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Dead terrorist domains for sale, just without the hyphens

Kevin Murphy, January 2, 2025, Gossip

People are trying to make a quick buck flogging domains matching the names of suspects in recent terrorist atrocities, but they’re stopping short of including the hyphens.

The 2024 Christmas-New Year period was marked by two vehicular terrorist incidents on either side of the Atlantic: the Christmas market attack in Magdeburg, Germany on December 20 and the Bourbon Street attack in New Orleans, Louisiana in the early hours of January 1.

In both cases, domains (almost) matching the names of the alleged attackers were registered within minutes of their identities being revealed.

The suspect in the New Orleans ramming attack, who was shot dead by police, has been named by authorities as Shamsud-Din Jabbar, and the .com matching his name was registered even before it was officially announced.

It seems reporters at NOLA.com were the first to reveal his identity, at around 1700 UTC yesterday, and shamsuddinjabbar.com was registered at 1720 UTC, some time before the news conference where he was officially named.

The more correct spelling, shamsud-dinjabbar.com, has not been registered. Apparently, attempting to make money from an attack that killed 15 people is okay, but registering a domain containing a hyphen is a step too far.

The domain that was registered leads to a Dynadot sales lander with a $7,038.94 buy-it-now price. This converts to a round €6,800, suggesting the owner is based in the Eurozone.

The matching .net has also been registered and currently leads to a GoDaddy parking page.

The suspect in the Magdeburg attack , currently in police custody and charged with five counts of murder, was named by German authorities as Taleb A., abbreviated due to German privacy laws, just a few hours after the fact, but his full name has been widely reported as Taleb Al-Abdulmohsen.

The .com matching (almost) his name, talebalabdulmohsen.com, was registered shortly before 0500 UTC on December 21, hours before it had been reported by major news outlets’ live blogs. It’s currently parked with GoDaddy.

Again, the hyphenated version was not registered and is still available. The matching .de has not been registered.

Professional domain investors consider registering such domains for profit not only pointless but unethical. The Internet Commerce Association, which represents domainers, has in its code of conduct:

Respect for Human Suffering and Victims of Tragedy. A [ICA] member shall be respectful of persons and communities involved in tragedy. A member shall not register domains with the intent to profit from a recent tragedy.

The ICA has no policy on hyphens, to my knowledge.

Company accidentally puts porn domain on kids’ toys

Kevin Murphy, November 12, 2024, Gossip

Toy-maker Mattel has had to apologize after accidentally printing the domain name of a porn site on the packaging of dolls designed for little girls.

The company mistakenly plugged the domain name wicked.com on boxes containing dolls of characters from the movie Wicked, which is based on the musical of the same name and set in the same world as The Wizard of Oz.

This domain leads to a (actually pretty tame) porn site, where you have to click through an age verification page before you see anything even vaguely suggestive. The movie’s actual web site is at wickedmovie.com.

“We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this,” Mattel reportedly said in a statement. It advised parents to throw out the box and not visit the web site.

The toys themselves have reportedly been yanked from retailers. There seems to be little doubt that not paying attention to its domain is going to cost Mattel money as Christmas and the film’s release date approach.

The domain wicked.movie has been registered since January to a third party who has listed it for sale at $4,000.

eBay’s new slogan looks like a $75,000 domain it doesn’t own

Kevin Murphy, November 11, 2024, Gossip

eBay has launched a television and radio advertising campaign featuring a slogan that looks very much like a domain name that the company does not actually own.

The campaign, reportedly eBay’s first global branding campaign in a decade, targets Gen Z customers looking for vintage and second-hand clothing and other goods.

Things.People.LoveThe new slogan is “Things.People.Love”.

While the dots are not vocalized, it sure looks like a domain name.

The domain things.people.love does not currently resolve, but .love is a real TLD and people.love is registered to a domain investor.

It belongs to TopDomains, a portfolio of premium domain names mostly for sale with buy-it-now or lease-to-own prices.

The domain people.love has a BIN of $75,000, peanuts for a company with a market cap of $30 billion.

ICANN fixes embarrassing “What is a Domain Name?” mistake

Kevin Murphy, September 30, 2024, Gossip

Good news, everyone! ICANN knows what a domain name is!

The Org has quietly corrected a slide deck, designed as a high-level introduction to the new gTLD program’s Next Round, that seemed to mislabel the components of a domain name.

When it was first published in early September, the offending slide looked like this:

ICANN slide 1

When I saw it, for a few moments I was genuinely worried I’d had another stroke or, worse, been wrong for a quarter century. Surely ICANN, the organization that oversees the global DNS, knew more about this stuff than I do?

Rather than call an ambulance immediately, I tweeted a screengrab on Twitter to get the reassurance of the four people still on that platform that I had not lost my mind.

Now, in the same ICANN deck (pdf), apparently updated September 19, the slide looks like this:

ICANN slide 2

The deck is part of a “Champions Toolkit”, a bunch of freebie marketing materials made available for people who want to market the Next Round, particularly in under-served regions, on ICANN’s behalf.

Go.Compare now redirecting to the .com

Kevin Murphy, August 8, 2023, Gossip

Go.Compare seems to have backpedaled a little on its high-profile rebranding to a new gTLD domain name.

The domain go.compare is now bouncing visitors to the insurance comparison site’s original domain, gocompare.com.

When the company announced its rebranding from GoCompare to Go.Compare last September, there was no redirect in place.

The firm seems otherwise entirely committed to the new branding, even putting it on Welsh rugby shirts as part of a sponsorship deal recently.

The only change appears to be the new redirect — visitors will see the .com in the address bar rather than the .compare domain.

My article announcing the rebrand always seemed to get an unusually high amount of traffic on Saturday nights when Go.Compare was advertising its new name prominently on prime-time Saturday night TV, which makes me wonder whether the company was suffering from leakage related to the switch.

.compare is a GoDaddy gTLD and the go.compare domain was purchased by Go.Compare’s registrar, Lexsynergy.

Musk prematurely announces Twitter is now X

Kevin Murphy, July 24, 2023, Gossip

Elon Musk has declared that Twitter is rebranding as X, using x.com, apparently as the latest stage of his ongoing mission to destroy the company he acquired last year for lulz.

At 1744 UTC yesterday, Musk tweeted:

The logo on the Twitter web site has now changed to a minimalist X, which was later projected onto the walls of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.

For me, and others around the world, x.com still resolves to a standard GoDaddy parking page, advertising sofas. Others have reported experiencing the redirect to twitter.com as intended.

It can theoretically take a day or more for name server changes to propagate throughout the entire DNS, due to caching and time-to-live settings, but in my experience with GoDaddy it has never taken more than a few minutes.

Still, it would be smart to make sure your new domain is actually working before announcing a rebranding.

Musk first owned x.com — one of a handful of single-letter .com names available — in the 1990s, when it was the original brand of the company that became PayPal. After he sold PayPal, the domain went with the company to eBay. But Musk reacquired the domain for an undisclosed sum in 2017.

He seems to have an obsession with the letter. His space flight company is called SpaceX. Tesla has a model X. He even named his kid X.

I’m reminded of another eccentric tech entrepreneur who obsessed over a single-letter domain, to the extent that it ultimately harmed his company.

Costerton drops rap album to attract Gen Z to ICANN

Kevin Murphy, April 1, 2023, Gossip

ICANN interim CEO Sally Costerton will today release an album of rap music, in an effort to attract more young people to the ICANN community.

Costeron rapper

Costerton told DI today that it’s become obvious in recent years that ICANN’s community is aging rapidly, and that attracting new, younger talent is vital to ensuring the Org’s longevity.

“Going to ICANN meetings used to be like walking into Rick’s Café, mingling with an international crowd of beautiful young rebels and dashing political hunks,” she said. “Now, it looks more like the Mos Eisley cantina.”

The solution is to modernize ICANN to embrace popular culture, making it more appealing to younger participants, she said.

“Rap is a new form of music from the streets of America, where performers speak over the music,” Costerton, who is releasing 13 all-new tracks and covers under the stage name “Lil Sally C”, explained. “They speak over the music.”

“We’re hoping that with this drop of dope joints, we can draw in the Gen Z chads and thots that we so desperately need,” she said. “We can explain boring ICANN policy concepts in a way that the kids can relate to.”

For example, C said, rather than explain the complex acronym “EBERO”, ICANN could simply direct a newcomer to stream the track “Baby Got Emergency Back-End Registry Operator”.

She expects other tracks, such as “Straight Outta Marina Del Rey”, “I Got 99 Problems (But Adhering To Our Bylaws Commitments To Openness And Transparency Ain’t One)”, and “My Name Is [redacted due to GDPR]”, to be popular singles.

Other tracks on the album include a cover of “Sucker For Pain”, which features guest vocals by DJ Jazzy John Jeffrey.

C lists her influences as Cardi B, NWA, A2M, and Vanilla Ice, but insists her sound is unique and “on fleek af”.

Fellow long-term community members and directors agree.

“She da OG Senior Advisor to President and SVP, Global Stakeholder Engagement & Interim President and CEO,” said board chair Tripti Sinha. “Fo’ shizzle!”

But the release has not been without controversy. C defended her decision to use the n-word 38 times on the album, explaining she’s “keepin’ it real.”

“There’s an apostrophe instead of the letter G in keepin’,” she said.

Lil Sally C’s album, entitled “Drop Da C-Bomb!”, is available to download today, April 1, via Napster and Yahoo! Music.

In pictures: from tuk-tuks to cheese wheels, every ICANN national stereotype 2016-2022

Kevin Murphy, August 2, 2022, Gossip

What’s the one thing that ICANN most associates with your country?

For the The Netherlands, it seems to be cheese. For Puerto Rico, rum. For Morocco, um… camels.

ICANN ships about 12 metric tons (10 tonnes) of gear to its meeting locations three times a year, and a few weeks after the meeting concludes it issues a “By The Numbers” report, containing a treasure trove of data about the meeting.

The reports include data on how much equipment — servers, routers, mics, headsets etc — was shipped, along with a lighthearted “that’s the equivalent of” comparison.

It started in 2016 with elephants and cars, but from round about the third report, the ICANN 57 meeting in Hyderabad, India, ICANN started picking a comparison with a local connection.

I thought it might be fun to collect all these images in one place for easy reference.

ICANN 55, Marrakech, Morocco

3.5 African elephants. I’m not convinced this one was connected to the host. Probably just representative of “a heavy thing”.

Elephants

ICANN 56, Helsinki, Finland

12.2 mid-sized cars. Again, this might just be “a heavy thing”. Finland isn’t really known for its cars. Maybe ICANN thought it was in Sweden.

Elephants

ICANN 57, Hyderabad, India

77 tuk-tuks. This cheap form of private-hire transport is as ubiquitous in India as it is in many parts of Asia.

Elephants

ICANN 58, Copenhagen, Denmark

1,365 bicycles. Copenhagen is reportedly one of the most bike-friendly cities in the world. I recall walking pretty much the full distance from the airport to the venue along a cycle path when I arrived for ICANN 58.

Elephants

ICANN 59, Johannesburg, South Africa

8 giraffes. South Africa is known for its tourist safaris.

Elephants

ICANN 60, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

6,517 falcons. Falconry is a popular pass-time and tourist attraction in the UAE.

Elephants

ICANN 61, San Jose, Puerto Rico

34 barrels of rum. I had to google this one to be honest, but it turns out the Puerto Rico government calls the US territory the “Rum Capital of the World”. It even has a .gov web site to promote the product.

Elephants

ICANN 62, Panama City, Panama

145 sacks of coffee beans. Panama isn’t exactly internationally renowned for its coffee exports, but I guess it’s difficult to weigh stuff in terms of canals.

Elephants

ICANN 63, Barcelona, Spain

6,849 Spanish guitars. It has the word “Spanish” in it, do you see?

Elephants

ICANN 64, Kobe, Japan

17 cows. Kobe is known for its beef, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Elephants

ICANN 65, Marrakech, Morocco

23 camels.

Elephants

ICANN 66, Montreal, Canada

38 barrels of maple syrup. A gimme… the leaf is right there on the flag.

Elephants

ICANN 74, The Hague, Netherlands

1,191 cheese wheels. Who doesn’t love a bit of Dutch cheese?

Elephants

Five things I learned from UK prime minister candidates’ domain names

Kevin Murphy, July 11, 2022, Gossip

Boris Johnson announced he is to resign as UK prime minister after a series of scandals last week, and as of this evening 11 of his former friends have announced their plans to replace him as leader of the Conservative party and therefore UK PM.

I’ll spare you the details of Johnson’s downfall and the process used to find his successor, but domain names became part of the story over the weekend when a so-called “Dirty Dossier” began circulating among Tory MPs, denouncing candidate Rishi Sunak.

Among the allegations was that Sunak, whose resignation as chancellor last week eventually led to the Johnson’s own resignation, had been plotting Johnson’s demise and his own rise to power since last December, using Whois records for his campaign site as a smoking gun.

I thought I’d take a look at all 11 candidates’ registrations to see what else we could learn.

1. Sunak wasn’t the only “plotter”

Sunak came under scrutiny over the weekend when it emerged that the domain name readyforrishi.com has been registered since December 23 last year, a few weeks into the Partygate scandal, when the foundations of Johnson’s premiership began to weaken.

This, it was claimed in the Dirty Dossier, showed that Sunak had been plotting his boss’s downfall for six months.

His team have subsequently claimed that the name wasn’t necessarily registered by them, and his campaign is currently using the similar domain ready4rishi.com, which was registered July 7, the day Johnson announced his resignation.

The December domain forwards to Sunak’s official campaign site, suggesting its registrant is at the least a supporter.

We can’t tell for sure because all Whois records are redacted due to GDPR, which is still in effect in the UK despite Brexit.

But Sunak wasn’t the only prescient registrant in the clown car. Liz Truss’s campaign site is at lizforleader.co.uk, which was registered June 8, a month before there was a leadership job opening available, Whois records show.

Jeremy Hunt, Tom Tugendhat and Sajid Javid have names registered last week. Penny Mordaunt’s pm4pm.com was registered in 2019, but that’s because she also stood for Tory leader in 2019, ultimately losing to Johnson.

2. Not much patriotism on display

Of the 11 candidates, only five are campaigning using .uk addresses.

Kemi Badenoch uses a .org.uk. Suella Braverman uses a .co.uk. While Jeremy Hunt usually uses a .org, he’s using a .co.uk for his campaign. Same for Truss. Javid is using a thoroughly modern .uk, eschewing the third level, at teamsaj.uk.

All the rest use a .com for their sites.

3. Truss and Hunt didn’t register their matching .uk

While Javid appears to have registered the .co.uk matching his .uk, Truss and Hunt have not registered their matching second-level domains, which is just asking for trouble from pranksters and opponents.

That said, while it’s been six or seven years since .uk domains became available from Nominet, they haven’t really caught on in terms of adoption or popular mind-share. It would be a much greater crime to register a 2LD without the matching 3LD than vice versa.

4. Two candidates own their surnames

While all of the candidates own their full names in their chosen TLDs, only Grant Shapps and Nadhim Zahawi own their .com surnames.

Whois records and Archive.org show that Shapps has owned Shapps.com since 2000, years before he won his first parliamentary seat. He has a history of being involved in questionable online get-rich-quick schemes and used to follow me on Twitter, so he’s probably quite domain-savvy.

Zahawi, who’s been Chancellor of the Exchequer since Sunak quit last week, has owned zahawi.com since he first ran for parliament in 2009.

5. Here’s what domains everyone else is using

According to Google and the Twitter accounts of the candidates, these are the URLs used by each candidate for their regular official sites and, if they have one, their premiership campaign sites.

Note that in most cases their regular sites are managed by a company called Bluetree, which specializes in running boilerplate web sites for Tories, so the choice of domain may not necessarily be the choice of the MP in question.

[table id=1 /]

Pizza company suffers from penisland syndrome

Kevin Murphy, May 26, 2022, Gossip

A small pizza company from the UK has attracted national headlines this week after its choice of domain name caused mirth on social media.

The Welsh Italian Pizza Co uses welshitalianpizza.co.uk, but when it showed up at a festival with signage that did not display the domain in camel-case, attendees had to double-take to make sure it wasn’t “Wel Shit Alian Pizza”, according to The Mirror.

In this case it appears to have been a genuine oversight, but other examples of this kind of snafu have leaned into their ambiguity.

Pen Island, at penisland.net — slogan “We Specialize In Wood” — has been around for decades and is perhaps the most famous.