Slashdot Mirror
Police Lose National High-Tech Crime Unit Website
Barence writes "The UK police have embarrassingly lost control of the National High-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) website. PC Pro reports the police have sloppily let the domain registration lapse, and it has now been picked up by an opportunistic German owner. The NHTCU was disbanded two years ago, but sites such as the BBC were still linking to the website as recently as July, making it a prime target for malware writers or phishing attacks."
SOCA remains entirely unrepentant for the lapse. "SOCA is aware that registration of the domain www.nhtcu.org has lapsed and is taking the necessary steps to remind partners and stakeholders that the NHTCU became SOCA e-crime in April 2006
I guess admitting that they goofed by letting the domain accidentally lapse would be too much. Instead they have to pretend like the domain is worthless since they changed their name two years ago.
With that reasoning, I guess AT&T can just let "cingular.com" lapse even though I still type that in every time I go to pay my AT&T wireless bill.
I'm a big tall mofo.
This illustrates why it's not always a good idea for every sub-organization, project and campaign to use its own top-level domain name. If the unit was part of the British government, surely a domain underneath .gov.uk would have been appropriate? Then you need not pay any fees to register it (except perhaps from one part of the government to another) and it can never be taken over by spammers.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Since it's my taxes that pay for it, I'm quite happy to see the registration lapse. This is a bit of a non-story and wouldn't be an issue if other people kept their links up-to-date.