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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."
Good Samaritan my foot.
"Hey, I save this domain for you. It'll only cost you $60,000".
.
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 too bad the individuals who legally registered these domains (hotmail.co.uk and passport.com) didnt' see fit to turn them over to the EFF or FSF. Even if only $35 was paid by Microsoft to retrieve them, the irony of making Microsoft pay those organizations would have been rich and wonderous.
Is it really that hard to assign one person the task of being responsible for domain renewals?
Jeez, even if that's all somebody did it would be worth paying someone $20,000/year just to avoid serious cock-ups like this one.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Right hand, this is left hand, come in, over.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I was under the impression that Nominet don't allow re-registration if a domain expires, only if it's explicitly released. My domain lapsed a year or so ago (registrar didn't renew it for me in time) but is still in my name, if inactive. They charge about 80 to reactivate a domain, such a money making exercise.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Later on, Mr. Chaney decided that the check was worth some money, so he put it up on Ebay for auction, promising to donate the proceeds to a charity of the buyer's choice.
My company won that auction and we purchased the check for $7000 which was then immediately donated to the Sisters of the Road Cafe in Portland, Oregon. We've still got the check, a check for $500.
Microsoft paid Mr. Chaney $500 dollars as a gesture of good will. They didn't have to do that, you know.
MS is not being childish, they probably are too busy throwing ice water all over themselves to cool off their extreme embarrassment that this has happened twice now.
(posting anonymously so that nobody can associate my username with the company I work for)
Then along came a third party, and registered "altavista.com". They set up a site that looked exactly like Altavista.digital.com, except for adverts and a disclaimer at the bottom saying that it wasn't actually the Altavista at www.altavista.digital.com. When a user searched using altavista.com, it redirected the search query to the real thing.
Digital finally bought the domain after a year or so of confusion and complaints.
This sort of behaviour is why we can't have nice things.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I've often wondered about this as a potential problem for webservices and to a lesser degree, XSD specs and XML namespaces. Take for example MapPoint.NET - a pretty cool (if overpriced) service that benefits from a webservice model. But say MapPoint.net rolls back- even temporarily-to somewhere else. First, there's a potential security issue: the lucky individual would get tons of requests, possibly including security info. Second, any mission critical apps- would flop until things got squared away. I guess these could all be overcome by good design, such as creating fall-back domains that the client knows to use, but I've yet to hear much talk of doing this.
Is there some kind of maximum renewal length on these domains? It's not like Microsoft doesn't have the money to pay for 20 years (or longer) of the domain, and not worry about it expiring.
The microsoft.com domain expires in May of 2012, hotmail.com in March of 2010, so why aren't they purchasing all of their domains for long periods?
...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.
... for Microsoft Outlook's "Reminder" function.
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
Imagine having rights to read all the email to *@hotmail.co.uk.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
Yes. Contrary to the Reg's article, I didn't "sign it over to Microsoft", I simply paid their outstanding invoice.
.co.uk domains get tossed back in the pool quicker, and the person actually did buy the domain. Part of the story is that they were trying to contact Microsoft to transfer it back to them and Microsoft wouldn't pay attention. It's difficult to be a good samaritan some days...
As I explained it to reporters at the time, if I went and made your mortgage payment I wouldn't own your house.
This particular case seems to be different than the passport.com case, though. It looks like the
Do you have ESP?
Actually, I wonder about this. Since they failed to renew, they demonstrated a lack of interest in protecting that aspect of their name and trademark, effectively relinquishing all claimed rights to that domain. It's one thing to deal with a squatter who is trying to make a buck off your good name, it's another entirely to demonstrate a lack of interest.
Is there any legal precedent here?
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Something cleverStupid, dumb, dumb, dumb. On the one hand, Microsoft has more lawyers than God. For another, it's just wrong to register a name with the express intention of screwing someone else. And lastly, it's definied by ICANN as registering a domain in bad faith.
And now you know.
BTW, I am not John Corrigan (my boss, cofounder of the company, and purchaser of the check). I'm merely a drone :-)
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.
"Honestly, who does use Hotmail anyway?"
People who travel a lot.
Next question?
"Derp de derp."
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
I'm waiting for this sentence to be real funny tomorrow - when this story is being posted again.
Miscrosoft todo list:
1. Fix bugs in IE CSS support
2. Develop a hack proof Web Server
3. Kill Linux
4. Purchase OS X machines
5. Fire guy that photos our loading docks
6. Register all htomail domains
7. Breakfast at tiffanies
8. Laundry
9. Supplies computers to 3rd world countries that don't even have electricity.
10. Sleep
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
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.
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?
This brings up the question of filtering websites. There are a lot of filters available that filter out adult sites for those who want to do that. My problem is that when I am looking for porn I often get sidetracked with news, weblogs, statistics, speeches, advertising, political websites, and other insignificant things that I would like to filter out. Hasn't someone built a proxy that will filter out all this extraneous information so I can focus on the important things on the web?