Slashdot Mirror
The Man Who Owns the Internet
Tefen writes "CNN Money posted this story about Kevin Ham, who has made a fortune gobbling up lapsed domain names and has recently launched a lucrative business partnership with Cameroon, the country which controls the .cm TLD. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue."
CNN is just reprinting a Business 2.0 article - how hard is it to attribute things properly? It's not quite as bad as crediting "Yahoo" for AP news stories, but still...
Yes. Because people will click on anything.
Block outgoing TCP packets on port 80 to these IP addresses:
64.20.33.115
64.20.33.131
64.20.49.210
64.40.116.41
66.45.231.154
69.46.226.166
204.13.160.26
204.13.160.129
208.254.26.132
208.254.26.140
209.200.153.152
216.34.131.135
217.68.70.69
That should get rid of many pages you get to when you type "typos".
On that last point: well, yeah, you can set up a "botnet", of sorts, to ensure that the real estate is bought at a certain profit. That has to do with greasing the politicians ahead of time.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Not entirely. If slashdot.org exists, slashdot.com should actually be slashdot.com in order to be able to buy the domain(or google.com vs google.org, etc.). So the existence of themightystink.com wouldn't depend on anybody actually being in business as the mighty stink or whatever, but if someone then wanted to register themightystink.org, they would have to pass a much higher bar than themightstink.com did. That would mitigate one large set of problems, but it wouldn't do much about squatters. Higher prices would certainly help some there. It does seem like there should be a way to own five or ten domains without paying out the nose though.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I have heard of people in California (naturally) that basically botnet the MLS: whenever a new house comes on the market, they submit a contract with contingencies allowing them to cancel. That cockblocks other people from looking at it while they take their time to actually look at it, reduce their offer, etc.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
In my experience, part of the risk is gambling that you'll be able to get zoning by-laws overturned, so that land you bought as cheap agricultural can be sold as as very expensive residential. There's enough money involved to seriously subvert the political system, making it very difficult for regular folks to get their politicians to stand behind the planning documents that are supposed to be safe-guarding the future of our communities. In the end the politicians get a nice campaign donation, and we're stuck with another eye-sore cookie-cutter subdivision on prime agricultural land.
Full disclosure: I've been involved with enough community groups fighting against such zoning by-law changes to have come to the conclusion that all land speculators are devil-spawn, although intellectually I know that's probably not true in all cases.
yp.
These days the registrar "buys" any domains theit clients let expire. You can thank ICANN for this.
It's even worse than that. Most of the ICANN accredited "registrars" are domain squatters who paid the fee to become a registrar so they could get a bulk rate, bulk Whois access, and the ability to do "domain tasting". Really. Take a look at the list.
Some fun registrar names:
"you're only a professional if your email address has a legitimate domain"
.edu's.
Side comment... fortunately, this still works for the
If you'd read TFA you would see that he hasn't registered any
He has a wildcard redirection of unregistered domains - His site is effectivly the
Lawyers probably won't be able to do a thing.
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
No, .cm does not stand for cambodia, it stands for cameroon. And no, he is not registering domains in that TLD. He made a deal with the local registar to put a wildcard on *.cm, so _all_ queries for names not existing in .cm would redirect to his agoga service.
I envy this guy too, but he played by the rules. unfortunately the rules do not state that everything you do should be make the web better. Good on him!
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
I lost my domain xsrv.org after +12yr of registration. First some hell when I needed to let it expire because Internic (Network Solutions) could not transfer it after I called them roughly FIVE times from Belgium. I transferred it over to Joker; I am very satisfied about the service until lately I did not receive any renewal mail about xsrv.org; I did about the xsrv.net and .com domains so I took them ALL THREE and I renewed them immediately.
.be (government ID) correspondence is still blocked completely. I didn't look in the matter immediately since xsrv.org was also hosted on the same network/same DNS server; so it all looked "fine" to me. It's currently hosting a search-engine poisoning engine.
.org to .net and have plentoria of documents with my regular normal "home" xsrv.org domain in it; which is bothering me even more... He interrupted my personal communications for almost a half year now!
xsrv.org failed and yet again I have not received a mail from that robot. A few weeks later I started to discover a spam-decrease and the missing end-of-the-month mailing list digests which I normally receive on my xsrv.org domain. Stuff stopped functioning as it should be functioning and I did not receive my regular correspondence; even my
Some while later the xsrv.org domain has been taken by Mr. Wilson; of the Wilson group. I've notified the WIPO about it and they tell I got a strong case about this; even in such matter that he could bail out before the panel decides. Still, it's a costly procedure to start this and I'd like to get my domain back in a normal way; without paying the $1000 RANSOM to Mr. Wilson ; or without getting it back by force using the WIPO with $1500. It's a double edged sword; both costing money; although the WIPO would sound lots more fair to me since his name *WILL* get published on their website.. I swear !
Don't break open my mouth about these people doing business like this; this guy took my house and he will be evicted from it; still I am wondering how this will be happening in a best and easy possible way without hurting MY OWN wallet about this. I am still not done changing everything from
I already notified his and our registry about this; no changes happened yet..
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..