Of Interest

We've turned up .tel registrations now that they've gone realtime and the initial registry implosion has stabilized. You may have noticed a distinct lack of urgency from us to light a fire under your keester to go register your name under .tel right now before somebody else takes it.

As we outlined previously, we find the hoopla around new top-level domain rollouts both tiresome and for the majority of domain holders, unnecessary. So we have a policy here that we generally a) don't launch the new TLD until it goes realtime and is considered "stable" and b) we don't try to whip our users into a hysterical frenzy ahead of time to register their domains under every new TLD.

The fact is, in the future there will be more top-level-domains, a lot more. So many of them that between obvious typos of one's domain, one's core domain or domains, and one's local geographic top-level domain, it will be a fool's errand to try and register your name under every new TLD that comes along just for the sake of "defending your mark".

The other problem is, .tel is severely crippled

While we do find .tel slightly unique in the realm of new TLDs because it actually exists for a reason: to cultivate internet telephony usage. This isn't some country-code ccTLD hiring out their namespace under some made-up reason (.me, .tv, .ws, et al) to draw in foreign registrants, it's an actual TLD geared toward SIP, VOIP and telephony and exists for that reason.

But .tel isn't doing anything under the space that can't be done under any other domain name with the appropriate use of SRV or NAPTR records and to actually make matters worse, you are forced to use their nameservers and your domains are under an Acceptable Use Policy which forces you to use the name for certain things (basically as a "contact" switch rather than a "content" page).

While the objective may be laudable: giving a TLD an actual raison d'etre beyond "register your name before somebody else does!", we don't like that you're forced to use their nameservers and don't have total latitude with your .tel domains. It runs contrary to the ethos behind easyDNS which was, and still is to drive a stake through the heart of lock-in. (It's not like we force everybody who registers a domain through us to use our nameservers because we're an outsourced DNS host, in fact we even allow our members to mirror their DNS from our nameservers from outside DNS hosts).


As such we have not become directly accredited under .tel, instead we're supporting them through our OpenSRS reseller tag, but the functionality is transparent.

Most of you reading this probably have no compelling reason to register your name under .tel unless 1) you like the TLD or 2) you have operations in the IP telephony space that would make sense segmenting under a .tel name and 3) you don't mind the crippled functionality and lock-in.

Many of you may not know that we have an ongoing member feedback survey where we ask for your thoughts and impressions of using easyDNS.

We try to make it as unobtrusive as possible, and for each respondent we make a $5 donation to a charity of your choosing (World Wildlife Fund, Children's Wish Fund or Unicef).

We've recoded the survey using eSurveys.com. Feel free to give us your thoughts by taking it today.

easyDNS Member Survey

We get asked this a alot: Why do you guys not offer whois masking or whois contact privacy?

The brief background on this is: whenever you register a domain name, your contact details are published in a publicly visible database called "whois", where your contact details are instantly harvested by spambots and marketers who proceed to email and postal mail you marketing offers, deceptive "domain slamming" attempts, ads for dubious products, and perhaps even telemarketing calls.

Nobody likes that, so over the years people started resorting to various tactics to protect themselves from the deluge of crap that inevitably comes with simply registering a domain name: throwaway email addresses in whois records, fake postal addresses, fake phone numbers, etc. The problem is, Registrants are obligated under their various end user agreements to provide true and accurate data (not doing so is grounds to lose one's domain), and the US even passed legislation making it unlawful to use fake contact details in a domain name registration.

Our response to this, years ago, was MyPrivacy.ca which protects your email address from being harvested from your whois records, but leaves your other data intact. We didn't see it as a revenue opportunity, in fact we made it free and opened it up to competing registrars, many of whom started recommending it to their customers. We just wanted to drive a stake through the heart of the whois spammers.

It wasn't long though, before many registrars took it a step further and created the concept of "whois masking" or "contact privacy", where all of the domain-holder contact details would be masked from the public whois. Of course, this was heralded as a "value-add" and most outfits charge extra for it.

In today's long overdue post, we're finally revealing why so-called "whois privacy" puts your domains at risk, costs you more and doesn't really protect your privacy.

Michael Moore released his latest film Slacker Uprising for free, over the web (note: don't click on that link if you live outside of the US or Canada or his lawyers will yell at us again). On the download page for the film Mr. Moore has this to say:

"I'm giving you my blanket permission to not only download it, but also to email it, burn it, and share it with anyone and everyone (in the U.S. and Canada only). I want you to use 'Slacker Uprising' in any way you see fit to help with the election or to do the work that you do in your community. You can show my film in your local theater, your high school classroom, your college auditorium, your church, union hall or community center. You can have your friends and neighbors over to the house for a viewing. You can broadcast it on TV, on cable access, on regular channels or on the web. It's completely free -- I don't want to see a dime from this. And if you want, you can charge admission or ask for a donation if it's to raise money for a candidate, a voter drive, or for any non-profit or educational purpose. In other words -- it's yours!"

So, why are his lawyers demanding we take action regarding a torrent posted on a DNS hosting client's website? We received the following takedown request via Fedex today:

10 years ago on this day, we removed the password block on easyDNS.com and sent out a couple of innocuous email announcements to the PHP and Mysql mailing lists announcing that we had developed a DNS management system using php and mysql and it was now open for business. We had three nameservers, 1 in our office (where the "other server", that ran everything was), one downtown in somebody else's cage at 151 Front street, and some friends of ours in Buffalo who were running an email company called chek.com let us run a third nameserver on one of their servers. That was the initial setup of easyDNS...

Trivial but handy: I found myself having to email out some Fedex tracking ID's today, so I thought what would make it easy would be a way to create a redirect to the Fedex tracking page for that ID without having to visit a URL shortener site to create the redirect.

That's the core idea behind the "URL Widgets" or "Redirect Widgets" of easyURL, which are described here We also have them setup for Amazon products, domain lookups (surprise), Wikipedia pages and RFC's.

In light of the recent ICANN advisory on domain lookup frontrunning we've made the guarantee that your domain lookups on easyWhois have and always will be, private.

What is domain lookup front running? It is when an unscrupulous operator between you and a domain lookup tool, such as a whois lookup website, perhaps even the site operators themselves, monitor your domain name searches and then go and grab some of the available domain names you search on before you get the chance to.

I never thought anybody would be so brazen, but silly me, I once again underestimated the widespread use of sleazeball tactics on the internet.

You can read the easyDNS press release on the subject and our new Guaranteed Lookup Privacy Policy at easyWhois. We've also added SSL encryption to easyWHOiS to eliminate the possibility of queries being eavesdropped.

I just finished voting in the Canadian Internet Registration Authority Board of Directors election. This year's election is the first under the new election process and reformed membership structure that was ushered in last year at the special member's meeting in Toronto.

I have mixed feelings about the new membership reform, having spent a good deal of my term on the Board working on it and finally seeing it get ratified by the membership shortly after the end of my stint. I found the re-authorization process of the membership confusing. If I found it confusing, having been in the belly of the beast so to speak, it must have been utterly unfathomable to a lot of casual .CA domain holders. I think 90% of .CA domain holders don't even really understand who CIRA is or why they consistantly get cryptic emails from them telling them to authorize this, confirm that, verify your id ("your papersss pleasss").

You probably didn't know we operated a URL shortening service at easyURL.net, which has some nice features like being able to create your own short label for a shortened URL and tracking of access stats.

After awhile I noticed that I was also using it as a pseudo-bookmarking mechanism, but of course it required that I actually remember the shortened URL. So we went ahead and added bookmarking and tagging to easyURL.net.

The bookmarking features are accessible via OpenID tokens because we're finding people are getting less and less interested in creating a new account on every site they use. For people without OpenID, you can always use a site like del.icio.us, for those with, use this.

During my 3-year tenure on the CIRA Board, I got the opportunity to travel across the country. Whenever we held a public forum anywhere in Canada, the turnout was usually quite high and the participants informed and enthusiastic.

Then near the end of every open forum I made it a habit to ask the attendees the following question: "How many people here voted in the last election?" and the silence was usually deafening. Less than 10 hands would go up every time, guaranteed.

So why the disconnect between getting live bodies out to an actual event and getting stakeholders to click a few buttons through their web browser?

Given the discontent I've seen among netizens over some gTLD issues with .COM (remember sitefinder?) and ICANN oversight, CIRA has set the standard for accessibility and stakeholder guidance for .CA. People should be seizing these opportunities and making their views known and voting.

Running country code top level domain registries carry unique challenges and require industry experience balanced with a sense of stewardship. .CA is after all a "key public resource" and the kind of people I want on the Board are those that take that stewardship capacity seriously.

This year I'm voting for the following member nominees:

• Paul Andersen https://elections.cira.ca/2006/finalslate/show/44/en
  
• Clyde Beattie https://elections.cira.ca/2006/finalslate/show/22/en
  
• Ross Rader https://elections.cira.ca/2006/finalslate/show/35/en
  

And from nomination committee I'm voting for:

• Raymond Benoit https://elections.cira.ca/2006/finalslate/show/13/en
  
• Bill Reid https://elections.cira.ca/2006/finalslate/show/12/en
  
• Jeff Ryback https://elections.cira.ca/2006/finalslate/show/10/en
  

I encourage all .CA domain holders who are CIRA members to vote now.

We have been testing our outbound mail service (codenamed "easySMTP™") and it looks good. It supports TLS and listens on numerous alternative ports.

easySMTP outbound mail service will be bundled with DNS-plus packages at no extra cost.

We are now accepting beta users for this service. If you would like to be a beta user and are currently subscribed with DNS-plus service, please contact support with your username and we will enable this feature for your account.

Many of us here at the office have been using this from home and it works great, so we anticipate a short beta period and a quick promotion to "production" status, at which point it will be available to all DNS-plus domains.

Details on the easySMTP outbound mail service can be viewed here

The MyPrivacy.ca whois-record-spamguard system has been upgraded to new hardware and now supports personalized whitelists.

This means individual users can add their own whitelists, either email based or hostname based, which opens myprivacy.ca up to much more flexibility beyond protecting your whois records.

An myprivacy.ca accounts are still free.

One hears many complaints about Technorati's blog search engine, that all it does it return "useless" blogspam search results. Is this a sign of a "bad" search engine or is it indicative of a deeper problem within the blogosphere itself, that it's riddled with blogspam and automatically generated scraper sites? (Blogger is particularly bad because of its "export" feature. Spammers can export their entire blog to a remote server, thus scraper sites can distribute themselves over multiple IP addresses and keyword stuffed domain names and leverage the resulting linkpop into search engine results).

I've been noticing my technorati search for easyDNS almost always turns up more blog spam than anything else, i.e.

http://www.dnshostingpro.info/dns-hosting/dns+hosting.html

"Today's DNS Hosting Article" is a joke, it looks like the ad copy from ours and our competitors' Adwords campaigns being scraped out and simply concatenatated into an keyword stuffed blob of crap with a Google Adsense block running over it. So those of us buying keywords via Google are paying for these ads on these scraper sites and something tells me those clicks are garbage traffic.

Last night I remembered that you can now click on the "Ads By Gooooooogle" link in the corner of the Adsense block and report a policy violation, which I am now doing. I report that as a paying Adwords advertiser I'm not impressed seeing my keywords scraped and recycled into blogspam, only to pay for the priviledge of having my own ads run on them.

I think anybody buying Adwords should think about doing this. It only takes a minute: Subscribe to your own company name via Technorati's blog search and then complain about the blog spam you find scraping your ads.

You'll be doing yourself and the blogosphere a service.