Domains

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

My Needs are Modest

Newsweek gives me special recognition for missing out on the booming multimillion-dollar market in Internet domains: When a Florida man, in anticipation of the naming of the new pope, registered the Web site BenedictXVI.com, the Vatican was in luck. Rogers Cadenhead, who has since used the site to publicize a nonprofit organization and plans to transfer control to the Vatican, could have been an investor looking to get in on a booming business: the domain market. Indeed, owners of similar sites ... (read more)

2005/05/11

Everybody Carl Jung Tonight

A voicemail message received last week: Hey, it's Mancow, we're trying to get you on the radio show here. It's an Illinois guy, he probably knows this show. But he got the pope's web site. And the story is he's going to turn it into a porno ... I didn't get this message soon enough to return his call. I suspect that if he heard my actual plans for BenedictXVI.Com, I would have been a great disappointment to him. WashingtonPost.Com reporter David McGuire wrote a followup story yesterday about ... (read more)

2005/04/29

I've Been X'ed

I did an interview yesterday with AVNOnline, believing the "AV" stood for audiovisual, like the A.V. Club entertainment site published by The Onion. I liked the final piece, although I thought it was odd for the reporter to quote another papal domain registrant talking about "nipples and snatch." That kind of talk hasn't appeared much in the media since the end of the Clinton administration. When I showed the story to my wife, she noticed that the ads around the piece were for X-rated sites and ... (read more)

2005/04/27

Read More Entries