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I was very concerned about my email address... I had robertb@geocities.com from way before Yahoo! bought out Geocities. But as the spam increased more and more, the geocities.com/yahoo.com address became more and more worthless. The kicker was when some b*stard used my email address as the reply-to on a spam message... first my inbox filled with bounce messages, then with angry messages from recipients and sysadmins.

I changed my reply-to address to the email on my own domain, dixie-chicks.com, and after a few months, all mail from people I cared to hear from was coming to an email address I controlled. The economics are there:

* 12 euros/year (< us$15 even on a bad day) for a domain name from Gandi.net. If all you need is email forwarding, stop here -- they have it.

* 6 bucks/month for a web host like the one I use. Includes no-ad no-popup web space and unlimited web-based email addresses. Not meaning to plug, but they are reliable and cheap.

All together, it's worth $15 a year + $6 a month for a better deal and better service than I'd ever get from Yahoo!.

To fix this, hand over pengaol.com and go register pengdialer.com, which is still available.

"The Client owns the Domain Name registered. Gandi simply acts on the Client's behalf. "

A more subtle distinction that it appears at first, IMHO.

John Gilmore said:
> That's just because you were silly enough to buy your domains from Verisign. They rely on millions of people like you, who were too lazy to switch; that's why their price is so high.

I did switch. I get my domains now through Joker.com, at about $11. each. I still consider this too expensive.

>I get domains for $8 to $12/year via eNom.com.

I went to their web site and they state that they want $29.95 for a domain. It was unclear if this was for a one year or two year registration, but even if it was two years, that means $15./year. But you probably have connections that I don't.

About US$10/year (EUR12/year) to have any of .COM, .NET, or .ORG domains. I have had all my domains registered through them for about three years.

They even do DNS for you, if you don't have it. And their entire system is automated. I've never had to make a phone call, send a letter, or a FAX. Everything, and I mean everything is done through their web interface.

And just in case you wonder, I'm a U.S. citizen... the fact these guys are based out of France and charge me in Euros doesn't seem to make any difference. I've never had a problem with these guys. They're clued.

Hey, I always wanted to have J.ORG which is my first name. Too bad you cannot get one letter domains, as far as I know.
It's okay, I have jawtheshark.net, jawtheshark.org and jawtheshark.com and also a ${MYLASTNAME}.lu domain. The last one is expensive, but the other three only cost me 12 Euro per year at Gandi Not that there is anything interesting to see on my sites...Just vanity :-)

A little bit of digging indicates that this Stefan Puffer is well known inside the security community as "Dr SuSe", especially among the developers of Snort.

He can be reached at the email address drsuse@drsuse.org (he owns the domain) or drsuse@sgsnetwerks.com

So, it seems he has the added incentive of making a name for himself. It doesn't really surprise me that he was arrested.

Also, he went to J. Frank Dobie High School in 1987.

A little bit of digging indicates that this Stefan Puffer is well known inside the security community as "Dr SuSe", especially among the developers of Snort.

He can be reached at the email address drsuse@drsuse.org (he owns the domain) or drsuse@sgsnetwerks.com

So, it seems he has the added incentive of making a name for himself. It doesn't really surprise me that he was arrested.

Also, he went to J. Frank Dobie High School in 1987.

Gandi will register your domain and forward the email for 12 Euro per year.
They also do web page redirections, which might be useful to you.

• Find an old useless computer (486 or P-I class).
• Install OpenBSD (buy the CD for support. I did)
• Configure NAT/FP, sendmail and apache
• Register a cheap domain name at Gandi.net
• Create an account at DynDns and donate 30 bucks
• Pick one of the many dyndns updaters
• Put machine in closet and let it run 24/24, 7/7.

IsMyJobHotorNot.com

The site seems to be slashdotted already. It's so bad the hostname is'nt even resolving.

Gleaned from the world's most idealogically sound domain registrar:

After checking, the domain name IsMyJobHotorNot.com is available.

Actually, Microsoft had passport.com "stolen" a few years back after it expired. The person did just do it for a joke, and gave it back.

I'm not sure what the circumstances were in this case, but my registrar Gandi reserves domain names for 30 days after expiration. After that, they are available for someone else to register.

I'm not sure how Microsoft does it now, but I imagine they have recurring billing for a number of years on their domains now, or paid many years in advance.

But verisign doesn't have exclusive control over .com or any tlds anymore.

If this passes, whats to stop me from registering my xxx .com/net/org domains through Gandi, and going merrily on my .com-porno way? (gandi doesn't seem like an organzation that's going bend over for some ridiculous US law)

And what about links to sexual content?
If linking to explicit content makes a site explicit, just about any discussion site would immediately have to be in the .prn TLD. But if linking to explicit content was allowed, TGPs would still be OK in the .com namespace, and it would defeat the purpose. And who's going to decide what is explicit content? The government already enforces the age restrictions on rated "R" movies, based on the MPAA's internationally-hated violence-good/sex-bad ideology, and the MPAA has already dipped their toes in the website-rating waters... I'm sure these .prn assignments won't be run like that, though, right?

Theres so many problems with this concept it's rediculous. I'm all for a .prn TLD, but blocking sites from .com is censorship no matter how you look at it. (many services WOULD just block the entire .prm TLD, making those sites exist only to audiences with the "dangerous" full internet connection.

The simple way you "can tell what the truth is", is that every single other person associated with censorware.org has wanted Michael Sims to stop playing dog-in-the-manger with the censorware.org domain name. And not only has he refused, he's now turned it into a smear-site. Note this does not depend on whether or not you believe I am sane.

It's instructive to look at, e.g. Jonathan Wallace's account, and a public comment by Jamie McCarthy. This isn't objective proof, though, because we all could be ganging-up on Michael Sims (pile-ons have happened, Michael Sims is trying to create one on me).

I categorically deny the accusations of spamming Slashdot and similar. And the way to know the truth of that is simple logic. If he had anything, anything, serious on me, he'd be making maximum use of it. When you break it down, the only thing he has, is much calling me names, and that other people have called me names. In contrast, he still has the censorware.org registration

If you want, we can take this to e-mail.

I can't recommend gandi (www.gandi.net) highly enough. In addition to the small and entirely pro-consumer terms of service, it's really cheap: a mere $10. And since I switched to them, the email address that I use to register domain names has stopped getting spam. (The old one that I used with netsol still gets plenty). These guys are the best.
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kurukshetra all the desi news and views you could use

I've also been using Gandi to great success.

Gandi has worked great for me. Only 12 euros per year (about $10) and their terms of service are very good (you actually own the domain). They also do website and e-mail redirection for free.

I've been associated VeriSign with bad business for a long time. I've heard nothing but bad stuff about them -- that it's a pain to update information, that it's expensive, that it's hard to talk to tech support...

Of course, this is also second-hand.

Gandi has the best terms of use and one of the best prices according to a big comparative review I read on the 'Net a while ago. My friend signed up with them and is happy with them. If you're looking for someone besides VeriSign, they might be good. I've heard that GoDaddy is also a good choice, if you don't like Gandi.

Of course, YMMV, and you might prefer a different one, but VeriSign is one of the few with a straight out bad rep.

Anyone a VeriSign fan out there?

I reckon they're well worth a look.

I never really figured that Verisign would stoop to being so slimy as to "slam" people with phony renewals... and anyway, most registrars require you to (A)cknowledge the transfer... just in case you forgot where your domains lived. :)

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you can buy domain-based E-mail redirection [dnscentral.com] for about $20 per year.

Even cheaper: At Gandi.net, you can get your own domain name for €12/domain/yr. If you turn on Gandi's free mail and web forwarding, it redirects http://www.foobar4.org/rest/of/URL to http://you.your.isp/rest/of/URL or http://your.isp/you/rest/of/URL and forwards *@foobar4.org to you@your.isp with up to five exceptions going to other addresses.

Basically, you register a domain with them and get free email and web forwarding with it. A .com domain is $17 for one year.

Why pay 17 bucks for that when you can get it for $10? Gandi.net is a French company which will do the same thing for less.

I use Gandi in France for all my US domain registrations because of their registration agreements first point "Client owns domain" and their price 12Euro is pretty damn reasonable for me here in NZ.
Also they have a really easy "Transfer Domain" option which forces NSI to relinquish the domain if you accept the emails.
NSI often doesn't even bother to reply to the requests from Gandi or the domain owner and so according to the ICANN registrar agreements if two out of the three contacts reply confirming the transfer then it happens.
I transferred ages ago with no problems and they even credited me for the time remaining on the domains.
The only possible spanner in the works could be if you can't pay be credit card as they only accept that or a bank cheque in Euros sent to them.

Oh by the way, Gandi says that it takes up to a week to process domains, but in reality it's never taken more than 1-2 days and as soon as your payment is confirmed the domain becomes unavailable to others.

Gandi and 975Register.com

• I contacted the new registrar (Gandi), and asked/paid them to transfer my domain to them.
• They (Gandi) contacted via email the three official contacts from the original registration: Administrative contact, Technical contact and Billing contact (visible via WHOIS) requesting official permission. You are probably the billing & admin contact, while the tech contact might be you, NSI, or whoever's providing your DNS.
• Assuming they receive positive replies from the contacts (no response from 1 contact is fine), then they pass on the transfer request to the original registrar.
• The registry entry gets updated with your new registrar. Both the old and the new registrars (should) then email you with the updated information. You're now fully transfered!

• I contacted the new registrar (Gandi), and asked/paid them to transfer my domain to them.
• They (Gandi) contacted via email the three official contacts from the original registration: Administrative contact, Technical contact and Billing contact (visible via WHOIS) requesting official permission. You are probably the billing & admin contact, while the tech contact might be you, NSI, or whoever's providing your DNS.
• Assuming they receive positive replies from the contacts (no response from 1 contact is fine), then they pass on the transfer request to the original registrar.
• The registry entry gets updated with your new registrar. Both the old and the new registrars (should) then email you with the updated information. You're now fully transfered!

If you register through register.com, they let you point your domain wherever you want using their web interface. I wish I had registered all my domains through them.

GANDI does the same thing -- plus they give you five or six email addresses at your domain that will forward wherever you want, and you can set up a catch-all address that will forward everything else.

Now if only I had a use for all of my domains...

So true! I once wanted to change contacts for the domain for my school newspaper, and they said I had to fax a letter on company letterhead, where the letterhead had me as having some lofty position. I told them we didn't have letterhead, and asked if I should make some up. I even asked what position I should be. They suggested managing director. A download of the paper's masthead from the web and a few clickety-clicks in Word later, I had my easiest promotion ever and new contacts on my domain. Pretty stupid, but that's NSI.

Of course now, all my domains reside with Gandi. It's very simple to transfer it from gandi's web site - all you need to do is reply to an email, and they do the rest.

Their TOC is reasonable as well: You own the domain, plain and simple, until you let the registration lapse.

So long as your domain isn't past its expiration date, NSI can do nothing to prevent you from transferring it out of their control. Just go to another registrar and follow their procedure to move a domain to their aegis.

I use Gandi.net, myself (not Ghandi.net; that's a squatter, and costs a lot more). Gandi charges 12 EU (about $10 US) to transfer the domain, and tacks on an additional year of registration. Check them out.

You should switch registrars as soon as possible, not only because NSI is unethical, but because your first few attempts may fail because NSI is very, very bad.

I work for an small ISP and whenever an NSI-registered domain we host comes up for renewal, we suggest that the domain owner switch registrars. We recommend Gandi, a bunch of French Linux geeks who we've never had a single problem with. They charge 12 euros a year, about $10-11. It helps that they are one of the cheapest, because transfers are often denied by NSI, meaning you lose your 12 euros. Make sure to start this process a while before your registration expires, so you can attempt multiple transfers if need be.

Be very, very careful not to let your domain expire. Occasionally, a customer will call up because their web site isn't working and we look into it and see that their domain name expired (generally because they forgot to pay their bill). In that case, we tell them to pay NSI ASAP or we often pay it ourselves, because of the NSI horrors we've had in the past.

One of our customers forgot to pay their NSI bill and the domain expired. NSI deleted it from their database, but it was still in the master registry. So the registry shows the domain as registered through NSI, but NSI has no records for it. This means that nobody can register the domain until it is expunged from the registry (which, funny enough, is also run by NSI). This takes an undetermined amount of time, meaning that they could do it today or they could do it in six months, but they absolutely will not tell you when they're going to do it.

In the case of our customer, it took about six weeks for NSI the registry to expunge the domain, which generally happens around 6:30 a.m. eastern time. As soon as it was expunged, a domain name hijacker registered the domain and won't relinquish it without getting a wad of cash.

Ask him "What if NSI use their warped Terms & Conditions to arbritrarily steal our domain, and give it to a friend of theirs?"

Personally, I prefer being with a registrar who states that I own the domain, and they're just looking after it for me, rather than the other way round.

Gandi is "sort of" non-commercial. It was started as a protest against commercial registrars. The founders thought that they were overpriced and were charging for what ought to be free. So they started selling domain names at almost cost ... and to their own surprise, they started making money, which they are investing back to support community project such as Gitoyen.

The interesting consequences of this is that they are not actively seeking customers. They don't have a marketing department. They don't advertise. They don't spam, nor do they try to lock the customers. You are free to go to another registrar -- no fee, no hassle. They are based on free software exclusively.

go to gandi. No fee for transferring(at least no fee from them).

I have laviola.org registered at GANDI, a French registrar that is simply the cheapest I could find -- theyll charge you 12 euros a year (approx. 10.6 USD, according to XE.com's Universal Currency Converter).

Notice that a friend of mine reported some trouble with them, with relation to GANDI supposedly transfering one domain without asking, thus resulting in lots of trouble to him, but I don't know if it was really their fault.

In any case, you should check them out, at such low price.

I transfered a couple from NSI to Gandi and it was fairly painless. The new registrar you choose should have instructions on how to transfer your domain to them, and as part of the process, NSI should contact you to verify it. I had a bitch of a time getting NSI to do things, but they kept pace on the domain transfer. Check out this site for a review of registrars that includes ratings of their terms of service (privacy and who owns the domain). Gandi is currently ranked first for legal policies. =D

The registrar has the right to terminate the contract if they see fit

Actually, some registrars, like gandi, waive that right. Not only that, they give you ownership of the domain. Read about it here.

But yeah, this'll depend heavily on who you sign up with.

The registrar has the right to terminate the contract if they see fit

Actually, some registrars, like gandi, waive that right. Not only that, they give you ownership of the domain. Read about it here.

But yeah, this'll depend heavily on who you sign up with.

I own a few dozen domains, and as they've come up for renewal I've simply been transferring them to a certain French registrar that's cheaper ($10), better, and has much better terms.

More to the point though, I have never had any problems with NSI refusing to transfer my domains to gandi.net. I can't say much for other registrars however.

The "poor guy" you are talking about is a porn-maven. Remember that monthly item you see on your credit card bill to "Starlite Entertainment Group"? Well that is how he pays for *sucks.com

According to GANDI's whois database, cocksucks.com (as in fellatio) is owned by Starlight Communications. But wouldn't cocksucks.com be a free-speech site criticizing the pr0n industry? Apparently, he has thought of this; http://www.cocksucks.com doesn't link to americasucks.com like the rest of them do.

Amazing that people will pay $70 to register a domain to point at goatse.cx.

.org .com .net domains for under $12 per year at GANDI. Services offered include URL-rewriting redirection and email redirection with NO ads. The terms of service are among the best in the industry.

Why pay more? Register your domain at www.gandi.net before it's squatted.

Amazing that people will pay $70 to register a domain to point at goatse.cx.

.org .com .net domains for under $12 per year at GANDI. Services offered include URL-rewriting redirection and email redirection with NO ads. The terms of service are among the best in the industry.

Why pay more? Register your domain at www.gandi.net before it's squatted.

What happens when ieee.org, acm.org, or whoever goes heels up?

Get your own freakin' address!

I have a whole domain full of email addresses (that's a lifetime supply) and I can change service providers, taking my address with me, at the hat of a drop.

Still, this seems unlikely. People want .com. They don't want country codes, and they don't want the other minor ones.

Fortunately, I was able to get a .org (et al.) for only $11 there. I still miss my country code, just because the .com (et al.) really needlessly obfuscates the Internet beyond reason.

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Personally, I'd want to have ".deb"... :-)

Actually, there ARE a few fairly inexpensive registrars out there, such as Joker and Gandi.net. Both are only 12 Euros/year, which at today's exchange rate is about $10-$11 US. I've had some fairly good experience with Joker, others have with Gandi. It just depends if you want to use a German or a French registrar (if that matters to you). Both have most/all of their pages in english, so for the great unwashed ignorant masses in the US (myself included), it's painless.

But I really think it would be great if the free/opensource OSes got together and formed their own root nameservers. All the cool TLDs, like .nym (one of my personal favorites) could then be made available as well. And if enough sites support alternate roots by default, then for the majority of folks, it would be completely transparent. It might even make VeriSign/NSI sit up and take notice. Not that I'll be holding my breath for THAT to happen.

But given the success of these OSes/philosophies in general, even really cheap (read $5/year or so) costs, coupled with a more intelligent name policy, would hopefully make great inroads...

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(from the article) In the much-awaited decision, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) limited the term of VeriSign rights to the .org name to the end of 2002, and the .net name to the start of 2006.

And they will only make $XXX million in that time frame. Remember that there's tons of names going every day, and eventually the selection will be extremely limited to anything but the most unique names, so the potential for profit of the future owners would be greatly limited.

Under the new agreements, VeriSign would provide $5 million to the nonprofit group that takes over .org, invest at least $200 million in research and development, pay its full share of ICANN expenses, to charge equal fees for registering names and eliminate the one-time $10,000 new registrar and other fees.

And I bet companies like Network Solutions will still be charging $70 per year. Personally, I use gandi.net, which charges about 12 Euros (about $10-11 USD, along with the best ownership agreement) per year, and have yet to find a better deal. The dropping of the $10,000 "new registrar" fee will not bring the prices for end users down any lower than maybe $10, or else how will the registrars turn a worthwhile profit?
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I like Gandi.net. 12 Euros (around $11 US) and the registrant owns the domain name.

That might work... Thing is, what's to stop someone trying random numbers until they manage to get money off someone at random? The basic idea sounds good, but it would have to be implemented extremely carefully to work.

It might be easier to only allow banks / credit card companies to use credit card details. Maybe you could do your shopping on whatever e-commerce site, then be redirected to a credit card company to do the payment. Some domain name registrars (Gandi, for example) already do this successfully. This way the company never gets your credit card details.

Gandi is slightly cheaper at 12 euros per year. Is there another registrar that's even cheaper for single domain name registrations?

In a sense you are, and you are not. What makes this confusing is you are buying an exclusive use of a domain on renewable terms with a period of contract defined therein. Actual ownership of a domain is subject to interpretaion of what a domain constitutes. IMO, absolute ownership would not be clear until you have rights such that neither a registrar nor any root server owner nor anyone else may alter or interfere with the domain name you registered and corresponding DNS entries, in perpetuity.

If you would like to register a domain wherein the contract with the registrar confers you explicit title in ownership (albeit, once again the derivative rights from that are unclear and subject to interpretation) take a look at Gandi.net who have Terms and conditions in contract which appear very favourable to the registrant.

A more philosophical way to look at this is ask yourself, if you are a home owner, whether you own that house outright, or if, as is usual, the deeds are owned by your mortgage lender and you will be paying them interest on a loan for any number of years to come. Many aspects of control derive from lend or lease variations, see Marx for some good rants.