Slashdot Mirror
New York's Oldest ISP Gets Domain-Jacked
Howard Roark writes "Panix, the oldest commercial Internet provider in New York, had its domain name 'panix.com' hijacked by persons unknown. The main effect on users is that mail sent to panix's customers is being routed to a bogus mail server run by the hijackers."
Parent's post is at +5 at 12:30amPST, 1/16/05. Who wants to bet that it
1) will be fixed at -1
2) becomes another post of death
before the day is over?
It wouldn't be the first time when slashdot editors' actions go directly against their high-horse stance against censorship and try to hide any views that they personally don't like.
I would like to remind Michael that you only support free speech if you support your enemies' rights to say things that you don't like and hope that you prove me wrong.
Seattle Eastside Math and Science Tutoring
People do not like him as an editor here. Michael constantly editorializes by sticking his opinions into the article submission instead of in a comment like the rest of us have to. He often modbombs threads and blacklists people who post in them from moderating. Even if you don't like Taco's endless dupes or typos, at least he lets the submission speak for itself (iPod launch comment excluded). Michael does very unprofessional things like the infamous all-caps attack toward Intel in the 64-bit chip article last year.
No, this is not just a hobby site where those kinds of things fly. This is a highly-visited news site, considered a major source of tech news for geeks, and a corporate-owned entity of OSTG who employs Malda and company. There's an amount of responsibility you ethically must adopt when your site gets so popular that it's name alone becomes a verb due to the server-killing power of its readerbase.
Michael also does things like edit the words of people's submissions, like adding quotation marks around the word "revealed" in this story (now in my sig). Regardless of what you think of the story, that's just plain misleading and twisting the words and intent of the submitter, making it appear they meant something other than what they did. If it was an anonymous submitter, that would be different, but now Michael has stuffed a message into the submitter's mouth that was not there. At least show a little respect for the people who are providing your content.
What seems to have happened is that somehow the Australian registrar "melbourneIT.com" yanked the fully paid-up registration away from Dotster (where Panix had it) without any notice whatsoever
Or so they say.
What many people here may not be aware of, is that the domain registry system had a slight overhaul recently, after ICANN mandated a change in the registrar transfer procedures.
More specifically: while in the past a domain transfer would automatically be rejected when the account holder did not approve it, recently this changed so now a transfer request get approved by default unless the account holder actively rejects it.
Yes -- that means that if the owner to be on vacation, doesn't check his mail frequently enough, has a spamfilter that ate the transfer notice, or simply never received the message in the first place for whatever other reason, the domain transfer request will automatically be granted.
ICANN's reasoning for this was alledgedly that it would prevent a defunct hosting provider or non-working administrative account from keeping a customer's domain hostage.
The only way to change this behaviour and reject a domain transfer by default, is to lock the domain with the registrar. Many of the registrars responded to this policy change by proactively locking all domains hosted with them with little warning (Network Solutions, for example)
Anyway, it's quite likely that this domain in question simply didn't get locked (or was actively unlocked by the administrator because it was deemed inconvenient?). Then if anyone sent a (bogus) transfer request and the administrator either didn't see the notice or didn't respond in a timely fashion to reject it, this would happen.
This will happen to ANY domain that is not currently locked, and who's admin contacts aren't paying close enough attention to their mailbox. If you haven't already done so: MAKE SURE YOUR DOMAINS ARE LOCKED!!!
Yet another example of how ICANN makes the world a better place, I guess.
Even under the new ICANN rules, that's not supposed to be possible. Someone is playing games with the system.