Entries by Mark Jeftovic

A bunch of years ago I had an idea for an espionage/action/thriller story where a bunch of mercenaries planned a coup d'etat against the regimes of either Columbia or Cameroon for the sole reason of gaining control over the country's top-level domain registry and making billions off of typo-squatting .COM.

Truth did kind of mimic fiction (minus the coup d'etat part) when Kevin Ham cut a deal with Cameroon to wildcard .CM root. Well now Columbia has decided to overhaul it's .CO root level domain and open it up to second level registations for non-locals.

.CO is being marketed ostensibly as 'Associated globally with the words "COmpany," "COrporation" and "COmmerce"', but let's face it, the activity in this TLD is going to be driven primarily by the fact that it's a typosquatter's wet dream for .COM and a goddamn headache for everybody else with a net presence built mainly under .COM.

As we've observed before (here and then here), most registrars like to whip their customer base into a frenzy to "grab your name" under every TLD that tries to tart itself up as some pseudo-generic and trots itself out as the latest "must-have" domain. Most of them aren't "must-haves" and a lot of them are quite frankly, a waste of time and money.

So it is with a heavy heart I have to come out and say this. If you're operating a serious net presence on .COM, you probably should go out and get the .CO version of your name, as much of a royal pain in the ass as that is/will be. Not to mention expensive. The base cost on a non-Columbian Sunrise claim will be somewhere north of $250 (non-refundable) and for landrush there will be a small non-refundable "application fee" but the first year registration will be over $200. Then after landrush, the cost will settle down to a more digestible level, only about 3 times the wholesale base cost of an actual .COM.

Nice work if you can get it.

We don't want to make a bad situation worse, but we won't work for free either, so we'll try to keep our markup reasonable.

What I am interested in is what our members think of this. If you have a few moments, please take the following survey on whether you will participate in .CO. For each response we'll donate $1 to the charity of your choice.

Feel free to comment as well.

For members who want an advance preview into the new system, what follows are step-by-step instructions on how to move a domain from the current easyDNS interface to the new management platform.

The new platform has been live since mid-2009, many of the staff here have been running their personal domains off of here and we've had numerous beta users on board as well. Additionally, I've been running one of my personal email accounts through the new easyMAIL platform since last summer, and I felt confident enough to switch my mom's email to it a few weeks ago.

There are few things we are still smoothing out and filling in like some of the help docs and some of the new features.

But here it is, the shape of things to come for easyDNS.

Until you get the hang of the new platform, we strongly suggest that you start with a non-critical domain. Something that won't ruin your life if the unexpected happens.

There is also this introductory document which outlines the new features and what changes on the new platform. It is strongly recommended that you review that document first.

So without further adieu, here's how to move a domain to the new system....

We are pushing back the launch of the new website and user interface until April 12, for a few reasons - not the least of which is that we will be shorthanded through the month of March on a few fronts. (March break, time off with the kids, Confoo, etc).

What we will do next week is post instructions on how to start trying out the new platform in advance and begin talking about what's new under the new system.

This morning I had just dropped my daughter off at school when an ad came on CBC radio as I was headed to my workout, the gist of it was:

More and more consumers are headed online as the first step in their next purchase. Is your business positioned to cash in on this trend?

It sounded a little 1998-ish to me, but what really got me was the URL. These ads were from some online internet marketing company here in Toronto and the URL was......

I've fielded a handful of queries from members about the coming DNS usage quotas. Some have looked at the "query usage" links beside their domain names and are surprised at the numbers they are seeing.

One thing to be aware of is that we've discovered that the January numbers were tabulated incorrectly and are too high. To gain a truer insight into your usage, look at the January 28th figure. We are currently running a process to fix up the stats to reflect actual usage and expect to have those online within the next couple of days.

But I'd like to take an opportunity to convey the following principles behind this to our member base:

We will soon be launching our new member interface, a ground up rewrite of the current members.easydns.com website. It has been a long time in coming, like all complex projects, it always goes over-budget and takes longer than expected.

The current user interface works, but it's pretty stale. There are so many layers of upgrades, fixes and plugins underneath the UI you see when you log in, that it's hit the point of diminishing returns: every time we add a feature or commit a bugfix, it seems to break something else. Despite the fact that most people dislike change, especially user interface changes, it is time to move on to the next level for easyDNS.

The other day I stumbled across http://appsto.re, a DNS client domain which is a pretty useful specialized URL shortener for iPhone apps.

A good example is easyDNS' own iPhone app for easyWhois. The iTunes URL is loooooooooooooong and cumbersome, and to be honest, I can't readily remember what shortened URL I created for it on easyURL (I think maybe http://easyurl.net/easyiphone?)

Well with appsto.re, we know it's simply http://appsto.re/easyWhois, and you can view the info for any given app by using http://appsto.re/info/easyWhois.

You can even create your own custom shortened URLs for any given iPhone app.

The other interesting thing about appsto.re that distinguishes it from most of the other URL shorteners out there, is that it actually has a revenue model, since I imagine they can use affiliate links to redirect to the paid apps (sorry guys, our app is free).

We've changed the glue record in the roots for ns3.easydns.org to reference a different node while we debug the data syncing issue.

Some queries are still coming in owing to DNS cache issues. If you recently updated your zone and that update has not been reflected in ns3.easydns.org then you could also consider removing ns3.easydns.org from your DNS delegation.

ns3 is a stand-alone node (we will be phasing out the stand-alone noded in the new year), as long as you have the ns1 and ns2 anycast strands in your delegation, you can safely remove ns3 from the delegation.

The main easyDNS member's interface at https://members.easydns.com and public facing website are currently experiencing database communications issues and are offline.

Systems personnel are onsite now and we hope to have things back to normal ASAP.

In the meantime, easyDNS production systems - DNS, URL forwarding, email forwarding, etc. are unaffected.

We will post updates accordingly and we are sorry for the outage.

I see this so often I've decided to start a channel here to try to educate people on the effectiveness (or not) of using web addresses or URLs in both online and offline situations.

In this installment, I was stuck in traffic behind this van the other day. This URL was staring in me in the face for probably eons longer than any casual observer would ever see it for, yet, I wouldn't be able to get to this website if my life depended on it:

We have temporarily disabled the DNS usage stats module while we iron out some performance and consistency issues. Sorry for the inconvenience, we hope to have them back online within a week to 10 days.

Our URL shortening service easyURL.net is now CLOSED to the general public.

Only easyDNS members in good standing with at least one active domain in their account may use this service. To enable your access log into your easyDNS account and under your utilities module click on enable easyURL.net and then you're done. Happy shortening.

Everybody else can make other arrangements.

Thank you for your time.

Feeling left out of the web 2.0 "URL Shortener" hysteria, we've added a mostly useless "easyFrame"™ to the easyURL.net redirect service. The culmination of nearly two night's worth of programming in front of the TV, and nearing 100 lines of PHP code, the easyFrame™ enables people to further perpetuate it's marginal functionality via other social networking sites with a single click. Users may also "vote" on whether they actually like or dislike the subject URL being shortened.


Perhaps the single actual useful function of the easyFrame™ is that you can also report spam URLs directly to us, with one click, which we will then nuke with extreme prejudice.

We are also happy to report that our new easyFrame™ has enticed a VC bidding war and easyURL has closed a $30 Million dollar A series funding round with a pre-money valuation more than 100X that of easyDNS itself. We are now planning on spinning off easyURL.net in an October IPO.

Try it today! Tell your friends! Tweet it!

We've re-enabled access to viewing your DNS query counts online.

Unfortunately, the May numbers are out of whack: you'll see a large spike in your query counts between May 12 and May 19 which is actually each day's total carried forward and added to the next. This was due to a parser bug caused by a change in the output log format.

Sorry for the on-again/off-again nature of this feature and we should be good to go now.

Following on our explanation of why we do not offer whois masking here at easyDNS, we note tonight that Registrar Namecheap has been sued "over cybersquatting claims for a domain name registered under the NameCheap whois privacy services".

As we outlined in our original article: Whoever is listed as the Registrant in the domain's whois record, effectively owns the domain. If you own the domain, you get all the responsibilities for it. That's why most Registrars simply drop the whois mask at the slightest legal speedbump. Namecheap didn't, and so now it cuts the other way they get the sharp end of the legal stick being poked at the domain.

Technology lawyer Eric Goldman in his analysis of the matter under the subheading Why This is a Troubling Ruling noted:

Read literally, every proxy service is exposed to potential contributory ACPA liability for every domain name it services. I can’t imagine proxy service providers will be excited about that liability exposure, and some may choose to exit the business.

Some certainly should. Any of the proxy providers who basically viewed whois masking as an easy business which basically pulls in money for doing nothing (which is more or less how I view it, I'm sorry, but that's only my opinion) - should take this as their signal that the party's over and exit the business.

As I've noted before, in it's current implmentation: whois privacy doesn't actually protect the underlying registrant's privacy (because most proxy providers will drop the mask at the first sign of trouble) and if they don't, the proxy providers are exposing themselves to inordinate risk. Coupled with the fact that the whois mask puts the underlying registrant's rights to the name in question and the whole thing is just one big mess waiting to blow up.