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NSI Accused of Cybersquatting
ckd writes "digitalMASS is reporting that NSI is being sued for cybersquatting by an Alabama resident who claims that they're holding on to expired names long past any reasonable time period (kam.com, listed as expiring in 1996, for example)."
You mean like x.org ?
--
NSI is simultaneously the company that assigns domain names and enforces their assignment, answering to no one and overseen by no one.
But ask yourself, what would be gained by a contrary holding? Is the NSI supposed to take money out of one pocket and put it into another pocket, thereby satisfying the principle of "paying" for a domain name (as distinguished from "squatting")? Make sure you read to the bottom of the article: nothing in NSI's agreement with ICANN precludes this behavior, as long as it isn't extreme enough to qualify as "warehousing", which clearly isn't the case here.
Squatting is bad in principle, but it's a necessary reality of any centralized system of domain-name assignment, which time and experience have shown is the only practical way of accomplishing this necessary service. The only alternative is bigger government and more Federal oversight of the process through the FTC and other administrative bodies, something I have no real fears of, but which lots of the rest of you seem to worry about.
-- Anne Marie
They would auction them off instead of making them available for vanilla registration.
--
"And 'day to day' checking has become tiresome."
:) It also served as an auto emailer to send daily test messages to a friend when he was just setting up his DSL account.
I faced this same problem, so I wrote a shell script that checked WHOIS a few times a day, and would email me if a name became available.
Although I never was able to get the domain I wrote it for, I did learn a few things about UNIX scripts
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
Here's their intro:
The Public DNS Service is a public service provided by Granite Canyon Group, LLC. The Service offers both primary and secondary DNS free of charge to anyone who asks. The Service maintains UPS protected FreeBSD servers that satisfy DNS queries. The servers are geographically separated and all are connected to the Internet via 7x24 dedicated lines with disjoint routes to the Internet's North American backbones.
The Public DNS is useful if you:
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
20 minutes! Your Lucky! I had to call NetSol because a hosting company lost a crypt-pass, and i had to wait 2 hours to get a rep! Then 2 months to get a reply to the FAX, and then another 2 months to get a reply to the second FAX, then 2 more months for it to be updated!
- pay only 10 bucks a year/domain
- change contacts at will through a web interface, you just log in.
- change dns servers at will -- no more ridiculous NSI "fax me your family's birth certificate from 12 generations back, and a detailed log of your last 14 bowel movements"
- a whole bunch more that you'll just have to look up for yourself
Basically, they let you do whatever you want to your domain name. In a strange twist, they give you the responsibility to look after your own domain. Gee, I don't know if I can handle that. I really feel much more comfortable letting an anonymous corporate overlord tell me what I can and can't do with what I supposedly "own"---------- You are not the contents of your sig.:-p
God, it really pisses me off searching for hours and hours at the internic whois page trying to find a domain that isn't taken (I always thought I must be horribly unoriginal for so many of my ideas to be taken). The worst thing is that none of these domains ever seem to have a web site on them (Okay, the web isn't the 'net, but it's a fairly good indicator that a domain is actually in use. I wonder if anyone knows the ratio of registered domains to domains which are actually used)
The only thing that keeps me going is the mantra: 'there is always a better domain'. If all my lamest ideas hadn't been rejected, I would never have had to think of something better.
Sort of like in Catch-22 where Milo Minderbinder (owner of M&M Enterprises) runs multiple companies which all sell products to one another, and to the army. Of course, in the M&M scenario, they all sell to each other at a loss, guaranteeing M&M has the lowest bid to get the contracts; but because M&M only sells to other M&M companies, it makes huge profits :)
Anyhow, sorry for butchering part of Joseph Heller's classic. back to your regularly scheduled flamewar.
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D. Fischer
ShoutingMan.com
The article says kam.com has expired, fair enough. And is pionting to a redirect, ok.
But, why is kam.com still resolving to an ip that is owned by a "KAM-CIRCUITS"
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.kam.com
Address: 194.200.169.2
inetnum: 194.200.169.0 - 194.200.169.255
netname: KAM-CIRCUITS
descr: Kam Circuits Ltd
country: GB
admin-c: UPHM1-RIPE
tech-c: UPHM1-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: AS1849-MNT
changed: ianm@pipex.net 19951031
changed: stephenb@uk.uu.net 19990915
source: RIPE
If /. is some vehicle for opening light to anyone then there are more serious issues.
Also, isn't this kind of tired from a newsworthy standpoint? I would also find it interesting if the chap in bama was to disclose how many domains he has registered.
The material girl just got her domain name secured. I think she has a right to it even if she wasn't first. It was held by an individual squatter. He had porn up on it for a while according to the articles I read.
This whole internet i was here first attitude just makes me want to puke. Also, if you are filling out a form on any web page and their is profit involved you can be sure someone is looking at the data and collecting/sorting/priortizing it for sale somewhere else.
I wonder if places like domainsurfer.com and such offer a service so that you can buy lists of the top 1000 searched terms. There would be someone out there that would want this just to aid in speculation I am sure.
Also, the dot com people aren't exactly known for their attention to detail so the conspriracy theorists aren't convincing me of an evil plot just yet.
http://fudge.org
Yes, NSI is stupidly holding on to valuable domain names that they will sell at auction. If they were intelligent, they'd let their competition sell the old domain names.
"Follow the money."
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
No, he meant like z.com.
Sometimes they don't even get the serving part of it right. My LUG change the IP of our nameserver, and we sent the proper email asking to change the host record. The change seemed to take affect, but every few weeks we would notice that the old IP was still there and we would send the request in again. Since they have a guarenteed income, why can't the spend some of it to update their system to be web-based? It's not that hard, everyone else seems to have it.
I haven't looked at all the registrars, but NSI seems to be the worst at dumbing down the process. They change the term 'domain name' to 'web address' and if you want to change your nameserver's host record, the help for that is under 'changing ISPs'. The process of registering domain names does not need to be something everyone can do. There is a slight technical side to it, that it's best if you understand that before registering. Bah.
Yes, they did stop doing that. They stopped because people were registering huge amounts of domain names and then putting them on auction sites, when they actually managed to sell one they would pay NSI for that one and transfer it to the new buyer.
I'm surprised /. hasn't picked this up yet:
adobe.com whois lookup
Adobe.com was hijacked by somebody in China today! ftp.adobe.com doesn't work, etc.
"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I wonder how many ICANN board members read /., and this may open the light to them.
This is one of the most puzzling and strange things that I'd ever heard when it came to domain names. I cannot remember how many brilliant domain names I came up with trying to find one for my hosting business. Most didn't exist and were expired, but I couldn't buy them. And yet we still have all of this news about lack of domain names, even though you can't buy expired ones. Utter stupidity, I hope they lose big.
I tried selling a domain name on eBay (smashingpumpkins.org), but I gave up trying to transfer it over to the winner of the auction for a year. They required a form to be printed on my "company letterhead" (I was a college student when I registered the domain), and I had to have it stamped and notarized by a public notary. After I filled out all the information, I faxed it to them, and didn't hear anything for months. Tried calling, but couldn't get through to anyone; tried emailing, but god only knows where those went. Eventually, they sent me a paper letter several months later explaining that I left out some information or something to that effect (I don't know how much more you could complete a form). I called and faxed a couple more times, but eventually gave up because I had to get on with Real Life. I absolutely refuse to deal with them ever again, and I know there are many, many other people out there who feel the same way, simply because they are impossible to deal with.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. -- Gandhi
When NSI announced a policy of holding on to expired domain names and auctioning them a while back, I knew that they were up to something. This news makes it clear that their policy change was just codifying what they'd been doing for a while. The minute they put that policy into effect, I changed my registrar, not wanting to have to ransom my domain back if I accidentally let it expire. People accuse Microsoft of being arrogant, but they pale in comparison to these bloody jackals.
I keep seeing people saying it, but does anyone know for sure if all the 3 letter domains are gone? What percentage of the 4s are gone as well?
F /...
Hopefully we will start having new TLDs at whim so that won't matter in the future.
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Solaris/FreeBSD/Openstep/NeXTSTEP/Linux/ultrix/OS
--- I do not moderate.
And I'm sure everybody suspects by now that they've got their domain name lookup CGI "bugged" so they can squat interesting names that aren't registered immediately after a search reports that the domain name is free. (See the recent Cringely article for an example.)
I make a point of always using the command line nslookup and whois because it's at least a bit harder to put a bug on those lookups (which go through complicated daemons written in C and might even cause a security problem if badly patched) than it is a web CGI written in Perl or VB.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/10/16/123724 8&mode=thread
NSI needs a smack or fifty across the face. Perhaps with a large blunt metal object, like a fire extinguisher...
I've had one name registered with them for nearly a year now and have yet to get it up and running. I have no problems with anyone suing NSI.
Fools must have decided to protect all their root nameservers by sequentially shoving them up their ass.
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Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
As long as they hold it, ONLY THEY CAN BE THE REGISTRAR for that domain. That means that if someone else wants to register it, they have to pay them. And if the original purchaser wants to register it they have to use them AND they have to pay all "back payments", even though they dropped registration.
This is just one more reason why NSI is pure evil.
Seriously though, I am not too familiar with US law but if you are losing money because of them you may be able to go after them for damages, especially if they are not providing a service as advertised. Might wanna check that out.
illenium.net - ultimate sk8 shop online
Ignoring the whole issue about wide-spread use and consistency, this might be possible.
That's like saying "ignoring the problem of objects gaining mass as they accelerate, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to travel at the speed of light!"
No one is going to use a DNS system that only a microscopic portion of the internet can access. No one is going to say "visit my website at http://indpendentdns.unconventionaltld, but make sure you have OSSDNS servers in your DNS list!" No one is going to use an e-mail account when 99.9% of their mail gets dropped because the mailservers can't resolve the domain name.
Linux caught on eventually, why not this?
Linux caught on eventually among relatively small groups of computer enthusiasts, and is just now peeking into the corporate world. But a decision to use Linux doesn't depend on others doing so for it to be useful.
And "Open Source" would really have nothing to do with it. The source code to BIND is of course already available. Using the term "open source" to mean decentralized and anarchistic just dilutes the meaning of the term.
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Over at NameZero on there boards, one post was on not being able to get the name you want after it expires. We'll see what happenswith the domain names I got. Some people that have a use for it and is for hobby like mine shouldn't have a problem getting it after it expires.
drey@falconis:~ > nslookup
Default Server: nyc.speakeasy.net
Address: 216.254.95.2
> www.kam.com
Server: nyc.speakeasy.net
Address: 216.254.95.2
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: www.kam.com
Address: 194.200.169.2
OK, new guess ... someone forgot to clear it out
of a DNS server somewhere. The way DNS works, anyone could put in any bogus set of domain information down in their server and have it work for them, as long as their DNS was always handled at their server. Now, why bad DNS information like that is still out there ... *shrug*
--
Perhaps THIS
Seriously, reposting stories that were posted a year ago is one thing, but COME ON! This was posted like 3 days ago!
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
I was surprised that they held on to one of mine something like 6 months after expiration. I'm glad they're being sued.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
The problem with NSI is that they are serving two roles. They run the root DNS servers. This gives them a guaranteed flow of income no matter how much the customers hate them. Their second role is that of a registrar.
Now, they seem to do a pretty good job of running the root name servers. The problem is that this position gives them an advantage over the other registrars. For one, they are guaranteed to have income. No matter how badly they screw up, or how much market share they lose, they will still have money rolling in because all of their competition has to pay them. In addition, as in this case, they can arbitrarily snap up domains without having to actually pay for them. Any other registrar that wanted to play this game would have to fork over cash to NSI to fund it.
What I think ICANN should dictate is this. One or more companies will be given contracts to register domain names, similar to what is done now. A second group of one or more companies will be given contracts to run the root servers. People who register a domain will pay the first group. The first group will pay some fee to the second group for each domain they want served. The contracts for both groups will stipulate that they are not allowed to own, be owned by, partner with, or be the same as any company in the other group.
The abuse that is happening with the current system is out of hand. NSI is acting like a greedy spoiled brat who is causing untold amounts of grief for thousands of hard working admins out there. Unfortunately, with the current system, they can and will keep doing it. In fact, I would expect their behavior to actually get worse as their market share declines. As they lose customers, past behavior indicates that they will abuse their power more to make up for the lost profits.
Oh.. thats not in the article. Do they auction off url's often?
illenium.net - ultimate sk8 shop online
The ppl replying to my orig. post are missing the point. NSI could probably claim two things that would be impossible to prove.
1. They indend to use the expired domains internally for future expansion of the company and for whatever reason did not register them.
2. The software handling the expiration of domain names has a bug.
You prove to me that they did it on purpose. I say it was either bad code, good business, or a combination of both.
i resolved www.kam.com
not kam.com
kam.com has no record
No, it's not. My previous company went 4 years without a web site, using the domain for email only. It's not that unusual.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Yeah, there is an old article about NetSol not releasing expired domain names at http://slashdot.org/asksl ash dot/00/06/16/1941232.shtml. That discussion has some information on their possible motives & was pretty interesting. It also contains a list of three letter domain names held by NSI without payment. It's kind of funny about that article actually... I was slashdotted and didn't even know it until a couple weeks ago (I was out of town at the time)! It's not funny about NSI's business practices though. NetSol did the same thing with the squatting to me; they have been holding mendelson.net without paying for it, and being Jonathan Mendelson, I think I have a proper claim to it.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
I don't believe for one second that the law, common sense, morals or _anything_ will prevent these people from savaging me if I try changing registrars- and I don't have the resources to fight them or even raise an issue.
It sucks sucks sucks sucks SUCKS. I'm awful glad some people can afford to attack NSI. I would consider it a big victory if they were destroyed and I had to pay a new fee to freshly register airwindows.com at another registrar. I can't afford to have them hold it for ransom, or swoop in and sell it in the middle of an attempted defection to another registrar. In the world of NSI I'm one of the guys being held up at gunpoint, who hasn't been shot yet. I am not joyous about the situation.
I still want to know if what's going on in the book with M&M is even vaguely possible. :)
-David T. C.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I heard that before, and so I ran a test. Last week, I did an enquiry on the NSI web site of some 5-letter .com names. All pronounceable, but nonsense words in english. I found one that was not taken. I haven't done anything about it except to make a note. In a week, I'll go back and see if it's taken. It's not proof, but it might well be an indication of some hanky-panky in the NSI system.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
My domain name, doofus.org recently came up for renewal. Recently I noticed that register.com allows domain names to be transferred to them. Instead of renewing I just transferred it to register.com and I just throw all of the renewal notices I keep getting from NSI into the recycler. I will never do business with NSI again, since I have found register.com to be far easier to manage my domains.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
The thing I think is lacking is any sort of delineation of NSI's responsibilities and limitations as a registrar. When the U.S. initially gave them monopoly registrar status, they were evidently not given adequate restrictions on how they could conduct business. Seems to me that the international community (ICANN?) needs to come up with a set of rules for registrars and impose them. The current situation reminds me of the free rein and large land tracts the railroads were given in order to induce them to build the U.S. rail system. Once that had happened, laws were finally imposed to reduce their depredations (read the novel "The Octopus" for a flavor of what it meant to have your community under the thumb of a railroad). I think we've reached that stage now with the internet.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
.
From the article: "Stan Smith, an Alabama resident, is suing NSI, contending that it's abused its power."
This guy wouldn't be bitter that he can't register his own name, thanks to Adidas, would he?
3prong
t
Yeah: 'cept we call it the innernit!
***I LIKE PIE***
The results were even faster acting for a friend of mine testing our theory that people lie in waiting for any name based on popularity. He however used NSI's domain name checker directly through their web interface, to find that on the 10-12th look up (usually from varying IPs) the name would be claimed.
This of course lead to our script idea, that would generate random crap, distribute a largish list to various clients, and have them all periodcally pick a random on every few mintues and try http://www.--- on it. This would last a week and a new list would be made. Compiled statistics on how many attempts, when and from where had been made on each domain, and when these domains had been claimed would then be sent back to be reported in some parsed form. The new list would then be worked through. We hoped that this would eventually discourage people squatting on this basis, due to cost.
Now I realize that cost may not be a factor for someone like NSI, and I realize that random crap may have to be generated from dictionaries and rules. We were further hoping that through a movie name generator (add the or a small set of adjectives to any noun) would cause enough companies to loose their prefered sites, that there'd be some public out cry.
We didn't ever implement this thoguh. We get paid for other work.
The most irritating thing that I've encountered was while trying to snag a domain name that was definitely a regional name. It was cancelled by NSI for non payment 7 months before it left the whois database. Then once it was out of the whois database, I was still not allowed to register it for another 5 weeks. I was told that it hadn't finished processing on their end. If they're going to continue their squatting practices and continue to be as inefficient as the federal gov't - the least they can do is have the whois database be the *last* place a domain gets removed from before it is available for registration. Otherwise we're flyin' blind out here.
Actually, every letter except z is reserved by the IANA back in 1993, as .com .net and .org, and z.net and z.org. Why they didn't get z.com is beyond me. Very unusual...
And they also have all the single digit numbers. If I recall, aren't they used for Zone File Servers?
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
What exactly would be the most prohibitive problems with starting an "Open Source" DNS? Seeing as how I'm shooting an unresearched, off-the-hip question I'm probably begging to be flamed, but as far as I know, my ISP is responsible for providing me with a DNS. Is there anything preventing them from starting their own dns servers with their own tables? Or for that matter, referring to a master DNS not run by NSI. Ignoring the whole issue about wide-spread use and consistency, this might be possible. It may take a while, but most worthwhile things do.
If you don't like a piece of software, write your own. If you don't like an OS, write your own. If you don't like a service, write your own. The same holds true here. If you don't like the way NSI works, build your own. Afterall, they did it with that openCDDB thing, and secondly with the cue cat. Why not this? No need to answer to NSI or ICANN, just start up your own movement to provide DNS service. Give out domains for free. Develop as many TLD's as you want. It would just need an organized effort, as with any grass-roots endeavor. Linux caught on eventually, why not this?
When I submitted an application to change my domain nameservers to NSI, it took just under three months to have that complete. It was finally changed. At the time I sent them numerous semi-abusive e-mails and filled out a survey stating VERY clearly my disgust with their customer service. About a month later the industry was 'de-regulated', and what do you know, they made up their site from the substandard peice of **** it was into something very slick and professional. On top of that, over 4 months after I submitted the change, 3 months since I expressed by utter disgust at their appaling customer service, 2 months after the survey I filled out and 1 month after the industry being 'de-regulated' I recieved a very automated e-mail "We understand you have had a bad experience with us, a free gift is on it's way". What do I get? A t-shirt with Network Solutions printed on it. I promptly threw it in the bin and resolved that no use would come out of yet another abusive e-mail. The bottom line is, this company is scum. When they had a monopoly over the market, they abused their power no end. Only a company hiding behind the guise of the net could do this. I recieved the most appaling service I have EVER received from any company, and I didn't have a say in whether I could use them or not. It is only after they have competition that their service seems more efficient. I propose everyone boycotts NSI and uses another domain name registry service. This company doesnt deserve to have any say in how such a mass media market is controlled. As a side note, I have been trying to register a domain which has expired. But to no avail.
How the hell can anybody know what they do with that crap. They don't hold anything valuable, they hold one guys dream. Patent it and sue them... end of discussion.
illenium.net - ultimate sk8 shop online
Here in Australia we have a couple of government departments/agencies that will deal with this type of complaint.
The first is the State run (I think?) Fair Trading department where disgruntled patrons can lodge notices of unfair trading or lack thereof. The other is the federal run Australian Consumer and Compeition Commision (ACCC) that deals with companies trading illegally and so forth.
With the number of stories that surface about the NSI on here and other places if this were a company in Austrlia there'd be hell to pay.
Actually, I'm pretty sure he meant like q.com
I don't think that billing cycle could possibly be as long as the four months it's been since the domain expired. And "day to day" checking has become tiresome. This Alabama resident is right on - I hadn't thought of it in terms of cybersquatting, but now that he mentions it, that's the obvious conclusion. It's not fair to the other registrars or to the people who want to buy some of the dead domain names of Network Solutions is allowed to keep the domains for an extended period of time. I hope the suit will open the eyes of more people so they can see NSI's evil business practices.
This has certainly happened to me. I don't know if I can attribute it to NSI stealing it, but what are the chances of it? So my online name is stype. stype.com is taken legitimately, so I figure stype.net is the next best thing. I check with NSI, stype.net is open. I buy it...a few days later I get an email saying that its no longer for sale and its been bought by some random person. I ended up getting stype.org but I was pissed for a while.
For this reason I've also registered nsi.cansuckmyballs.com just because I'm pissed at NSI.
-Stype
-Stype
Bus error -- driver executed.
Trolls have feelings, too.
They do? I thought one of the prerequsites for troll status was to have their feelings surgically removed, along with their brains and their nervous systems.... Oh, well. NSI still makes them look like wannabe amateurs.
-RickHunter
For the non-lawyers (include me in that category), self-dealing is an interesting concept in the law. Here's the definition from Black's Law Dictionary: Relates to transactions wherein a trustee, acting for himself and also as "trustee," a relation which demands strict fidelity to others, seeks to consummate a deal wherein self-interest is opposed to duty.
What he meant, I believe, is that your response is entirely too common among domain administrators. Further, I believe his comment was primarily meant in jest, rather than a serious impulse to reduce the rating of your message...
I will *not* use smileys in this message. I think if you don't get the joke without them, you won't get it with them, either. :)
Dammit!!
-c.
--
Casey
More scratches on the cave wall, thanks be to anonymity.
x.com is one also. My thinking is give them enough money and maybe they won't be so reserved with it.
On a related topic I actually renewed a domain with them (dumb I know, but it's the one most of my email goes to and one I tried to transfer they managed to lose for about 3 months and then dropped, luckily a friend noticed it was available and reregistered it for us) and in the renewal email they say "Your FREE personalized T-shirt will be shipped to your Billing Contact in 4 to 6 weeks." even though I only renewed for 1 year and they say a 2 year minimum for da T-Shirt on their site.
If they don't cough up u reckon I can sue them to get it? + of course the mental anguish from having to go barechested (no joke in Scotland at this time of year) for month as I was relying on it arriving (about £1000 000 000 I reckon - I get VERY anguished).
~ppppppppö
Xerithane,
I'm going through exectly what your going through, after moving from Arizona to IL, I dont even have access to my old school account and after months of getting annoyed i tried the same stuff you said and faxed several times, and today they send me this e-mail saying my licence was not legible on the fax! WTF! I am like this close to blowing these MF's out of earth. I called their tech support and the answering system hangs up on yoru saying it's busy serving other customers (it doesnt even put you on the freaking hold).
And their domain update crap is so outdated. It's hard to update anything there.
--
Is there any evidence that they're not releasing them to the public, or did they make a legitimate purchase. All the three-letter .com domains are gone. It makes good business sense to hold on to them.
There's a company that makes DJ mixers and turntables called KAM.
thenerd.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
It appears the issuant of the case has not correctly gathered his facts. He sites "kam.com" as an example. A quick lookup on the whois database indicates that the record for the domain was last modified 21-Oct-1999.
I have to question how he gets his data on cancelled domains. More than likely he's basing it on either "insider knowledge" of the original owner of the domain, or on some output from one of the Whois systems, and the output is erroneous.
I hope this case goes to court - NSI could use some extra funds. =)
Oliver
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Wasn't the NSI cybersquatting issue already mentioned in this article in YRO? I'll admit that it's going to get more attention as a front page article (which it deserves to get), but this is about the zillionth time that /. has repeated an article recently.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Let's take this matter out of context, blow it up to obscene proportions, and make an NBC miniseries out of it.
What would you do if your child's grade school decided to keep your child at the end of the school year asking for a ransom ? You'd hire the biker gangs and have everyone shot and blown to pieces (excluding your kid of course).
Wishful thinking =) Die NSI die!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I couldn't believe my own ears, but NSI was really trying to get some money by sending a "Final Notice" for a domain that had already been transferred to somewhere else. They even had a big notice that unless we pay they'll auction it.
Maybe some suckers fall into their trap.
Just for kicks, I'll put it in a href Like this?
It is kinda funny, in a way..
Every 3-letter .com has been registered. If nothing else, it's somebody's initials. So I'd say the answer is yes, there's someone who wants kam.com. The guy sueing, at a minimum.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
The trend in legislation is plain to see: whoever has greater potential financial gains at stake will win any dispute. If no clear financial gain can be argued, then whoever already has more money will win. Look at the example of Corinthians.com. An American citizen with an interest Paul's Letter to the Corinthians registered this domain years ago, and has been serving up content related to this book of the New Testament on the site. A Brazilian soccer team, the Corinthians (go figure) decided they wanted to have Corinthians.com in addition to Corinthians.com.br. So they petitioned to have the domain name ripped from the current owner. They won. I think all of the sh*t about "good faith" only applies until a corporation with lots of money shows up asking for the domain name. At that point, the bidding opens up, whether or not someone already owns the domain name.
I think the time has come for an alternative to the DNS system, so that those of us who don't want to participate in the corporatization of the web can just "move away". Then we can all just laugh at NSI and their customers as they traffic in domain names that noone will ever use.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I tried to register a domain one night early last year. Near the end of the process, my browser crashed. It was late, so I decided to go home and finish the job in the morning. Guess what! By the time I got back, the domain had been registered by somebody else, and a few minutes of research turned up that they were an NSI employee! Argh.
I had another domain name registered via NSI, who claimed I never paid for it. Not only had I paid for it, I still had the receipt. They waited five months before ever telling me there was a problem with the payment, and only told me after I inquired why I couldn't get any lookups on it. They just clipped it with no warning. After sending copies of the receipt and going through their whole comedy of errors, they said I had to pay the $70 bucks again or nothing. So, I just told them I no longer wanted it and to delete it. I planned of course to register it via someone else, and pay significantly less. That was a long time ago, and it's still regtistered to me. Turns out they now say I have to pay for it (again) before I can authorize them to delete it! Yes! they want me to give them money to throw it away!
In the end, I just quit and started over. I will never work with NSI again.
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Conspiracy abounds! Aren't you being a little over-enthusiastic in this idea?
Searched for it on NSI one day, found that it was open. I think I did that on a sunday. Decided on Friday to go get it and it was bought up. Go figure.....
I would like to know the story behind how whois lookups on a b c and y.com all return reserved and as being there since 93 and z.com has only been around since 20-Apr-2000 this year.
Xerithane,
on your page you indicate that you have no public email address. if it would be any help at all, i will be glad to set you up an email account on my server with absolutely no strings attached. i can do this in five minutes, you can choose from several domains i control, and as far as i'm concerned you can have it for as long as you need it, no charge. drop me email if this will help.
"I will gladly pay you today, sir, and eat up
Sacred cows make the best burgers.
Thanks- I'm using my work email now which is functional for the domain stuff, I'm not just not releasing it to the public. I haven't updated that page in about a week however, and a few days ago I had to get a dialup account at earthlink so I'm using that one for now.. xerithane@earthlink.net. :)
Thanks - it's real nice to know I have some supports in this
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
They aren't devils, they are just ex-spooks. The founders of NSI used work for .gov including the NSA and CIA.
Could the problem with kam.com be that there are two companies having a private legal battle over it complete with an injection keeping it from being transfered?
yeah, i noticed that a few weeks ago when i was looking for domain names. I found about ten from 1998 and a few from 1997.
Now when this guy's rich, i'll be thinking "it coulda been me" heh oh well
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
legislation affect things such as this? The way I see it, cybersquatting is a very big gray area. On one hand, peoples names and trademarks are being infringed upon, on the other, people should have the right to register something as long as they get it first. Who should legislation slide in favor of? Wont legislation create more opportunity for big biz to infringe upon our rights, rather than the other way around? some things that have to be thought about. this is a very sensitive subject.
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Anyone else heard of such nonsense from or favorite registrar?
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
give me a sec, I was just getting to that....
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
I wouldn't consider it squatting if they're just to damn lazy to give it up. Is anyone really that interested in kam.com?
I am so happy to see this
I hope to see a lot more -- I'm generally against a lot of lawsuits but I really have no choice but to feel utter dispise towards that company.
My recent dealings with them have been absolutely horrendous, here is a page about it.
Not only have I had horrible experience with their customer service department, but also they're utilities for updating and registering are so far behind the rest of the competitors I can't imagine why anyone still does business with them.
The biggest thing I dont understand about them, is that since they lost their monopoly they now only account for 40% instead of 100%? A 60% loss in market share and they still seemingly refuse to restructure their obviously defunct customer service department and registration tools?
This, above all, deserves to be a Fucked Company life member.
My worst experience with them, was getting my contact record changed when the email address expired very suddenly. After explaining to them the situation and getting a canned response back then responding to that, then getting another canned response back I finally figured out what to do. You have to FAX them something. Wow, I thought we were living in a digital age, hell no. So I faxed it, nope - they lost it twice! Finally, I get my contact record changed (after 2.5 months of arguing with them) and when I tried to update my domain (nerdfar.org) they are refusing on the grounds that I have not properly proved my identity - yet my contact record is updated.
If there is a law against this I'd love to nail em for it -- not for any money, I just want my domain to be functional again.
Well, this is one hell of a rant.
Morale of the story, screw NSI and use register.com or another one of the registrars because NSI's head is so far up it's ass it's making the slashdot trolls envious.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
I see some guy looking to make a profit from getting his hands on yet another obscure domain name. My favorite is inside.com. Inside what?
illenium.net - ultimate sk8 shop online
For anybody that is interested
I won. As of 8:56:14 Eastern Standard Time, the nerdfarm.org domain name was modified and pointing to a functional server.
For those of you who dont know, nerdfarm.org is a community discussion forum that is still under development but is mostly functional. If you are interested check back to nerdfarm.org in a couple of days, and I'll get the about document posted up there.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
It would be months, sometimes years, before the name became available again, and you could use it until then.
We used to always register strange names--without paying for them--for parties. For example if someone left the company, we'd get "GOOD-LUCK-ON-YOUR-NEW-JOB-FRED.COM" or whatever, post our party pictures there, and NEVER pay for it. And it would last for quite some time before NSI took it away.
The downside of this is that people who register and sit on reams of names never had to pay for them. I mean, it's one thing if they had to shell out $70 a pop to register yes-on-xxx.com, no-on-xxx.com, and hope there's a buyer, but when they're not paid up, it's a little annoying.
I don't think it's malice, the software at NSI just must be poor at tracking these things. I hope this lawsuit sheds some light on the matter.
--- Speaking only for myself,
NSI's head is so far up it's ass it's making the slashdot trolls envious.
Trolls have feelings, too.