds of blacklists exist because these domains have been used to host scams or distribute spam (or some other malicious activity) in the past. They're there to protect people (e.g. so that Firefox can disply a "warning: this site is a scam") and reduce abuse. They're not just there so people at Google can get a good kick out of blacklisting random domains.

1 comments

I'm guessing here because I'm not the author but I believe this statement is directed towards the blocklisting entities because they don't provide transparencies or a method to reach them to resolve issues with a domain once it's aquired by someone else. That absolutely is the issue of those entities.
At one point of time when I had to deal with people submitting phishing links to a web service I owned, I learned some of the tricks that phishers use to get around reports, such as using IP geolocation or the accept-language and accept-encoding header to determine if the phishing page should be served.

With tricks like this, it's not a surprise to see why the companies operating blocklists are hesitant to make this process easy; after all, what's to prevent the phishers from temporarily stating that the issue has been resolved to get out of the denylist, and then restarting their campaign again?

If the process required you to verify ID, e.g. a passport + video selfie, some accountability might be possible. But that might be too invasive for many folks.
This doesn't work because there's a nearly unlimited supply of people willing (out of desperation, drug addiction, or just plain poor decision making) to let bad actors use their IDs.
Also, all that info has been leaked a billion times now, and there are tools to allow real-time filter/overlays of faces to make it even easier.
It's what banks are using now.
If you could get out of blacklists by transferring ownerships then people can “wash” domains by fake transfers.