Exile From the Herd

.CO Domain Registrations are Coming. Will You Participate?

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?"

Sprott ditches stake in alleged Google-scammer.

From the earliest days of my investment education, I always liked Eric Sprott and his Sprott Asset Management. Sprott and his team are proven money managers and his Markets at a Glance commentaries are a great no-nonsense source of valuable insight.

As a tech guy, I was intrigued when I found some Sprott Asset Management 13G filings with the SEC that showed Sprott was taking a few positions in some (*gulp*) internet companies. Imagine that. Namely, Israeli start-up IncrediMail Ltd. (MAIL), an easyDNS customer Points.com (TSX:PTO) and Pacific Webworks Inc. (PWEB).

So the interesting one here is PWEB, but we have to take a bit of a tangent.

Continue reading "Sprott ditches stake in alleged Google-scammer."

Have (another) Parkdale Hookers Christmas

My band has re-released our perennial family favorite "Have a Parkdale Hookers Christmas" on the band website. Phil had it re-mastered at the Laquer Channel and if I may say so, it sounds pretty kick-ass.

Seasonal Greetings to all.

Because your security is very unimportant to us

We're forcing you to use a watered down, weaker password to authenticate your credit card info:

For your convenience, and the convenience of those attempting to crack the password protecting this account, please only use characters in your password from this smaller, known set of values so that the total potential keyspace required to crack your account is a minute fraction of what it should be.

Thank you.

This is from Verified by VISA btw.

Enabling SASL authentication on postifx for outbound email

There are a lot of articles about how to enable your postfix server to accept inbound SASL connections for authenticated mail. Sometimes you want to do the opposite: get postfix to route all outbound mail via an upstream mail relay with SASL authentication.

Case in point: Last night I grabbed a new VPS via Slicehost, and there are a few wobbles, but so far the support seems responsive and I loved the lighning fast activation. Who knows what the last occupant of my IP there did though, cause it's listed in the spamhaus xbl-sbl:

Nov 4 00:43:25 thirteen postfix/smtp[12557]: 7427014027F: to=, relay=smtp.easydns.com[64.68.200.52]:25, delay=0.81, delays=0.15/0.01/0.53/0.12, dsn=5.7.1, status=bounced (host smtp.easydns.com[64.68.200.52] said: 550 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [204.232.193.225] blocked using sbl-xbl.easydns.com; http://www.spamhaus.org/query/bl?ip=204.232.193.225 (in reply to RCPT TO command))

Bummer.

Well with the increasing popularity of cloud computing and grids, odds are the IP address you're using now is a bit tarnished. All the more reason to have a stable, dedicated outbound SMTP mailhop setup somewhere. As it happens, I own a company that offers outbound SMTP relaying so the next step was just to figure out how to get postfix to do it.

Thanks to "anothersysdmin's" Postfix as relay to a SMTP requiring authentication, I was able to get it working in about a minute-and-a-half.

"Everything louder than everything else..."

Just a quick observation on today's new all time high in the price of gold on news that the IMF has sold 200 metric tonnes of gold to India's Central Bank.

Usually, when the IMF sells gold, the price of gold goes down.

Historically, central banks sell their gold. (Tin foil hats aside on the reasons why)

Instead gold went up today, typically, when gold goes up, the US dollar goes down. Not today, it went up too.

Usually, when the USD goes up, the Canadian dollar goes down. Not today though, the CDN went up even more than the USD.

Even Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway went up on news that they would be undertaking their largest buyout ever and splitting the Baby B's 50-to-1.
(When a company announces a takeover of another company, their stock often goes down while the target companies spikes higher.)

Just one of those zany days in the financial markets.

Canadian M3 Money Supply still going strong. (Is that good or bad?)

At least M3 is still reported here in Canada. The number is so politically indigestible in the US, they simply pronounced it "irrelevant" and stopped reporting it years ago. To get US numbers you have to use the non-official numbers over at ShadowStats.

Source: Statistics Canada

Statistics Canada still reports it. In fact they seem to have updated the figures today. We see that M3 grew single digits from 2005 through 2007, the yearly YOY numbers were 9%, 7% and 9% again before flaring out to 12% from 2007 to 2008.

What's interesting is the seeming divergence between US and Canadian M3 data. According to ShadowStats, M3 in the US tanked over '08. That would be deflation in action - billions upon billions of what looked like "money" (or an "asset" with a AAA rating from Moody's) turned out to be in fact, toxic debt with little or no value.

Here in Canada, the quarterly data tells a different story, M3 didn't implode this year, it's up another 3% so far, to the end of August.

The Good News

So the good news is that Canadian M3 didn't implode like it did in the US. This means there wasn't nearly as much toxic debt fueling asset bubbles here in Canada. That could mean we may/might hopefully see a divergence in the Canadian and US economic paths going forward, one where the Canadian economy holds up better than what happens in the US (green shoots aside, and sorry to our American readers , but I fear there is still a lot of gloom ahead).

The Bad News

M3 is still going up, which means we're all being hosed via inflation. Got a million dollars sitting in the bank that you're calling your "nest egg"? Well that million dollars became 12% less powerful in '08 and 3% less this year. Sure, the government would point to the CPI figures which show a drop in inflation this year. But think of it like owning shares in a company: you hold 1 million shares of "Canadian Dollar Corp", suddenly the Board of Directors decides to issue another 120 thousand shares "to shore up liquidity", are your shares diluted or not?

(What's more is that pretty well all global currencies, whether their M3 went down or not in '08/'09 are still pumping new money supply as we speak. This is the story gold is telling right now. Everybody is debasing their own currency so gold is once again rising against all of them.)

More Bad News

If you're an exporter, (or say, an internet company that does a lot of sales in the US), you may get caught in a type of double bind: Canada holds up better than the US, which leads to a stronger Canadian Dollar than the US, which leads to weaker exports, and/or weaker revenues out of the US. So even though the amateur economist in me sees a glimmer of Canadian divergence from the ongoing financial gloom, make no mistake that we'll still feel it. (In case you haven't already).

At the end of the day, as Marc Faber noted in this month's GloomBoomDoom report

"the world is not black and white and that there can be inflation in some sectors of the
economy and in some asset markets while other sectors and asset classes
deflate."

Always keeping in mind that this is not financial advice, I am not a licensed financial advisor so do your own due diligence, remove cellophane before eating, etc. my guess is that we look to be on an inflationary path here in Canada.

Lifestyle business? Damn right!

I had to respond to Rick Segal's dig at "lifestyle businesses" in EYODF Part 8 - How to Hold Down 10 Jobs Simultaneously. Even though he's no longer a VC, he seems to still hold the standard VC dogma which despises that dreaded L-word.

God forbid somebody builds a business and gets to a point where it requires very little work and just spins off cash. To VC's that's a travesty. They have a pejorative term for it, "the lifestyle business".

First, I’m sorry. Very sorry. I’m very sorry for ever (E-V-E-R!) calling your business a “nice lifestyle business.” The only thing I can think of that would be a worse insult? Throw a shoe at you. Seriously. If an investor uses the term lifestyle business, YOU throw a shoe.

Thanks Rick, where would I be if I followed your advice unerringly? (Oh yeah, cashed out of my own business at some stink bid valuation years ago and heading up some JLA funded start-up that went into the deadpool....)

A lifestyle business is one in which the company is profitable and the profits flow to the last place VC's ever want to see them going: into the founder's pockets. Even worse is if the company is on auto-pilot and the founder can do whatever he wants.

While the lifestyle business is unsung and frowned upon, the VC-funded start-up is celebrated and adored. Profits are optional and more frequently absent. As 37 Signals noted in their parody VC tombstone:

"When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation”

The most important thing in a VC-funded startup is that it can garner subsequent funding rounds at successively higher valuations which eventually culminate in "an exit". In today's climate that is generally a euphemism for finding that last, greatest fool who will take all the earlier investors out at some terminally high valuation, and basically ends up "holding the bag" chock full of eternally unrecoupable goodwill. Whether that terminal investor is a big fish with deep pockets, or an unwitting public drooling over the next big thing IPO is immaterial.

Over the summer easyDNS was on the receiving end of an unsolicited buyout offer. I told the investment bank that I was about the least motivated seller that could possibly be found. After putting together an offer that was about half of what I would get my attention they told me (get this), "They have VC's on their Board, so any deal would have to MAKE SENSE from their perspective".

Which really cracked me up. Making sense is a laudable goal. Except when it comes to VCs, where it means "the deal has to be totally slanted in our favor and you get screwed". Uhm ok. Where do I sign?

What's Next, Canada Pension Plan Buys Twitter?

I haven't been blogging much over the summer and I've made a commitment to myself to get back into it over the fall. Here's as good a place as any to start.

I'm doing some comparative research of Canada versus the US: growth of money supply, national debt as a percentage of GDP, account surplus. From that I'm trying to figure out if I'm about to do something suicidal (buy a building for the company after our lease expires next year), or shrewd. A big part of the calculus here is to try to get a feel for the downside risk if we're just in the eye of the storm, financially speaking, and another trainwreck is about to ensure (next round of mortgage resets down south, credit card defaults, imminent crash in the USD, deflationary spiral? Hyper-inflationary blow-up?)

Usually, you don't have to factor all these Black Swan events into a routine decision like this, but we are living in a rare confluence of events where we have to seriously consider the possibility (probability) of these things occurring.

But I digress....

In the course of this, I just found out that the Canada Pension Plan was a member of the consortium that just bought Skype from eBay, so CPP will own 15% of Skype if this goes through.

WTF?! You're telling me, CPP is automatically deducted from my salary, nothing I can do about it except supposedly live off some pittance it produces when I'm 65, and they're using this money by going in on these sucker's bet private equity deals like this? Give me a break. What's next, Canada Pension Plan buys Twitter?

This is CPP: it's supposed to be a lockbox model: money goes in, stays there until we're old, money comes out. In the interim about the only place I can see sanely putting the money is into Government bonds, not f-ing SKYPE. We're not running a goddamn VC fund here, it's supposed to be our retirement income.

What a crock. Tell me why I can't just opt-out of CPP now. Kiss off the money I put in so far, relinquish any future claim to any payout from CPP, thank you very much, I'll look after myself - and keep the damn portion of my salary CPP deducts every year and invest it myself.

Oh right, that would mean taking responsibility for my own life.

Can't have that now. Gotta let the Nanny take care of EVERYTHING.

easyURL.net now CLOSED to general public

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.

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!

Demystifying "Government Guaranteed Gas Rebate Cheques"

The Oxford Club publishes an investment newsletter but I'm pretty sure they make far more money pushing financial advisory info products than they do actually investing into the trades they talk up. I subscribed for a year, found it to be a "pay for more ads" kind of upsell machine and discontinued.

They still send me their sales letters. I guess the hardest thing to face was that at one point in time I actually responded to this stuff.

Anyhoo...today's sales letter is a 19 page opus How to Claim Your First "Gas Rebate" Check on July 15 because....

"Some smart Canadians have begun collecting checks for a little-known government-guaranteed gas rebate program. And they'll continue receiving payments until 2011. Now you can join them..."

Continue reading "Demystifying "Government Guaranteed Gas Rebate Cheques" "

TARP funds were for loosening up the credit markets, right? Right?

Can't go into this too much, but was on the phone yesterday with a friend of mine who is COO of a tech outfit in New York state. Been in business around 5 years, has customers, revenues, cashflow, etc.

They had an operating line-of-credit with Silicon Valley Bank, who in December took somewhere north of 230 million in TARP funds. TARP funds were handed out to "get the credit markets flowing again" after they completely seized up in late '08. This company has not used up a lot of their credit line, but they do use it. They've never missed a payment.

This week they've been informed by SVB that their credit-line is no more. It's been converted into a note and they've been given 10 months to pay it off.

After I got off the phone I wondered if perhaps they were registered Republicans

Whois Privacy brings a lawsuit down on Registrar

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

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.