Domain theft

[Chris Knight]

Some bugger is strying to steal my domain and the registrars have stopped all DNS access, so I can't get at it and neither can anyone else at the moment which is why none of my pix or avatar works - or pix for anyone who used my site for their pix.

I am trying to get it back but shall start to transfer stuff that I still have on my disk, elsewhere to another domain I have. That does not include anyone's stuff uploaded direct to my site, so apologies to those who did so.

If the domain chrisknight.info metamorphoses into a **** site, it wasn't me - honest!

 

[Jaco]

I saw someone trying to advertise his **** site on another wood work forum. NOW WE KNOW WHO IT WAS!
As long as the **** is as good as your woodwork!
If you find out who they are - grind them into very fine sawdust!

 

[Anonymous]

Chris

Speaking as one who has quarante ans, your excellent woodwork is probably a lot more interesting than ****. Now if I had only dix-huit ans....

Good luck with the rebuild

 

[Alf]

Speaking as one who has quarante ans, your excellent woodwork is probably a lot more interesting than ****.

Oh deary me. That's about the saddest* thing I think I'll hear today...

Sounds ghastly, Chris. Would anyone care to educate the thick and explain how someone can steal a domain name, please?

Cheers, Alf

*As in "sorrow", not "you sad bloke". Although... :wink: :lol:

 

[Chris Knight]

Alf,
Domain registration used to be done by one organisation but in recent years it has been commercialised and fragmented. Now there are thousands of registrars whose job it is to provide the name with an IP address and propogate that through the Domain name servers around the world.

The domain names are sort of leasehold rather than freehold so one pays an annual (or other periodic) fee to one of these registrars to set up and maintain the name. Names can be transferred to another person or company during a paid-up period if the owner requests it, or if the periodic payments are allowed to lapse a name can be taken over by others.

Neither applies to me but it appears that my registrars have acted on a spurious request to transfer my domain. I am still hopeful of sorting it out next week (these guys don't work over the weekend it seems).

The most famouse case was that of a domain called ***.com that was stolen and resulted in a multi-million dollart court case. This article touches on it http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1384450,00.asp

Of course the registrars should not act without the real owner's permission or except upon his instructions but it appears that many registrars are little more than hole in the wall one-man bands and have no real systems in place to prevent this sort of thing.

 

[Charley]

Just to add registrars such as Enom have a feature called the 'Registrar Lock' which has to be turned off in the control panel before you can make a transfer request

 

[Anonymous]

Maybe the following outfit might be of interest to people who have one or more domain names which they want to control:

http://www.freeparking.co.uk

They don't do hosting - they just look after domain names and provide something called a DNS server (that's the central resource which the Internet uses to find a server based upon the domain name).

I've been using FreeParking for several years (there are other similar outfits) because I offer web design and hosting for small businesses and this allows me to control the domains - I can buy, update, move domains online 24x7. They handle all the renewal stuff and send out emails to you when it's about to happen - just logon and submit your credit card details and the renewal happens immediately.

This has saved my bacon a couple of times where an ISP I was using went off the Internet due to technical problems - I just set up another account with a new ISP, then went to FreeParking to switch the domain across to the new ISP. Within a few hours I was back in action - the old ISP wasn't!

The "problem" with holding your domain at an ISP can be that if the ISP gets into difficulty then you've lost the ability to redirect the domain elsewhere 'cos their systems aren't online. And in some cases if you wanted to move the domain to a new ISP they will charge you an admin fee - I know FreeServe wanted £125 to allow a domain to be moved from them for example 'cos I looked into that for a customer a couple of years back.

Andrew

 

[Alf]

Ah, I see. Thanks. I wondered if it was more technical than someone just claiming something that wasn't true, but I see it's old fashioned crime in a hi tech world :roll:

Cheers, Alf