"Loonie soars to new 30-year high Eric Beauchesne, CanWest News Service Published: Saturday, May 26, 2007
OTTAWA -- The loonie soared to a new 30-year high of nearly 93 cents US Friday and toward what one Canadian bank is saying will be parity with the ailing U.S. greenback within two years.
The dollar, after hitting a high of 92.8 cents US, closed Friday at 92.64 cents US, its highest closing level since 1977."
"The strength of the Canadian dollar can no longer be laid solely to weakness of the greenback," Gignac said. "The loonie has appreciated against almost all currencies."
Now be nice or well hook the Chinese on Timbits and buy the US debt and turn your country into an amusement park. Eh.
"Good point, now I will check a second secret domain to prove or disprove the "ass-tunnel" hypothesis" "
% whois ass-tunnels.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the.com and.net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/ for detailed information.
No match for "ASS-TUNNELS.COM".
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the.com and.net domains can now be registered with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/ for detailed information.
I watched a movie and while I was doing that the gnomes of Zurich seems to have fixed NSI's website. It woiks now.
I'm sorta impressed there's poeple at NSI fixing this stuff at midnight. I've never seen other registrars fix stuff at night especially without even filing a trouble ticket.
I actually need to register a domain at this very moment and right now netsols website just plain flat out doesn't work. It's been this way from about 9:30 - 10:30 est.
This was 6 years ago and todays rules don't apply.
I've seen names that should have been deleted and wern't. These are called "mistakes".
If you have an adequate paper trail you can talk to ICANN's hear lawyer and get them to reverse this. They HAVE to follow the rules.
I got NSI to do this in the pre-icann era. I sent in a template to reg a domain and somebody else got it with a later timestamp. I pointed this out and they told the other guy "sorry, we screwed up" and I got my (clients) domain.
This was before ICANN "regulated" the process to the level of fairness it's at now of course.
"I've *never* used whois for probing novel domain-names for this exact reason. I just use the URL and see if it hits. If it and it's adjacent ones on other tlds of interest don't hit and I want it, I order it."
Um, you are aware not all registered domains have working websites (or even "should be working but isn't at the moment" websites) right? Some only exist to publish MX records, ie they're used only for mail.
"A quick Google search comes up with Starbucks in Burlingtons in Vermont, Ontario, North Carolina, Washington, and Massachusetts. Which one do I mean when I say "the Starbucks in Burlington?"
Well, I mean the Starbucks in Burlington, Massachusetts. But here's the thing: there are two Starbucks in Burlington, Massachusetts. (More if you count Starbucks served inside of other stores.) Which one do I mean? Well, for this example, I mean the one on Mall Road. "
The starbucks in Burlington Ontario is a drive thru. Woo hoo!
Um, there's more than one Starbucks in Burlington Ontario though. There's at elast 3 I can think of and I haven't lived there in 25 years.
"I am so very glad that ICANN has quickly come forth at the first signs of such a horrible problem, to think that the registrars would abuse their positions like this."
Keep in mind you have to send ICANN $70K to become a registrar.
So ICANN has great incentive to keep them on the up and up.
"If no one owns it, buy it NOW. The first hour after your search could very well be the only time it is ever available ever again."
An HOUR?
Say people are doing this and note it's the registrats of which there are hundreds from big ones (Network Solutions, godaddy, etc) and small ones. Serious domain name colllectors become registrars just to get domains wholesale. The abuse tends to be in the hands of the smaller registrars, modulo some crooked characters at larger registrars which HAS happened in the past - and who were fired on the spot.
Anyway, so people are doing this. Accept it. Now, more than one guy is doing it. In a competative environment do you really think you have an hour? Either now or in the future?
I'd speculate that there are registrars who simply register any name within minutes if not seconds after a lookup. Especially if they're cheap registrars. Sure they can make a dollar if you reg a domain through them, but dollars to donuts they can make more than that by implementing some clever name you thought up.
So, in theory the more a registrar charges the less likely it is to happen. I use Network Solutions these days as they seem to suck less than anybody else I've tried (YMMV) and I've never seen them steal a domain I looked up there even weeks larer.
Speaking of lookups, if you use real port 43 whois your query (in net/com) it only goes to Verisign but any web based whois at a registrar is a crapshoot. Some are good some are so bad even ICANN, a slow moving parody of itself, overrun with lawyers and controlled by registrars, has been forced to act.
"They come with speedometers in kilometers, which is one less thing to do. "
That's only for cars less than 15 yrs old. In fact all that stuff about tires and headlights is too. For older cars they only car if it was built with A/C. Newer cars have a bunch of hurles to climb, about $800 worth.
"Facebook isn't concerned with you then, just like you aren't concerned with Facebook. Facebook is concerned with the millions of other users who do have a reason to go there. "
All of who will forget their login when their braces come off and get boyfriends.
"Where do you get that people are quiting MySpace for Facebook?"
Annoying teenagers.
Myspace, is like, so last year. Dude.
My 21 yr old son is the last person I know still using myspace. Every other kid I know is using facebook. And will until the next kewl shiney thing appears.
"there has been rumor about brands as big as rolex shutting down."
Show me this rumor. It's nowhere near true. Omega in the past decade has pulled its socks up and now surpasses Rolex in every way. Cheap watches get cheaper, expensive watches get more expensive. It's never been easier to get vintage watches now as well and ebay had killed the niches and cliques that used to dabble in this stuff and make a living. All the sock drawers have been emptied and dumped onto ebay directly by their owners and the net continues to disintermediate the middle man. Dealers go hungry and watches are scare for them.
I've been a watch freak for decades and never at any point in history that I can remember have watches been so popular now that we don't actually need them. Weird huh?
When I wake up, strapped to my arm is a 14Kt 44 jewel MST 435 Roamer Stingray. Each of the reversing wheels has 5 ruby roller bearings. It's cool as shite but looks like just another thin gold plain dress watch. My cel does indeed tell time... wherever it is.
"About 4 years ago, a US visitor here (UK) was shocked to see that nearly everyone had mobile phones"
The US is far from homogenious. A decade ago I was flying all over the US and cel phone usage was about the same as Toronto, my home base at the time. The sight of the odd person holding a cel and talking into it was not uncommon.
So like, I fly to San Fransisco and again, this is 1997, get off the plane and walk through the concourse. I see a guy talking, apparantly to himself with a blank stare like he was here but not really here if you know what I mean.
Then I notice they're all doing it. Holy shit! Zombies!
Turns out they were just early adopters of cel phone headsets and they'd achieved near ubiquity at least at SFO. I'd never seeen these before.
The crab cocktail and sourdough bread soothed my jangled nerves in the land of blue suited zombies that afternoon.
I have in my barn 4 old german cars I brought up from the states. Importing a vehicle 15 yrs old or older is trivially simple. You drive it up, show them the bill of sale and registration then pay the GST and $100 more if is has A/C (working ot not, installed or not). Then you drive away ands you have no hassles from the local registration authority even if it's something weird like a 5 cyl diesel.
"I used to see it happen a LOT - then I stopped doing name lookups through web interfaces, and do a whois in a terminal, and the problem went away. NEVER do a domain name search through a web interface. They're not there for your benefit, but for domain name pharmers "
Oy. Where to begin.
First of all, traffic to the root servers isn't vert interesting. They get queries like "what are the nameservers for.com?" or "what are the nameservers for.tv". The root servers serve up the NS records for the top level domain servers.
TFA almost certainly means "tld servers" not "root servers", as the tld servers are the ones that get queries on the order of "what are the NS records for blahfoobingyabbadabbado.com" and failures in these lookups are usefull to some people.
As for looking up domains stealthily, yes, by all means avoid web based lookups.
But if you use dig/nslookup what have you you're still querying the tld servers and your failed lookups will be sold. So this won't help.
But! There are 13 nameservers listed for com and similarly so for net. There's zero guarentee NSI, err, Verisign will actually get all the queries. They only get some.
The only way you can do this independant of observation is to download a copy of the com or net zone files. You can get them from NSI, err, Verisign by filling out some forms, then you get a login and password and can download the zones and look at junk without anybody seeing.
I'm not sure of the marginal utility of this, I just wanted to point out you're not "safe" just because you use dig instead of a web based lookup.
I can't get too excited about this. I'm more annoyed by them selling whois in bulk.
When domains were free I registered a lot of silly ones. Right away and still to this day I get (snail) mail from the likes of HP, Microsoft, IBM etc to "The Masonic order of the Mango" and other idiocies.
In 1994 I met a guy that told me this story. He was out of a masters program in argicultural science and wanted to do someting about the chicken problem whereby you have to feed them antibiotics when they're in close quarters otherwise they get sick. He reasoned that it was filty air that was doing so built a coup that had two walls charged with -15kv to electrostatically clean the air. He said it worked; the ait was clean, the chickens never got sick and there was a 4" thick coating of white fluffy dust.
One day the coup was wiped out by one of the rare hurricanes up here. Specifically the one in the Fergus/Guelph corridor.
He didn't think much of it other than "dammit".
Not long after he got a visit by a bunch of government types (he never said who, but said he was scared from the moment they said "hello".
They explained to him the hurricane was tracking a straight line then took a 10 mile south diversion, wiped out his coup then went back to it's original course. They wanted to know what on earth he had in that coup.
He said "hey, if I could divert the course of a hurricane would I me messing around with chickens?" and they want away.
If you dig deep enough you'll see Verisign/Netsol was founded by ex SAIC staffers. SAIC is sort of a retirement home for ex intelligence types. Even later hires at netsol came from the intelligence community.
I did some work at netsol almost a decade ago (writing diagnostics for the registry/regiatrar protocol). Those dudes are seriously smart people and good at what they do.
It's easy to see why people hated netsol. It was full of very smart people very good at what they do.
Slashdot Mirror
" Because Commodore killed the Amiga "
Nice. But good point. The last thing computer manufacturors want is a machine that does what everyone needs.
I wonder how much they bribed Tramiel to be so stupid?
" how much is that in Canadian monopoly money? Ha ha, canucks, we love you miserable bastards, eh "
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/story.html?id=292a762e-5b3e-4909-9ea3-ca664b774391&k=97109
"Loonie soars to new 30-year high
Eric Beauchesne, CanWest News Service
Published: Saturday, May 26, 2007
OTTAWA -- The loonie soared to a new 30-year high of nearly 93 cents US Friday and toward what one Canadian bank is saying will be parity with the ailing U.S. greenback within two years.
The dollar, after hitting a high of 92.8 cents US, closed Friday at 92.64 cents US, its highest closing level since 1977."
"The strength of the Canadian dollar can no longer be laid solely to weakness of the greenback," Gignac said. "The loonie has appreciated against almost all currencies."
Now be nice or well hook the Chinese on Timbits and buy the US debt and turn your country into an amusement park. Eh.
"Good point, now I will check a second secret domain to prove or disprove the "ass-tunnel" hypothesis" "
.com and .net domains can now be registered
.com and .net domains can now be registered
% whois ass-tunnels.com
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.
No match for "ASS-TUNNELS.COM".
Whois Server Version 2.0
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net/
for detailed information.
No match for "ASS-TUNNEL.COM"
"That reminded me of the extremely funny Capital One commercials:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XMOh-kyDhis
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Nyrzyd5Rq1Y "
Are they to be sued next for advertising cheap credit cards? (They aren't)
I watched a movie and while I was doing that the gnomes of Zurich seems to have fixed NSI's website. It woiks now.
I'm sorta impressed there's poeple at NSI fixing this stuff at midnight. I've never seen other registrars fix stuff at night especially without even filing a trouble ticket.
Netsol? I've heard of them. They sound good.
I actually need to register a domain at this very moment and right now netsols website just plain flat out doesn't work. It's been this way from about 9:30 - 10:30 est.
Oy.
This was 6 years ago and todays rules don't apply.
I've seen names that should have been deleted and wern't. These are called "mistakes".
If you have an adequate paper trail you can talk to ICANN's hear lawyer and get them to reverse this. They HAVE to follow the rules.
I got NSI to do this in the pre-icann era. I sent in a template to reg a domain and somebody else got it with a later timestamp. I pointed this out and they told the other guy "sorry, we screwed up" and I got my (clients) domain.
This was before ICANN "regulated" the process to the level of fairness it's at now of course.
Get rid of speculators? Hahahahaha. Who do think participates in ICANN meetings?
You've never been to one, have you?
"I've *never* used whois for probing novel domain-names for this exact reason. I just use the URL and see if it hits. If it and it's adjacent ones on other tlds of interest don't hit and I want it, I order it."
Um, you are aware not all registered domains have working websites (or even "should be working but isn't at the moment" websites) right? Some only exist to publish MX records, ie they're used only for mail.
" A quick Google search comes up with Starbucks in Burlingtons in Vermont, Ontario, North Carolina, Washington, and Massachusetts. Which one do I mean when I say "the Starbucks in Burlington?"
Well, I mean the Starbucks in Burlington, Massachusetts. But here's the thing: there are two Starbucks in Burlington, Massachusetts. (More if you count Starbucks served inside of other stores.) Which one do I mean? Well, for this example, I mean the one on Mall Road. "
The starbucks in Burlington Ontario is a drive thru. Woo hoo!
Um, there's more than one Starbucks in Burlington Ontario though. There's at elast 3 I can think of and I haven't lived there in 25 years.
God it was Boring.
" I am so very glad that ICANN has quickly come forth at the first signs of such a horrible problem, to think that the registrars would abuse their positions like this. "
Keep in mind you have to send ICANN $70K to become a registrar.
So ICANN has great incentive to keep them on the up and up.
Oh wait...
" If no one owns it, buy it NOW. The first hour after your search could very well be the only time it is ever available ever again."
An HOUR?
Say people are doing this and note it's the registrats of which there are hundreds from big ones (Network Solutions, godaddy, etc) and small ones. Serious domain name colllectors become registrars just to get domains wholesale. The abuse tends to be in the hands of the smaller registrars, modulo some crooked characters at larger registrars which HAS happened in the past - and who were fired on the spot.
Anyway, so people are doing this. Accept it. Now, more than one guy is doing it. In a competative environment do you really think you have an hour? Either now or in the future?
I'd speculate that there are registrars who simply register any name within minutes if not seconds after a lookup. Especially if they're cheap registrars. Sure they can make a dollar if you reg a domain through them, but dollars to donuts they can make more than that by implementing some clever name you thought up.
So, in theory the more a registrar charges the less likely it is to happen. I use Network Solutions these days as they seem to suck less than anybody else I've tried (YMMV) and I've never seen them steal a domain I looked up there even weeks larer.
Speaking of lookups, if you use real port 43 whois your query (in net/com) it only goes to Verisign but any web based whois at a registrar is a crapshoot. Some are good some are so bad even ICANN, a slow moving parody of itself, overrun with lawyers and controlled by registrars, has been forced to act.
" They come with speedometers in kilometers, which is one less thing to do. "
That's only for cars less than 15 yrs old. In fact all that stuff about tires and headlights is too. For older cars they only car if it was built with A/C. Newer cars have a bunch of hurles to climb, about $800 worth.
"Facebook isn't concerned with you then, just like you aren't concerned with Facebook. Facebook is concerned with the millions of other users who do have a reason to go there. "
All of who will forget their login when their braces come off and get boyfriends.
"WTF!?! Facebook is worth of 15 billion dollars?"
Don't panic, they're US dollars.
They'd probably take a box of timbits instead.
" Where do you get that people are quiting MySpace for Facebook?"
Annoying teenagers.
Myspace, is like, so last year. Dude.
My 21 yr old son is the last person I know still using myspace. Every other kid I know is using facebook. And will until the next kewl shiney thing appears.
"Yeah, there is, but that domain is just a redirect to slashdot.org "
I get a Yahoo (spit) search page.
" there has been rumor about brands as big as rolex shutting down."
Show me this rumor. It's nowhere near true. Omega in the past decade has pulled its socks up and now surpasses Rolex in every way. Cheap watches get cheaper, expensive watches get more expensive. It's never been easier to get vintage watches now as well and ebay had killed the niches and cliques that used to dabble in this stuff and make a living. All the sock drawers have been emptied and dumped onto ebay directly by their owners and the net continues to disintermediate the middle man. Dealers go hungry and watches are scare for them.
I've been a watch freak for decades and never at any point in history that I can remember have watches been so popular now that we don't actually need them. Weird huh?
When I wake up, strapped to my arm is a 14Kt 44 jewel MST 435 Roamer Stingray. Each of the reversing wheels has 5 ruby roller bearings. It's cool as shite but looks like just another thin gold plain dress watch. My cel does indeed tell time... wherever it is.
" About 4 years ago, a US visitor here (UK) was shocked to see that nearly everyone had mobile phones"
The US is far from homogenious. A decade ago I was flying all over the US and cel phone usage was about the same as Toronto, my home base at the time. The sight of the odd person holding a cel and talking into it was not uncommon.
So like, I fly to San Fransisco and again, this is 1997, get off the plane and walk through the concourse. I see a guy talking, apparantly to himself with a blank stare like he was here but not really here if you know what I mean.
Then I notice they're all doing it. Holy shit! Zombies!
Turns out they were just early adopters of cel phone headsets and they'd achieved near ubiquity at least at SFO. I'd never seeen these before.
The crab cocktail and sourdough bread soothed my jangled nerves in the land of blue suited zombies that afternoon.
I have in my barn 4 old german cars I brought up from the states. Importing a vehicle 15 yrs old or older is trivially simple. You drive it up, show them the bill of sale and registration then pay the GST and $100 more if is has A/C (working ot not, installed or not). Then you drive away ands you have no hassles from the local registration authority even if it's something weird like a 5 cyl diesel.
Notes and links here
"I used to see it happen a LOT - then I stopped doing name lookups through web interfaces, and do a whois in a terminal, and the problem went away. NEVER do a domain name search through a web interface. They're not there for your benefit, but for domain name pharmers "
.com?" or "what are the nameservers for .tv". The root servers serve up the NS records for the top level domain servers.
Oy. Where to begin.
First of all, traffic to the root servers isn't vert interesting. They get queries like "what are the nameservers for
TFA almost certainly means "tld servers" not "root servers", as the tld servers are the ones that get queries on the order of "what are the NS records for blahfoobingyabbadabbado.com" and failures in these lookups are usefull to some people.
As for looking up domains stealthily, yes, by all means avoid web based lookups.
But if you use dig/nslookup what have you you're still querying the tld servers and your failed lookups will be sold. So this won't help.
But! There are 13 nameservers listed for com and similarly so for net. There's zero guarentee NSI, err, Verisign will actually get all the queries. They only get some.
The only way you can do this independant of observation is to download a copy of the com or net zone files. You can get them from NSI, err, Verisign by filling out some forms, then you get a login and password and can download the zones and look at junk without anybody seeing.
I'm not sure of the marginal utility of this, I just wanted to point out you're not "safe" just because you use dig instead of a web based lookup.
I can't get too excited about this. I'm more annoyed by them selling whois in bulk.
When domains were free I registered a lot of silly ones. Right away and still to this day I get (snail) mail from the likes of HP, Microsoft, IBM etc to "The Masonic order of the Mango" and other idiocies.
That's gonna be a bitch for say, ftp, irc, mail, nntp, ntp, ssh...
Is there anybody here that didn't do this a decade ago?
I sure did.
In 1994 I met a guy that told me this story. He was out of a masters program in argicultural science and wanted to do someting about the chicken problem whereby you have to feed them antibiotics when they're in close quarters otherwise they get sick. He reasoned that it was filty air that was doing so built a coup that had two walls charged with -15kv to electrostatically clean the air. He said it worked; the ait was clean, the chickens never got sick and there was a 4" thick coating of white fluffy dust.
One day the coup was wiped out by one of the rare hurricanes up here. Specifically the one in the Fergus/Guelph corridor.
He didn't think much of it other than "dammit".
Not long after he got a visit by a bunch of government types (he never said who, but said he was scared from the moment they said "hello".
They explained to him the hurricane was tracking a straight line then took a 10 mile south diversion, wiped out his coup then went back to it's original course. They wanted to know what on earth he had in that coup.
He said "hey, if I could divert the course of a hurricane would I me messing around with chickens?" and they want away.
If you dig deep enough you'll see Verisign/Netsol was founded by ex SAIC staffers. SAIC is sort of a retirement home for ex intelligence types. Even later hires at netsol came from the intelligence community.
I did some work at netsol almost a decade ago (writing diagnostics for the registry/regiatrar protocol). Those dudes are seriously smart people and good at what they do.
It's easy to see why people hated netsol. It was full of very smart people very good at what they do.