Domains

The Blogger To Be Named Later

A few years ago, outspoken tech blogger Russell Beattie got a phone call at home after he angered someone with one of the entries on his site. They asked to speak with his young son. Beattie didn't want the incident to feed anyone's fear, but I think it's worth recalling in the discussion of whether it's OK to reveal a blogger's identity, as Michael Arrington appears to believe. Arrington's put the chill on the unnamed author of Dead 2.0, a blogger critical of the web 2.0 bubble that has become ... (read more)

2006/09/22

Remembering Brian Buck

A comment spam showed up today in a year-old Workbench entry marking the death of Brian Buck, a blogger who told the story of his five-year fight with cancer to its end last April. The entry about Buck was the last before I created an international incident by popesquatting Benedict XVI. So in a nice bit of serendipity, thousands of people drawn here by international press coverage read about Buck, a remarkable person whose blog stands testament to the power of personal journalism. In a ... (read more)

2006/04/14

Mobile developer Russell Beattie likes the new .mobi top-level domain:... something what we've been desperately needing in the mobile web: A standard navigation scheme. Now users can guess "cnn.mobi" or "yahoo.mobi" or "amazon.mobi" and KNOW that their phone isn't going to barf at them, and the companies will have a standard name to rally around as well. I would imagine that very soon, the handsets themselves will incorporate this, so instead of having to type in .mobi at all, that will be the ... (read more)

2006/04/01

Worst New Word of 2005: Popesquatter

The American Dialect Society has declared that pope-squatting is the new term least likely to succeed for 2005, rating it ahead of the acronym GSAVE (global struggle against violent extremism) and Brangelina, the nickname given to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. The society defines the term as a verb that means "registering a domain name that is the same of a new pope before the pope chooses his new name in order to profit from it." This would exclude me, since I donated BenedictXVI.Com to the ... (read more)

2006/01/16

Suck.Com Domain Hijacked by Smut Merchant

Over the holidays, Suck.Com stopped being a failed online magazine for a few days and began a new life as a porn portal. This was apparently a domain name hijack, because the portal's gone and the old site's archives are now restored. While Suck was porn, Steve Baldwin wrote a bitter sendoff: Given that this is certainly the end of suck.com's long journey as a project, one must ask: was suck.com ever really about anything more than the wiles and whims of its owners? Wasn't this the joke all the ... (read more)

2006/01/03

My Name Server is Totally Lame

I started the day with a dead name server that knocked more than 100 sites offline, including Workbench, the Drudge Retort and all of the Buzzword.Com bloggers. I've been using BIND for years and thought I had run out of interesting new ways to break it. Overnight, most name requests failed and my server log filled up with errors like this: lame server resolving 'www.cadenhead.org' (in 'cadenhead.org'?): 67.19.3.218#53 A lame server is one that's not responding to a name request it is expected ... (read more)

2005/11/04

Katrina.Com Owner Responds to Storm

A web designer whose personal site has been published for years at katrina.com has turned it into a Hurricane Katrina relief site in response to the huge traffic from victims, their loved ones, and others seeking information on the disaster. Katrina Blankenship told ComputerWorld that the site has received 400,000 hits the past week, a twenty-fold increase on the normal monthly traffic. ... it wasn't until Monday morning -- when she saw her e-mail in-box full of messages -- that Blankenship ... (read more)

2005/09/05

Headline Created to Enable Controversy

I've won Anil Dash's new intellectual dishonesty award for my item on Bram Cohen's technological manifesto. The award appears to be issued weekly, which means Karl Rove goes home empty-handed. Dash faults me for not approaching Cohen in e-mail, where he could have explained himself before the story got more traction with weblogs and the media. Perhaps he has a point, but I regarded an essay Cohen linked on his front page for two years as fair game for evaluation, independent of anything else he ... (read more)

2005/06/30

A domain geek weblog runs an interview with the guy who sold popebenedictxvi.com for $6,100: The name was registered in February along with roughly 40 other possible pope names, the only variations that were missed were the names that Rogers Cadenhead registered, I'm still kicking myself for overlooking those variations. The tone of the article makes "domaining," the term it uses to describe the practice of registering domains, sound like a quaint hobby akin to scrapbooking or quilting. But ... (read more)

2005/06/21

Master of Their Domain

Internet pornographers got lucky with ICANN and will receive their own top-level domain. A Florida domain registry and the International Foundation for Internet Responsibility, the groups that requested the domain, will devote .xxx explicitly to sexual content, making it easier for Internet users to avoid such sites entirely or dive headfirst into the fleshy sea of sin: ICM and IFFOR selected .xxx as the sole string for this application based upon its high ranking in the aforementioned ... (read more)

2005/06/02

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