Exile From the Herd - via easyDNS blog

.CO Domain Registrations are Coming. Will You Participate?

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: Domain Industry Watch) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:44:23 -0500

A bunch of years ago I had an idea for an espionage/action/thriller story where a bunch of mercenaries planned a coup d'etat against the regimes of either Columbia or Cameroon for the sole reason of gaining control over the country's top-level domain registry and making billions off of typo-squatting .COM.

Truth did kind of mimic fiction (minus the coup d'etat part) when Kevin Ham cut a deal with Cameroon to wildcard .CM root. Well now Columbia has decided to overhaul it's .CO root level domain and open it up to second level registations for non-locals.

.CO is being marketed ostensibly as 'Associated globally with the words "COmpany,""COrporation" and "COmmerce"', but let's face it, the activity in this TLD is going to be driven primarily by the fact that it's a typosquatter's wet dream for .COM and a goddamn headache for everybody else with a net presence built mainly under .COM.

As we've observed before (here and then here), most registrars like to whip their customer base into a frenzy to "grab your name" under every TLD that tries to tart itself up as some pseudo-generic and trots itself out as the latest "must-have" domain. Most of them aren't "must-haves" and a lot of them are quite frankly, a waste of time and money.

So it is with a heavy heart I have to come out and say this. If you're operating a serious net presence on .COM, you probably should go out and get the .CO version of your name, as much of a royal pain in the ass as that is/will be. Not to mention expensive. The base cost on a non-Columbian Sunrise claim will be somewhere north of $250 (non-refundable) and for landrush there will be a small non-refundable "application fee" but the first year registration will be over $200. Then after landrush, the cost will settle down to a more digestible level, only about 3 times the wholesale base cost of an actual .COM.

Nice work if you can get it.

We don't want to make a bad situation worse, but we won't work for free either, so we'll try to keep our markup reasonable.

What I am interested in is what our members think of this. If you have a few moments, please take the following survey on whether you will participate in .CO. For each response we'll donate $1 to the charity of your choice.

Feel free to comment as well.

Continue reading ".CO Domain Registrations are Coming. Will You Participate?"

easyURL.net now CLOSED to general public

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: of Interest) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:19:39 -0400

Our URL shortening service easyURL.net is now CLOSED to the general public.

Only easyDNS members in good standing with at least one active domain in their account may use this service. To enable your access log into your easyDNS account and under your utilities module click on enable easyURL.net and then you're done. Happy shortening.

Everybody else can make other arrangements.

Thank you for your time.

easyURL.net adds useless "easyFrame" to redirects.

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: of Interest) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:43:37 -0400

Feeling left out of the web 2.0 "URL Shortener" hysteria, we've added a mostly useless "easyFrame"™ to the easyURL.net redirect service. The culmination of nearly two night's worth of programming in front of the TV, and nearing 100 lines of PHP code, the easyFrame™ enables people to further perpetuate it's marginal functionality via other social networking sites with a single click. Users may also "vote" on whether they actually like or dislike the subject URL being shortened.

Perhaps the single actual useful function of the easyFrame™ is that you can also report spam URLs directly to us, with one click, which we will then nuke with extreme prejudice.

We are also happy to report that our new easyFrame™ has enticed a VC bidding war and easyURL has closed a $30 Million dollar A series funding round with a pre-money valuation more than 100X that of easyDNS itself. We are now planning on spinning off easyURL.net in an October IPO.

Try it today! Tell your friends!Tweet it!

Whois Privacy brings a lawsuit down on Registrar

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: Domain Industry Watch) — Sat, 30 May 2009 09:30:00 -0400

Following on our explanation of why we do not offer whois masking here at easyDNS, we note tonight that Registrar Namecheap has been sued"over cybersquatting claims for a domain name registered under the NameCheap whois privacy services".

As we outlined in our original article: Whoever is listed as the Registrant in the domain's whois record, effectively owns the domain. If you own the domain, you get all the responsibilities for it. That's why most Registrars simply drop the whois mask at the slightest legal speedbump. Namecheap didn't, and so now it cuts the other way they get the sharp end of the legal stick being poked at the domain.

Technology lawyer Eric Goldman in his analysis of the matter under the subheading Why This is a Troubling Ruling noted:

Read literally, every proxy service is exposed to potential contributory ACPA liability for every domain name it services. I cant imagine proxy service providers will be excited about that liability exposure, and some may choose to exit the business.

Some certainly should. Any of the proxy providers who basically viewed whois masking as an easy business which basically pulls in money for doing nothing (which is more or less how I view it, I'm sorry, but that's only my opinion) - should take this as their signal that the party's over and exit the business.

As I've noted before, in it's current implmentation: whois privacy doesn't actually protect the underlying registrant's privacy (because most proxy providers will drop the mask at the first sign of trouble) and if they don't, the proxy providers are exposing themselves to inordinate risk. Coupled with the fact that the whois mask puts the underlying registrant's rights to the name in question and the whole thing is just one big mess waiting to blow up.

Whois Privacy brings a lawsuit down on Registrar

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: Domain Industry Watch) — Fri, 29 May 2009 22:26:42 -0400

Read literally, every proxy service is exposed to potential contributory ACPA liability for every domain name it services. I cant imagine proxy service providers will be excited about that liability exposure, and some may choose to exit the business.

Do you really need to register your name under .tel?

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: of Interest) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:50:00 -0400

We've turned up .tel registrations now that they've gone realtime and the initial registry implosion has stabilized. You may have noticed a distinct lack of urgency from us to light a fire under your keester to go register your name under .tel right now before somebody else takes it.

As we outlined previously, we find the hoopla around new top-level domain rollouts both tiresome and for the majority of domain holders, unnecessary. So we have a policy here that we generally a) don't launch the new TLD until it goes realtime and is considered "stable" and b) we don't try to whip our users into a hysterical frenzy ahead of time to register their domains under every new TLD.

The fact is, in the future there will be more top-level-domains, a lot more. So many of them that between obvious typos of one's domain, one's core domain or domains, and one's local geographic top-level domain, it will be a fool's errand to try and register your name under every new TLD that comes along just for the sake of "defending your mark".

The other problem is, .tel is severely crippled

While we do find .tel slightly unique in the realm of new TLDs because it actually exists for a reason: to cultivate internet telephony usage. This isn't some country-code ccTLD hiring out their namespace under some made-up reason (.me, .tv, .ws, et al) to draw in foreign registrants, it's an actual TLD geared toward SIP, VOIP and telephony and exists for that reason.

But .tel isn't doing anything under the space that can't be done under any other domain name with the appropriate use of SRV or NAPTR records and to actually make matters worse, you are forced to use their nameservers and your domains are under an Acceptable Use Policy which forces you to use the name for certain things (basically as a "contact" switch rather than a "content" page).

While the objective may be laudable: giving a TLD an actual raison d'etre beyond "register your name before somebody else does!", we don't like that you're forced to use their nameservers and don't have total latitude with your .tel domains. It runs contrary to the ethos behind easyDNS which was, and still is to drive a stake through the heart of lock-in. (It's not like we force everybody who registers a domain through us to use our nameservers because we're an outsourced DNS host, in fact we even allow our members to mirror their DNS from our nameservers from outside DNS hosts).

As such we have not become directly accredited under .tel, instead we're supporting them through our OpenSRS reseller tag, but the functionality is transparent.

Most of you reading this probably have no compelling reason to register your name under .tel unless 1) you like the TLD or 2) you have operations in the IP telephony space that would make sense segmenting under a .tel name and 3) you don't mind the crippled functionality and lock-in.

New easyDNS Member feedback survey

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: of Interest) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:13:31 -0400

Many of you may not know that we have an ongoing member feedback survey where we ask for your thoughts and impressions of using easyDNS.

We try to make it as unobtrusive as possible, and for each respondent we make a $5 donation to a charity of your choosing (World Wildlife Fund, Children's Wish Fund or Unicef).

We've recoded the survey using eSurveys.com. Feel free to give us your thoughts by taking it today.

easyDNS Member Survey

Why we do not offer Whois Privacy at easyDNS

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: of Interest) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:29:13 -0500

We get asked this a alot: Why do you guys not offer whois masking or whois contact privacy?

The brief background on this is: whenever you register a domain name, your contact details are published in a publicly visible database called "whois", where your contact details are instantly harvested by spambots and marketers who proceed to email and postal mail you marketing offers, deceptive "domain slamming" attempts, ads for dubious products, and perhaps even telemarketing calls.

Nobody likes that, so over the years people started resorting to various tactics to protect themselves from the deluge of crap that inevitably comes with simply registering a domain name: throwaway email addresses in whois records, fake postal addresses, fake phone numbers, etc. The problem is, Registrants are obligated under their various end user agreements to provide true and accurate data (not doing so is grounds to lose one's domain), and the US even passed legislation making it unlawful to use fake contact details in a domain name registration.

Our response to this, years ago, was MyPrivacy.ca which protects your email address from being harvested from your whois records, but leaves your other data intact. We didn't see it as a revenue opportunity, in fact we made it free and opened it up to competing registrars, many of whom started recommending it to their customers. We just wanted to drive a stake through the heart of the whois spammers.

It wasn't long though, before many registrars took it a step further and created the concept of "whois masking" or "contact privacy", where all of the domain-holder contact details would be masked from the public whois. Of course, this was heralded as a "value-add" and most outfits charge extra for it.

In today's long overdue post, we're finally revealing why so-called "whois privacy" puts your domains at risk, costs you more and doesn't really protect your privacy.

Continue reading "Why we do not offer Whois Privacy at easyDNS"

Why we do not offer Whois masking at easyDNS

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: of Interest) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 11:29:13 -0500

MobileMe and easyDNS...

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: Tips and Tricks) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:03:02 -0500

A number of customers have been registering domains to point to their new websites published via iWeb on their MobileMe accounts. Unfortunately, while MobileMe instructs how to point "www.yourdomain.com" to their services, they don't have a way to easily point just "yourdomain.com" to their services. This is especially important as not everyone on the internet will type "www" before a domain name when looking for a website (such as "www.google.com" versus "google.com").

Realising this is an issue for some of our customers who have DNS-Only services, we have implemented a work around. Simply follow the instructions on MobileMe to have your "www.yourdomain.com" CNAME point to "web.me.com". These are correct, and are very important. However, one last step is to leave your "yourdomain.com" record in the "hosts" block pointing to the word "PENDING". It should look something like this:

A record (host): yourdomain.com
Has IP: PENDING

...with your CNAME looking like this:

C name (alias): www.yourdomain.com
Points to A record (host): web.me.com

Once entered, click "next" to submit your changes, and "next" again after you have confirmed all looks well. These updates may take a few hours to propagate across the internet before you can see them.

If you have any questions at all, please contact our Support Dept., and we would be happy to assist you.

How to explain "URLs" so anybody can understand them

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: Tips and Tricks) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:47:14 -0400

One of our tech support guys just had a conversation with somebody who wanted "to register the URL http://example.com/something.html", where example.com was already registered, the person couldn't understand why he couldn't have that URL with "something.html" after it.

We've heard variations of this one a lot. Like somebody who knows "xyz.zz" is taken "but can I register "www.xyz.zz?", no, you can't.

The easiest way to explain a URL such as this one:

http://www.example.com/something.html

Is to think of it as HOW, then WHERE and finally WHAT:

http://	« how?	The method we are going to use to retrieve or "get to" the document described by the URL. Common ones are "http" (Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol), you may also see "ftp://" or "mailto:"
www.example.com	« where?	This is the hostname of the server, somewhere on the internet, which is holding the document we actually want
/something.html	« what?	Finally, after we know what server we are looking for and how we're going to retrieve the document from it, we now specify exactly which document we want off of the remote server.

Understand those three components and you basically have URLs down cold.

Your web browser (firefox, safari, IE, Opera) is all about "how", what protocols to use to pull all these documents over the web to your desktop.

The web host is the "what" machine. It sits on a server and serves document after document to remote web browsers who send it requests.

Something has to bridge the browser to the web host/server and that's the "where", that's where DNS and domains come in, and that's primarily what we do here at easyDNS. We tell web browsers (and other client applications) the "where" aspect of retrieving and transmitting documents (the "whats") across the internet. We do this via "DNS lookups" ...about a quarter billion times a day.

What part of "blanket permission to download" do Michael Moore's lawyers not get?

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: of Interest) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:30:00 -0400

Michael Moore released his latest film Slacker Uprising for free, over the web (note: don't click on that link if you live outside of the US or Canada or his lawyers will yell at us again). On the download page for the film Mr. Moore has this to say:

"I'm giving you my blanket permission to not only download it, but also to email it, burn it, and share it with anyone and everyone (in the U.S. and Canada only). I want you to use 'Slacker Uprising' in any way you see fit to help with the election or to do the work that you do in your community. You can show my film in your local theater, your high school classroom, your college auditorium, your church, union hall or community center. You can have your friends and neighbors over to the house for a viewing. You can broadcast it on TV, on cable access, on regular channels or on the web. It's completely free -- I don't want to see a dime from this. And if you want, you can charge admission or ask for a donation if it's to raise money for a candidate, a voter drive, or for any non-profit or educational purpose. In other words -- it's yours!"

So, why are his lawyers demanding we take action regarding a torrent posted on a DNS hosting client's website? We received the following takedown request via Fedex today:
Continue reading "What part of "blanket permission to download" do Michael Moore's lawyers not get?"

What part of "blanket permission to download" do Michael Moore's lawyers not get?

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: of Interest) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:51:03 -0400

"I'm giving you my blanket permission to not only download it, but also to email it, burn it, and share it with anyone and everyone (in the U.S. and Canada only). I want you to use 'Slacker Uprising' in any way you see fit to help with the election or to do the work that you do in your community. You can show my film in your local theater, your high school classroom, your college auditorium, your church, union hall or community center. You can have your friends and neighbors over to the house for a viewing. You can broadcast it on TV, on cable access, on regular channels or on the web. It's completely free -- I don't want to see a dime from this. And if you want, you can charge admission or ask for a donation if it's to raise money for a candidate, a voter drive, or for any non-profit or educational purpose. In other words -- it's yours!"

Running an affiliate program? Don't pay for sales you already had in the bag

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: Tips and Tricks) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:31:29 -0400

People have tried this on us so many times I figure it must still work in many cases so after the last one I decided to post a brief note about this.

We run an affiliate program via Commission Junction, it pays $20 per new customer acquisition. We also come up first in all major search engines for our own name: "easydns", "easydns.com", "www.easydns.com", and "easyDNS Technologies Inc". Every online business probably comes up first in Google for their own name. (If you don't, you have larger problems and you should probably address those).

Here's what I consider, if not a "black hat" PPC technique, a grey one which we're not interested in because it costs us affiliate commissions on sales we would have gotten without the affiliate ever being involved. Here's how the scam works:
Continue reading "Running an affiliate program? Don't pay for sales you already had in the bag"

Ten Years of easyDNS

nospam@example.com (easyDNS: of Interest) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:25:21 -0400

10 years ago on this day, we removed the password block on easyDNS.com and sent out a couple of innocuous email announcements to the PHP and Mysql mailing lists announcing that we had developed a DNS management system using php and mysql and it was now open for business. We had three nameservers, 1 in our office (where the "other server", that ran everything was), one downtown in somebody else's cage at 151 Front street, and some friends of ours in Buffalo who were running an email company called chek.com let us run a third nameserver on one of their servers. That was the initial setup of easyDNS...
Continue reading "Ten Years of easyDNS"