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Microsoft Forgets To Renew Hotmail.co.uk

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the whoops dept.

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."

5 of 375 comments (clear)

  1. You'd think.. by rylin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You'd think MS would be clever enough to use a registrar that supports auto-renewal. Like any tucows reseller.

  2. They're very lucky by JoshuaDFranklin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    They are very lucky that it's not a porn site now, like russianhistory.org (not href for obvious reasons) and many others.

    Or maybe the porn squatters wouldn't touch it, considering that there might be a public outcry.

  3. Re:your wife by ckaminski · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Right, not stupid enough to trust her BOFH husband from reading her mail from her latin lovers, but stupid enough to use a computer that he could put sniffers, keystroke loggers and cache traps on to read mail from her latin lovers? Right....

    It's probably because he's crashing the damn thing every other day. :-)

  4. Re:Not a problem by NanoGator · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Honestly, who does use Hotmail anyway?"

    People who travel a lot.

    Next question?

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  5. How would I contact Microsoft if I wanted to? by Dominic_Mazzoni · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?