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The Hazards of Abandoning a Domain
It happens all the time: you click on a link and the website that comes up is not what you expected. If you’re lucky, the page is simply gone, but the site may look oddly similar and contain links for the subject you’re interested in, or it may be a trap bristling with malware and spam. In any case, you probably shrug and move on, pausing briefly to delete the bookmark if there is one, but you likely don’t spend much time wondering what happened. What happened is that the website owner quit. Maybe she or he died, or their lives and interests changed, or the company went broke. Possibly the owner just forgot to renew the domain registration. Whatever the cause, abandoned domains rarely just die quietly forgotten any more. Usually they are snapped up even if they are not high-traffic, popular sites, often by a domain registrar hoping to cash in on, but increasingly by people with worse intentions in mind. Not long ago, it was not uncommon for websites of churches, schools and government institutions that had lapsed to be grabbed up by Web porn purveyors. They may have done it more for the shock value rather than to make money, but in more recent times even more sinister characters have been doing much the same. Nowadays, an abandoned website may present an irresistible temptation to hackers and spammers to walk in and take over. However, unlike … Continue reading
Posted in News, Online Tools, Security, Warnings, Your Online Presence
Tagged cybercrime, domains, hackers, security, spam, web sites
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Domain Applications Reveal Amazon’s Daunting Ambitions
The dust is starting to settle from the latest land-grab on the Internet. While it’s not over yet – there will probably be a year or more of behind the scenes wrangling – the claims on the various turfs have been filed. And the results show just how ambitious some of the movers and shakers have become; in particular, the merchandising giant, Amazon.com. The cyberturf in question are the latest extensions to the top-level domains. The Domain Name System, (DNS), regulated by ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers), gives names to websites that enables users to locate them. They are organized into broad categories of some 300 total top-level domains, consisting of 22 generic classes (like org, restricted to non-profit organizations) and 280 country codes (us for US, uk for Great Britain, ca for China and so on). By far the most popular is com, for commercial enterprises, in which there are millions of websites. This has led to intense competition for names, domain squatting and parking, and other practices. So, over the last decade, ICANN has been slowly moving to open up the system. In its latest effort, some 2,000 top-level domains revealed here (note: long list, loads slowly) have been applied for at a cool $185,000 per name (plus in case of disputes, up to $122,000 or more). So obviously only wealthy speculators and major Internet entities have applied. And presumably, with such money and … Continue reading
.PRO Domains Available Now
As you may already know, .PRO domains have been around for several years. However, they were previously difficult to register and maintain. So much so that our partner registrar, OpenSRS, did not even carry them. Recently they have streamlined the administration of .PRO domains, and now SWCP is happy to be able to register them. To celebrate we’re running a 2-for-1 promotion until Feb 15th 2012! Buy a .PRO domain for $20, and we’ll register it for 2 years instead of 1! .PRO domains are intended to be used by licensed professionals (Doctors, Lawyers, Architects, Engineers, etc.) As such, there is some additional information you have to provide when you register the domain (your license number, and a pointer to the authority which issued the license). We have a page describing a bit more about .PRO domains, complete with a request form if you want to get one of your very own, right here.