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If you're willing to pay a one-off $95 reseller signup fee then OpenSRS is a very good choice.

I think OpenSRS is attempting to address the "going away" issue.

First, Smith is in the UK (apparently).

Second, s11.org is in Oz. (I checked the IP block of www.s11.org, and it's served by Telestra, so it doesn't appear to be an Oz site based on Smith's UK server.)

These together make it hard to see why Smith has any involvement.

Third, to get to s11.org took more than an Internic entry. It took a name server that resolved nike.com to s11.org which was pointed to by the bogus NSI record.

Fourth, s11.org's site is on a named virtual host. If someone provided DNS without s11's knowledge, nike.com would have resolved to "GreenNet Australia", which is the default.

It seems that the only solution to satisfy all of these conditions is that s11.org (and / or GreenNet) were involved up to their eyeballs, since the VirtualHost record could only have been created on their site. Obviously they wouldn't have done that had the DNS not pointed to them, and to point a name server to themselves, they'd have had to control the Internic record.

Unless a) someone else hacked Internic and pointed the name server to s11, and, seeing the requests, they added the VirtualHost opportunistically. Or b) GreenNet was also hacked.

In any case, I don't see Smith's involvement here, unless he was the one to set up the name service for a) above.

I've transferred all my regs from NSI to Tucows mainly because of the ease of domain hijacking, and NSI's security is certainly the source of this problem. But I'm totally unconvinced that it happened as the Wired reported presented.

Thanks NSI! I can't tell you how much fun I had dealing with your ongoing garbage for the past 3 years! And to think my company has registered over 1000 domains with you guys for our customers over the past 5 years!

In using Tucows OpenSRS we have had extreme reliability, durability, speed, and low prices. Any ISP who hasn't implemented this service yet doesn't know what they are missing... Only $10/year per domain.

And for all you end users out there, don't miss out Domain Monger, who implement OpenSRS, and only charge $17/year.

NSI... How are you still a company?

EraseMe

For example, one webhost I use, WorldWebserver.com, offers free domain registration with hosting. But if you're getting, "just domain registration" for $25/year you get one page hosting of one-page site that you can change whenever you want, a catch-all POP3 email box, http logs including http_referer and graphical stats. That's a lot better deal that having your parked domain point at an ad for the registrar!

You can actually do alot with a one-page domain. I've used a few as "storefronts" for affiliate links, or you can just use it for your "front page" and have your other pages on the web space that comes with your dial-up.

Plus the tech support at worldwebserver.com is amazing. Anyway, that's my 2 cents. Oh and they use Apache on Slackware too.

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+++For-pay Internet distributed processing.+++

From their Client FAQ page:
Our current development track includes a NT DLL Client for OpenSRS. We are planning to ship Perl "wrapper" functions for the actual C function calls for the Linux/Solaris environment, and see no reason why we should not ship something similar for the NT environment.

Later...