Re: Re[2]: Someone's puttin' the taint on dom reg services

[Lee Hodgson (DomainGuideBook.com)]

Hello William,

> Your story is interesting, Lee, but still nothing but accusations
> without any proof to tie the registrant to the registrar.

No, I have no proof, but believe it or not I've got better things to do than
try and chase low-lifes around the Internet. And in this particular case, I
don't need proof to know that my accusations are true, however arrogant that
may sound. I swapped several emails with the registrant, and he was a born
lier. I'd bet my house that he didn't have the brains to think up this name
on his own.

> I have seen this accusation spread around online as far back as 1996,
> and not yet as any party been able to come up with any proof to back
> it up.

It is fairly difficult to prove - these people may be greedy, but they
aren't completely stupid. They use contacts outside the registrar to
register the names, and in my case, use false addresses in foreign countries
as well. The guy I was dealing with wasn't too bright though - he came up
with a ridiculous sounding address in the States which I knew was false just
by looking at it ;-)

> In the case of this infoworld article, the writer went to great length
> to twist innuendoes around to insinuate that insidious things are
> going on, but is very very short on evidence, and like most reports of
> this type of activity, merely alludes to evidence that might be there,
> but doesn't ever get revealed.

I agree that the article was short on evidence, but let's face it, if they
had evidence, the parties would be in litigation rather than it being
discussed in a 'fluffy' article. I have a question for you William. What
sort of evidence would be needed? In my case, it was not done through log
files, rather through people sending in domain names to be registered
manually. Even if I could tie the registrant with the registrar, how could I
prove that the name was given to the registrant by the registrar, email
records perhaps? It is my guess that to bring a successful civil action
against a registrar, I would have to demonstrate a systematic approach to
domain 'stealing' by the registrar for a large number of domains over a long
time period. That would involve some kind of group action. And more
importantly, even if the allegations were provable, what law has the
registrar broken?

> Now, I've read your stuff before, Lee.  And I know you base your
> articles on facts and proof.  So clearly responsible reporting is
> something you are familiar with, and place value on.
>
> Do you really see responsible reporting in this article?

No, the article isn't great. I've seen the same article a dozen times in
various places. But I've come to expect a poor level of journalism, even on
technical web sites. These writers tend to fall into two main categories:

1) Writers who concentrate on one subject e.g. domain names, and are thus
able to write well researched and thought out articles. These type of
writers appear to be few and far between.

2) Writers who attempt to write on a wide variety of topics, and lack the
knowledge and research tools to write decent articles. They cover this up in
two ways:
(a) Writing badly-researched but original nonsense. We have all seen
examples of this. I saw an article from a well-known writer recently who
thought that .web was in wide use already :-) I also saw somebody write that
.TV was the 2nd most popular domain name in the world.
(b) Rewriting well-researched articles as their own. This is also very
common, although less difficult to detect. I have been victim to this. I
wrote an article about selling domain names, and within 2 weeks, I had seen
the article rewritten and then placed on major web sites, without any credit
to me.

I have to agree with you that no evidence has been brought forward to
support these allegations, but you must appreciate that domain names *are*
valuable items, and it's a lot easier to look through log files to find
valuable new names than use your grey matter. Human nature being what it is,
there just have to be registrars who build up collections of domain names
for resale by looking through log files. Why wouldn't there be?

Best Regards,

Lee Hodgson
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

----- Original Message -----
From: William X. Walsh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Lee Hodgson (DomainGuideBook.com) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: J. Scott Schiller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Lee Hodgson
(DomainGuideBook.com) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Discuss-List@Opensrs. Org
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, October 21, 2000 9:41 PM
Subject: Re[2]: Someone's puttin' the taint on dom reg services


> Hello Lee,
>
> Saturday, October 21, 2000, 7:07:40 AM, you wrote:
>
> > William,
>
> >> Anyone thinking that they are the only ones to come up with a
> >> particular string that is available, when over 900 domains an hour are
> >> being processed on average, is just being naive.
>
> > No offence, but you are the one being naive. Sure there are 900 domains
> > registered an hour, but there are millions (billions? zillions?) of
> > unregistered domains still available. Many of the case will be
coincidences,
> > but some are not.
>
> Your story is interesting, Lee, but still nothing but accusations
> without any proof to tie the registrant to the registrar.
>
> Just because someone is selling the domain doesn't mean they came up
> with the domain by watching lookup log files on a registrar site.
>
> I have seen this accusation spread around online as far back as 1996,
> and not yet as any party been able to come up with any proof to back
> it up.
>
> In the case of this infoworld article, the writer went to great length
> to twist innuendoes around to insinuate that insidious things are
> going on, but is very very short on evidence, and like most reports of
> this type of activity, merely alludes to evidence that might be there,
> but doesn't ever get revealed.
>
> I find that to be irresponsible reporting, the kind of thing one would
> expect from a tabloid,  or maybe Gordon Cook.   It is written in an
> attempt to create alarm, when no evidence exists to justify the alarm.
> And that's exactly the trademark of tabloid reporting.
>
> Now, I've read your stuff before, Lee.  And I know you base your
> articles on facts and proof.  So clearly responsible reporting is
> something you are familiar with, and place value on.
>
> Do you really see responsible reporting in this article?
>
> --
> Best regards,
>  William                            mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
>