If you believe the article, that is. I do not, because I placed an order for this set. It was canceled. I received an email from Amazon about it. It is true that you no longer see the order online, but that's how canceled orders work. I just canceled an order for a few books I bought locally, and the order no longer shows up in my account either.
This guy's email is probably wrong, or it got spam filtered. It's almost certainly an automated process, so I fairly certain we were both sent emails
The only way this connects to Google services is it's offered through AdWords. The pages you optimize don't have to be the ones you're advertising (nor, for that matter, do you even have to be actively advertising).
Also it has nothing to do with optimizing to work better with/for Google, it's to optimize them to convert better (turn more visitors into buyers/subscribers/whatever). In other words, this is basically just a tool Google offers to help you make a better selling website.
Of course, you CAN use it to test traffic from AdWords ads, increase conversions from AdWords visitors, and spend more money on AdWords ads. You can just as easily use it to test traffic from Overture ads, increase conversion from Overture visitors, and spend more money on Overture ads.
The 600,000 unit was made up by a research company.
As you said, MS shipped 1.5 million units. 900k of those were in the US for the fiscal quarter ending Dec 31st. So as of DECEMBER, 900k were sold in the US. As of now... I'd guess a million or so.
Usually becoming a reseller requires little or no investment upfront (free signup, free software).
Becoming an ICANN accredited registrar means large fees and you also need to prove a substantial amount of working capital in order to be approved. Financial Requirements.
And, just to be nit-pickey, unless the company is ICANN accredited they are not actually a registrar (just a reseller).
It can actually make a big difference... not so much for transfering (although it is possible that the reseller steal your domain), it's just another layer where something could go wrong.
Also, resellers often have the same power you have over a domain -- they could easily change the admin contact to themselves, for example.
Or, in a recent example, the employee of one reseller decided to delete everyone's domains. The users were forced to either pay some price over $100 to get the domain from redemption or potentially lose the domain (aside from the fact that what they paid for the domain was gone). If you care to read about that, here is a rather long thread on it.
First and foremost, choose a registrar that is secure. Under the old Network Solutions regime things were mostly done with email forms and the base method of security was verifying the "From" address an email was sent by. Yeah. That's not very secure, yet Exite was using it as opposed to at least the slightly better password or crypt-password options.
Most registrars now use password protection and a web interface (Network Solutions does this now too). Yet like with everything else people will have stupid passwords, and some registrars allow people to have stupid passwords.
Also, domains can be locked. This gives some security -- it prevents a transfer from going through unless you login to your current registrar to unlock the domain first. This is a bit of added security.
Finally, make sure your email is secure and VALID. The number of people with invalid emails in their domain profile is staggering. Without a valid email you won't be notified that a domain is attempting to be transfered. If someone gets into your email, it's also likely they can get the login details for your registrar account.
Okay that finally wasn't too final -- here's a few more things: don't deal with resellers. Go straight to a registrar and make sure they are ICANN accredited (not selling for someone else who is). Deal with a company with a good reputation.
It's not surprising this has happened. Many, many companies do not take administrating their domain seriously, and several registrars -- Network Solutions especially -- make it very easy to steal domains.
I know this from experience -- many years back one morning I woke up and Excite.com, Angelfire.com, and a few other domains were mysterically owned by me. The only thing the hijacker needed to do (it wasn't me, by the way) was send in a single email. Old Story at Wired.
After looking at a LOT of different dedicated hosts, I've seen only very few that will patch a user's machine. If you're going with a large facility, they have thousands of machines. It is almost ALWAYS the user's responsibility to manage the server; this INCLUDES keeping the patches up to date.
A facility should, however, provide a system initially with all patches up to date; this only makes sense. If it was a new server, you should have been up to date. If you'd had it for a few years and ignore security bulletins (or don't subscribe to them), it's your fault. Clearly you had a new server and shouldn't have had problems, but a user must take some accountability themselves.
I recently got a dedicated server and the FIRST thing I did -- before transfering from my old dedicated to the new one, even -- was to check for patches.
A while back, an idiot sent in a few hundred fraudulent requests to transfer big-name domains to my ownership. None succeeded, except two: angelfire.com and excite.com. NSI fixed it instantly -- I never showed up as owner of excite.com publicly (although I did for angelfire). The shame is they REFUSED to do that for a friend of mine who had his domain stolen in the same manner... I guess they only help the multi-million dollar companies out. Not only that, after they fixed angelfire.com, the changes switched back a few times over the next few weeks (causing downtime at Angelfire, and also people pissed at spammers to call ME and bitch). Now I was extremely nice about everything -- I didn't want to profit or gain off of this, that wouldn't be right... but imagine if I did? There was a Wired news article about it, you can check it out here.
Slashdot Mirror
If you believe the article, that is. I do not, because I placed an order for this set. It was canceled. I received an email from Amazon about it. It is true that you no longer see the order online, but that's how canceled orders work. I just canceled an order for a few books I bought locally, and the order no longer shows up in my account either.
This guy's email is probably wrong, or it got spam filtered. It's almost certainly an automated process, so I fairly certain we were both sent emails
The only way this connects to Google services is it's offered through AdWords. The pages you optimize don't have to be the ones you're advertising (nor, for that matter, do you even have to be actively advertising).
Also it has nothing to do with optimizing to work better with/for Google, it's to optimize them to convert better (turn more visitors into buyers/subscribers/whatever). In other words, this is basically just a tool Google offers to help you make a better selling website.
Of course, you CAN use it to test traffic from AdWords ads, increase conversions from AdWords visitors, and spend more money on AdWords ads.
You can just as easily use it to test traffic from Overture ads, increase conversion from Overture visitors, and spend more money on Overture ads.
The 600,000 unit was made up by a research company.
As you said, MS shipped 1.5 million units. 900k of those were in the US for the fiscal quarter ending Dec 31st. So as of DECEMBER, 900k were sold in the US. As of now... I'd guess a million or so.
Usually becoming a reseller requires little or no investment upfront (free signup, free software).
Becoming an ICANN accredited registrar means large fees and you also need to prove a substantial amount of working capital in order to be approved. Financial Requirements.
And, just to be nit-pickey, unless the company is ICANN accredited they are not actually a registrar (just a reseller).
It can actually make a big difference... not so much for transfering (although it is possible that the reseller steal your domain), it's just another layer where something could go wrong.
Also, resellers often have the same power you have over a domain -- they could easily change the admin contact to themselves, for example.
Or, in a recent example, the employee of one reseller decided to delete everyone's domains. The users were forced to either pay some price over $100 to get the domain from redemption or potentially lose the domain (aside from the fact that what they paid for the domain was gone). If you care to read about that, here is a rather long thread on it.
First and foremost, choose a registrar that is secure. Under the old Network Solutions regime things were mostly done with email forms and the base method of security was verifying the "From" address an email was sent by. Yeah. That's not very secure, yet Exite was using it as opposed to at least the slightly better password or crypt-password options.
Most registrars now use password protection and a web interface (Network Solutions does this now too). Yet like with everything else people will have stupid passwords, and some registrars allow people to have stupid passwords.
Also, domains can be locked. This gives some security -- it prevents a transfer from going through unless you login to your current registrar to unlock the domain first. This is a bit of added security.
Finally, make sure your email is secure and VALID. The number of people with invalid emails in their domain profile is staggering. Without a valid email you won't be notified that a domain is attempting to be transfered. If someone gets into your email, it's also likely they can get the login details for your registrar account.
Okay that finally wasn't too final -- here's a few more things: don't deal with resellers. Go straight to a registrar and make sure they are ICANN accredited (not selling for someone else who is). Deal with a company with a good reputation.
It's not surprising this has happened. Many, many companies do not take administrating their domain seriously, and several registrars -- Network Solutions especially -- make it very easy to steal domains.
I know this from experience -- many years back one morning I woke up and Excite.com, Angelfire.com, and a few other domains were mysterically owned by me. The only thing the hijacker needed to do (it wasn't me, by the way) was send in a single email. Old Story at Wired.
After looking at a LOT of different dedicated hosts, I've seen only very few that will patch a user's machine. If you're going with a large facility, they have thousands of machines. It is almost ALWAYS the user's responsibility to manage the server; this INCLUDES keeping the patches up to date. A facility should, however, provide a system initially with all patches up to date; this only makes sense. If it was a new server, you should have been up to date. If you'd had it for a few years and ignore security bulletins (or don't subscribe to them), it's your fault. Clearly you had a new server and shouldn't have had problems, but a user must take some accountability themselves. I recently got a dedicated server and the FIRST thing I did -- before transfering from my old dedicated to the new one, even -- was to check for patches.
A while back, an idiot sent in a few hundred fraudulent requests to transfer big-name domains to my ownership. None succeeded, except two: angelfire.com and excite.com. NSI fixed it instantly -- I never showed up as owner of excite.com publicly (although I did for angelfire). The shame is they REFUSED to do that for a friend of mine who had his domain stolen in the same manner... I guess they only help the multi-million dollar companies out. Not only that, after they fixed angelfire.com, the changes switched back a few times over the next few weeks (causing downtime at Angelfire, and also people pissed at spammers to call ME and bitch). Now I was extremely nice about everything -- I didn't want to profit or gain off of this, that wouldn't be right... but imagine if I did? There was a Wired news article about it, you can check it out here.