Domains

Red Herring: The War Over Wargames.Com

Red Herring interviewed me for a news article on the war over Wargames.Com. The story's pretty fair, though I was never uncertain about what I wanted to do with the domain. I've been playing wargames since Dungeons & Dragons was still considered a wargame in the late '70s. She covers my background in the article: Two years ago, Mr. Cadenhead registered www.BenedictXVI.com. When the new pope announced his new name, the website saw 500,000 hits in two days. Mr. Cadenhead decided to donate the ... (read more)

2006/12/20

'The Deck is Stacked Against Cadenhead'

Jim Ledbetter, writing for the Business 2.0/Fortune blog The Browser, covers MGM's effort to grab Wargames.Com: Over at Techdirt, they're pretty pessimistic about the little guy's chances: "Given the history of the domain name arbitration game, where the big company almost always wins, the deck is stacked against Cadenhead". But wait! The Browser is not an attorney, and does not play one on television. But we noticed something curious about MGM's trademark of the term. Although the movie came ... (read more)

2006/12/19

My Battle with MGM Over Wargames.Com

For the past three months I've been privately engaged in a time-consuming dispute with Nathan J. Hole, a lawyer representing MGM Studios who claims that Wargames.Com, a domain that I've owned since April 16, 1998, is the rightful property of the film company because it produced the 1983 movie WarGames and registered it as a trademark. I received an e-mail this morning indicating that MGM has filed a legal complaint with the National Arbitration Forum to take the domain name away from me. I ... (read more)

2006/12/18

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

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