Monthly Archives: April 2002

Succaland: another domain name hijack

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It looks like, yet another domain, Succaland, has been hijacked by Ultimate Search. This is in a long line of domain name abuses by some operators. Let me quote from a comment in that thread:
“It sounds like Ultimate Search is one of just a number of companies that are using autoamted scripts to query the known domain database (whois) and any time their results show that a domain is free for registration it automatically goes through the registration process. Another company notorious for this is called Mailbank, which owns thousands and thousands of domains. However, since succaland.com was not set to expire until June 1, something obviously went wrong and Ultimate Search was able to register the domain thorugh their automated process. Outright domain stealing has been known to happen. Look up the history of sex.com and you’ll find an interesting story involving deceit, lawsuits, etc. I think the best course of action for those of us who still control our domains is to transfer them from registrars who have proven their security/process is lax (i.e., NetSol) and park them with registrars who have a better process for handling domain registrations and changes. You can also go ahead and pay for multiple year’s worth of domain registration fees.”
Since I have recently registered my own domain, I obviously pay a lot more attention to domain name hijacks than I earlier did. I would write a longer thread on it later. Meanwhile, this is a good document to read if you are interested in finding out why such system failures occur.

Lake fx

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Noticed:
Dan Dhartung’s weblog, lake effect is back up again. I first noticed his weblog through his posts on mefi. Dhartung’s politics and writing are much further to the right than what I usually read. But his posts tend to be very erudite and well reasoned.

Carmel

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Carmel completely charmed us.
We started early on Highway one when it was still misty and there were few vehicles on the road. It is about 45 miles south of Santa Cruz, only a short way from the urbarn sprawl of Moterey, but completeley different in personality.
It is an old and quaint town with lots of woods and very little parking. Its a place where you gotta take the permission of the city to cut a tree on your premises, where the city council apparently passed an ordinance once, banning high heels from the city. A slightly eccentric town!
It originally became famous as the bohemian sanctuary of some of the most well known artists, photographers, writers in California. Edward Weston lived there most of his life. A lot of likeminded people started moving to Carmel. As the place started becoming well known, its unspoilt scenic beauty started attracting tourists and retirees driving up the real estate prices and driving away the ‘starving artists’. There is stll a lot of art in Carmel, though some say that they tend to be of the ‘surf-crashing-against-the-seashore-with-bent cypress’ variety. The shops and the cars parked on the curb will clue you in about the demographic profile of the locals.
I loved it there though. It is very picturesque. One of the very few places of its kind that I think has managed to retain its charm. And the city tries hard. Even the garbage cans are wood covered. There are no night clubs.
If you walk away from the downtown, it is very wooded and quiet. It has awesome beaches, only a stone’s throw away from town. I also read that it has interesting festivals round the year – a kite festival, Sandcastle building festival etc. We didnt get to explore any of that. But we had a gorgeous time nonetheless.

Important

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Important
I am hoping to move this weblog to kaush.com by the end of next week. If you would like to be notified when RandomNotes moves to the the new url, please sign up through the form on this page. I’ll send you a mail when I migrate this site.
I am told that migration from blogspot can be a traumatic experience :(. So dont be too surprised if things get a little wobbly for a few days.

Le Pen’s surprise win in Paris

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A post on the reactions in Paris to Le Pen’s surprising win (is it?). In other news: Metafilter is still down and I was reassured to find that others are showing withdrawal symptoms too.
Update: More on the Le Pen win- Caterina posted from France about the popular reaction on the streets of Paris. Paul Krugman’s NYT column (registration needed) tries to draw parallels between USA and France using the Le Pen upset victory as an example. And yes, and metafilter is up again. Apparently, it was Verizon’s T1 line acting up …

Revenue streams for online media

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Good reads on revenue streams for new media:
–Essay on how to make community sites viable by Derek Powazek. (via Microcontent News )
Online News Revenue Models by Steve Outing (via Netmarketing )
More people need to start talking about how to build revenue streams for web based communities or content site. But both these articles left me feeling vaguely dissatisfied. I would try to sort through my thoughts and post what I think about the subject in a later post.
If you are bored, check out Rachel James’s photography . Some pretty cool stuff there. I have forgotten which site sent me there originally. Time to get back to work ….

On spammers and their spam

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I am not sure which one is worse. The pop up advertisements or the junk mails. I have no complaint about the pop up ads that I get when I go to any site where I am accessing free content (i.e most sites). Its their right to subject me atrocious advertisements and my privilage to take my eyeballs elsewhere. What really really pisses me off is spywares like Cydoor that installed itself in my machine either without permission or through subterfuge. My browser slowed down quite a bit over the last few weeks. After I ran Ad aware, I discovered Cydoor all over my machine.
The other set of online parasites that bugs the hell out of me are the spammers. Today’s Silicon Valley.com has a terrific report on spamming. It was shocking to find out that otherwise respectable organizations have been turning a blind eye to spammers under the guise of affiliate marketing. It was also a revealation that people actually buy stuff through junk e-mailers.
The best quote goes to Scelson, a noted spammer (that sounds so weird!), who is quoted as saying:
“Lots of people say what I do is unethical. What do ethics have to do with it? It’s all about the law, what you can and cannot do. People say pornography is unethical, but Playboy has a pretty good business.” (via GMSV).
I also used to be bugged about idiotic e-mail forwards in my mailbox. Specially the chain mails! Anil Dash has a great rant against e-mail forwards on his weblog. Its a great read. But thankfully I get few forwards these days and mostly through people I know well and who know what I would enjoy reading.
Update: It seems that te spam filters aren’t terribly effective either.

Kenichi Ohmae on China

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Kenichi Ohmae has written a terrific article on China’s economic juggernaut, ‘Profits and Perils in China, Inc.’ (registration required), in the current issue of strategy + business. I dont like his implied advise to the Western governments to ignore the human rights situation in China. But as reportage, its a great read.
As an Indian, I am sad that India has not been able to achieve what China is poised to. As a strong believer in free market economy and human rights, I am slightly alarmed by the conclusions drawn by Ohmae. But his description of what he calls Chung-hua Inc. (Chung-hua, or Zhong Hua, as it is spelled in Beijing, translates into English as ?China,? and actually means ?the prosperous center of the universe.?) sounds right.
Russia is finding the going much tougher. Esther Dyson is probably the only person who seems really positive about Russia’s economic outlook. In the current issue of Wired (not yet available online) she had forecast that in the next few decades Russia will be ahead of Uniter States in software development. But software development expertise alone, unless it is followed by infrastructural development in other spheres, won’t be able to bootstrap the entire country’s economy. It would, however, create a large cosmopolitan middle class that would become a catalyst for all sorts of interesting social changes. We know that one in India.