Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Forgets To Renew Hotmail.co.uk
Saint Aardvark writes "The Register is reporting that Microsoft forgot to renew their hotmail.co.uk domain. A Good Samaritan renewed it for them, but was unable to get a response from anyone at Microsoft. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."
The major organizations have shown that major companies like MS are 'entitled' to domain names similar to their company name, bar none. Thus, their is no need to register for it, no one can take it anyway...
Paying to renew it is much different than transfering ownership, or changing the name servers for it. It would have been a lot harder for the person to re-register it for themselves.
Plus they would have been torn apart later in court. remember, you can only legally steal domain names if you're a bunch of Tree huggin' hippies
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Well according to that guy's page...
On January 15, 2000, I received the check from Microsoft for $500, in addition to a new copy of Visual Studio 6.0 (which I need to compile and run the decss program to decode my DVD's so that I can play them under Linux). I put the check up on ebay to raise money for charity.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
...doesn't mean it's up for grabs. There is, at minimum, a 40 day period after the domain expires before it is actually made available for registration. It is usually 14 days after the expiration that the domain is deleted from the root servers and this is when outages can occur.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Had a laugh about it, then told her to use Hotmail.com. I forget if the site it was pointed to was amazon.com or .co.uk, but it was definitely at one of the Amazon sites.
Cheers,
Ian
I work for Microsoft and am therefore posting anonymously. While this was not done on purpose, it was by a ad exec at Microsoft and not a decision by Microsoft. That ad exec has since been let go.
BTW, I am not John Corrigan (my boss, cofounder of the company, and purchaser of the check). I'm merely a drone :-)
"Whilst" is, strictly speaking, past tense. For example "I like to eat tacos while playing my gameboy" / "When I was young, I liked eating tacos whilst playing on my gameboy".
Not that you have ever called me a pretentious jackass, but I tohught you might like to know.
evil math within Nature's Cubic Creation!
I don't think they registered a .co.uk domain at NetSol...
What I don't understand is how your company still has the check if it was "immediately donated to the Sisters of the Road Cafe?"
We still have the check MS sent to Chaney. What was donated to SotR was the $7100 purchase price, along with $2500 matched by Chaney. We encouraged MS to also contribute but they didn't.
Are you saying the guy who held the ebay auction donated the 7000.00 to Sisters of the Road Cafe...and your company still has the check?
As far as I know, he never sent the money to Chaney but donated it directly. I actually went down to SotR with a few other people later that day and got my face in the newspaper :-)
That whole deal sounds fishy to me, as I fail to see why anyone would pay 7000.00 for a check worth 500.00, with no guarantee at all that the person who held the Ebay auction would really donate the money to charity.
Mr. Chaney's name was well known, he is a consultant of some kind, and we didn't see any reason that he would risk destroying his professional reputation to get $7000.
It seems to me that if your company just wanted to be charitable, it would have been better just to pick out a charity and donate to it. At least that way you knew where the money would go AND been able to take it as a tax deduction.
We wanted to be charitable but let's not kid ourselves here, we got a lot of PR for a relatively low price. CNet was on the phone literally within seconds of the auction close. The reason we selected SotR for the donation is because one of the company cofounders already knew about that particular charity, and I assume he's made donations to them in the past. Whether or not it was tax deductible wasn't an issue. I don't think anyone was even thinking about that.
And as someone else already pointed out, Microsoft saved 500.00 bucks because the check was never cashed!!!
We couldn't have cashed it even if we wanted to since the check was never endorsed and it was made out to Michael Chaney, not us.
Yes, this is the right way to contact the MS Security Response Center. This is what most people who actually find vulnerabilities do. And no, it's not better to email individual employees - they will just forward your email to MSSRC.