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."
You'd think MS would be clever enough to use a registrar that supports auto-renewal. Like any tucows reseller.
Or maybe the porn squatters wouldn't touch it, considering that there might be a public outcry.
It's because she doesn't want her BOFH husband reading all her mail. Especially the steamy love notes from her Latin Lover, Juan Carlos.
That would be tons more spam than I'd care to have rights to...
$60,000? That's pennies to MS.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Since you still have the check, Microsoft didn't actually pay anything.
John Sauter (J_Sauter@Empire.Net)
"Honestly, who does use Hotmail anyway?"
People who travel a lot.
Next question?
"Derp de derp."
The problem is the task is an infrequent one for an employee. Often when they leave their job and transition their projects its often easy to forget something you do once a year over the last x years you have worked.
I think that the real issue here is that it's impossible to contact anyone important at a large company like Microsoft. Suppose I discovered that one of their domains just expired, or I found a new security hole in IE, or found out the identity of someone inside Microsoft who had been "leaking" builds of Longhorn, or something like that. What do I do? All of their public telephone numbers and email addresses get routed to minimum-wage drones who wouldn't understand what I'm talking about, much less even have the authority to contact somebody who does.
In the specific case of security holes, Microsoft has repeatedly complained when people publish exploits without contacting them first, and yet in many cases the researcher who found the problem had been trying to contact Microsoft for weeks without getting any response.
I suppose the best way I could think of might be to send email to individual Microsoft employees I know of who might be willing to listen - there are some who post regularly to public newsgroups and mailing lists (and even Slashdot!) and one of them might pay attention. But how long would it take them to figure out who to contact to fix the problem?
Not that it's better in many other large companies. Anyone know of any large corporations where they're actually handling this well?