Will you shut up, man? Trump takedown domain on sale for ridiculous fee

Proving once again that there’s no neologism or emergent catchphrase that won’t be registered as a .com, a domainer has put willyoushutupman.com on sale in the wake of last night’s ludicrous US Presidential debate.

The line “Will you shut up, man?” was uttered in exasperation by Democrat candidate Joe Biden midway through the debate, after being ceaselessly harangued and interrupted by President Trump.

It’s currently listed on Dan.com with a “make an offer” tag, but Newsweek reported earlier today that the seller had priced the domain at $175,000.

The domain currently redirects to an affiliate link to the bespoke printing company Zazzle, so even if it doesn’t sell, the domainer may make a bit of cash.

Newsweek also reports that Biden’s campaign are already selling “Will you shut up, man?” merch, but I was unable to find such an item on the official Biden site.

ICANN 69 returning to YouTube

ICANN is to make its annual general meeting next month available streaming on YouTube, the org has announced.

That’s in addition to the Zoom rooms that have been used exclusively for meetings since the coronavirus pandemic hit at the start of the year.

The YouTube streams will be listen/view only and will have up to 30 seconds delay compared to the live Zoom rooms, which will of course continue to have interactivity.

The move will be a welcome return for those of us who need to listen in to sessions and not necessarily engage.

Unfortunately, only five “high-interest” sessions will be available, and there won’t be any live interpretation for the non-English speakers.

For the Zoom rooms, they’ll be mandatory registration before you can even view the meeting schedule. The links will be hidden behind a login screen.

This is largely due to repeated incidents of “Zoom-bombing”, where trolls interrupt proceedings with inflammatory off-topic material.

Watch three members of the ICANN community get assassinated

Three members of the ICANN community got killed by an assassin in a 2012 movie, now available on Amazon Prime, I inexplicably had never heard about until today.

The film’s called Rogue Hunter, and it’s produced and directed by prominent community member Jonathan Zuck, who’s been involved in ICANN representing intellectual property interests for the last 15 years.

It’s about… 55 minutes long.

It’s about… I dunno. A foxy female assassin or something? Maybe. The audio during the exposition scenes was pretty ropey. My feeling was that it’s drawing a lot from The Bourne Identity.

Zuck himself, alongside Steve DelBianco and Andrew Mack, both former chairs of the ICANN Business Constituency, all have cameos in which they get killed.

Here’s the trailer for the film, featuring DelBianco getting offed near the Taj Mahal (presumably shortly after the 2008 ICANN 31 meeting in New Delhi).

But is it any good?

No. The movie is fucking terrible.

But it’s firmly in the “So Bad It’s Good” zone.

And I laughed my balls off.

It’s not quite a classic of the genre — it’s no The Room — because it seems pretty clear that Zuck and his colleagues knew they were making a terrible film. There’s deliberate humor in the script and the direction.

The film was released in 2012, and somehow got on to Amazon Prime two years ago, where it has one one-star review:

Poor camera work, poor lighting, poor story line, poor acting just really all round dreadful.

I don’t think that reviewer really “got” what the makers were going for. Maybe, if you choose to watch the movie and review it, you could help redress the balance.

I should point out that there’s a bit of nudity and a somewhat explicit sex scene in the film, so you probably shouldn’t watch it with your boss or your kids watching over your shoulder.

Bored? Try the DI Fiendishly Difficult Domain Name Pub Quiz

One of the many trends to emerge since most of the world went into coronavirus lockdown is the emergence of the online pub-style quiz as a way to kill time while we wait for normality to resume or death to kick in.

This gave me a great idea: why not copy this idea?

While most of these quizzes are usually conducted over YouTube or some other streaming platform, I’ve long been told I have a face for radio and a voice for print, so you’re going to have to make do with text.

So, here I present the inaugural DI Fiendishly Difficult Domain Name Pub Quiz.

It’s split into rounds that should test the breadth and depth of your domain industry and ICANN knowledge to their fullest.

There are no prizes. It’s just a bit of fun.

Go ahead and test yourself, your boss isn’t looking!

The Trivia Round

• Which two alcoholic beverages feature on Domain Name Journal’s list of the top 20 secondary-market cash sales of all time?
• What’s the only one of ICANN’s five geographic regions not to have had one of its citizens elected chair of ICANN’s board of directors?
• Which horror movie director publicly called GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons a “sick fuck” in 2011?
• How many companies applied for the .web gTLD in 2012?
• Over 170 domainers got a nasty bacterial infection during the DomainFEST conference in 2011. Which saucy place did they catch it? I’m looking for the location, not the body part.

The ccTLD Round

There are over 200 ccTLDs in active use today. How many can you match to the correct country, and vice versa?

First, name the countries or territories associated with the following five ccTLDs:

• .aq
• .tw
• .bb
• .bj
• .lr

Now, name the ccTLDs for the following five countries or territories:

• Myanmar
• Macao
• Mali
• Morocco
• Mauritania

The Acronym Round

These are all acronyms used in the domain name industry and ICANN community, but what do they stand for?

• MX
• EPDP
• NPOC
• LGR
• SSAC

The Spot-the-gTLD Round

Some of these gTLDs are real, some are not. But which is which?

• .jcrew
• .blockbuster
• .toysrus
• .tjmaxx
• .paylessshoesource

The Anagram Round

These five strings are all anagrams of well-known people or well-known companies in the domain/ICANN space. Solve the anagrams. If you follow DI on Twitter and have a long memory, these might be a little easier for you.

• barman orgy
• cretin clan
• enema chap
• boner storm
• lewd anal manner

Bonus Round — Name That Beard

For a bonus point, whose beard is this?

The Answers

There are 31 points on offer, and I’ll post the answers early next week. If you’re impatient, pretty much everything here is Googleable.

But remember, you’d only be cheating yourself!

If you enjoyed this, or like some bits but not others, let me know in the comments on via other channels. If there’s sufficient positive feedback, I may make this a regular feature.

Coronavirus could cause “high risk of widespread outages”, ICANN says

There’s a “high risk of widespread outages” in the DNS if ICANN can’t get enough people in the same room for its next root DNSSEC ceremony because of the coronavirus pandemic.

That’s according to ICANN’s own board of directors, which yesterday published a contingency plan that — in the worst case scenario — could see parts of the internet come to a screeching halt in July.

The problem is with the elaborate “ceremonies” that ICANN and its IANA/PTI unit uses to make sure the internet can support DNSSEC — the secure version of the DNS protocol — all the way from the root servers down.

Every quarter, ICANN, Verisign and a select few “Trusted Community Representatives” from all over the world meet in person at one of two secure US-based facilities to generate the public Zone Signing Keys for the root.

In addition to the complex cryptographic stuff happening in the computers, there’s a shedload of physical security, such as retinal scans, PIN-based locks, and reinforced walls.

And the “secret key-holders”, memorably fictionalized in a US spy drama a few years ago, actually have physical keys that they must bring to these ceremonies.

The events are broadcast live and archived on YouTube, where they typically get anything from a few hundred to a few thousand views.

Obviously, with the key-holders dotted all over the globe and most under some form of coronavirus-related lockdown, getting a quorum into the same facility at the same time — originally, Culpeper, Virginia on April 23 — isn’t going to be possible.

So IANA has made the decision to instead move the ceremony to the facility in El Segundo, California, within easy driving distance of ICANN’s headquarters, and have it carried out almost entirely by ICANN staff, wrapped in personal protective equipment and keeping their distance from each other.

The TCRs for El Segundo live in Mauritius, Spain, Russia, Tanzania, Uruguay and on the east-coast of the US, according to ICANN.

Four of these key-holders have mailed their keys to different IANA staff “wrapped in opaque material” and sealed in “tamper-evident bags”. These IANA employees will stand in for the TCRs, who will be watching remotely to verify that nothing fishy is going on.

Verisign and the independent auditors will also be watching remotely.

That’s the current plan, anyway, and I’ve no reason to believe it won’t go ahead, but ICANN’s new contingency plans do provide four alternatives.

It’s already discarded the first two options, so if the current, third, plan for the ceremony can’t go ahead before June 19 for some reason, all that would be left is the nuclear option.

Option D: Suspend signing of the DNS root zone

This is the final option if there is no conceivable way to activate the KSK and perform signing operations. There would need to be a massive education campaign at short notice to have resolver operators disable DNSSEC validation. There is a high risk of widespread outages as it is not possible to ensure global implementation, and high risk this will fatally compromise trust in DNSSEC in general as a technology.

This is considered highly unlikely, but nonetheless the final option. Without exercising the option, in the absence of a successful key signing ceremony, DNSSEC validation would be unsuccessful starting in July 2020.

The reason for this scenario is that DNSSEC keys have a finite time-to-live and after that period expires they stop functioning, which means anyone validating DNSSEC on their network may well stop resolving the signed zones.

ICANN typically generates the keys one quarter in advance, so the current key expires at the start of July.

However, the planned April 23 ceremony will generate three quarters worth of keys in advance, so the root should be good until the end of March 2021, assuming everything goes according to plan.

Clearly, the idea that half the planet might be on the verge of lockdown wasn’t taken into consideration on February 12, the last ceremony, when ICANN’s biggest problem was that it couldn’t get into one of its safes.

If you’re interested in more about the ceremony and the coronavirus-related changes, info can be found here.

GoDaddy signs up 30 partners to lockdown-era marketing scheme

GoDaddy has signed up 30 companies to a new marketing program that it says is designed to help small business keep afloat during the coronavirus lockdown.

It’s called #OpenWeStand, and the company is doing its level best to cast it as a community “movement” rather than a way to shift product as the world stands on the precipice of pandemic-induced recession.

The companies signed up so far are: Acronis, American Express, Association for Enterprise Opportunity, Avetta, BrandCrowd, Brex, ChowNow, Digital Air Strike, Evite, Gift Up!, GoFundMe, Hello Alice, Inc. Media, Kabbage, Keap, Keysight Technologies, Moneypenny, Next Insurance, Next Street, Nextdoor, PayPal, Rocket Lawyer, Ruby, Salesforce, Seed Spot, ServiceTitan, Shaw Academy, Slack, SurveyMonkey, and Zenefits.

What are all these companies offering worried business owners? It’s not entirely clear yet, but the answer so far appears to be primarily: discounts.

Evite, for example, is offering customers a free year of its premium service, which usually goes for $249, according to the OpenWeStand web site.

Customers of GoDaddy that are also customers of collaboration tool Slack will get a 25% discount on any Slack upgrade they buy.

Food delivery aggregator ChowNow says it’s designed a loyalty scheme product designed to put uo-front fees in restaurants’ pockets at a time when delivery is basically their only option.

Inc magazine’s contribution appears to be limited to a pledge to continue publishing.

GoDaddy itself is offering free social media makeovers and marketing services.

There’s not a whole lot more in the way of offers right now, but the site has placeholders for the likes of PayPal, American Express and Salesforce to promote their offerings soon.

In terms of offering advice to small business owners, we’re looking at a collection of GoDaddy blog posts and a LinkedIn group with about 200 members.

It’s obviously far too early to say whether any of this will ultimately be useful or attractive enough to help small businesses survive the lockdown, but I also think it would be churlish to dismiss it as a cynical marketing ploy at this stage.

A slick GoDaddy video promoting #OpenWeStand, which appears to have been voiced by the soothing, avuncular gravel of Donald Sutherland, has received over 12 million views since it was published March 25, so their may be an appetite for this kind of “movement”.

An open question to the domain name industry about coronavirus

“Don’t worry. We’ve done this before.”
That was pretty much the first sentence out of my grandmother’s mouth when I called to wish her a happy Mother’s Day.
She was talking about World War II and the immediate post-war years. She’s 94, so she saw both.
She’s no Uncle Albert. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her talk about “The War” before. Not once. But when her grandson called her for the first time in embarrassing months, that was where her mind went straight away.
They couldn’t get oranges, for years, back then. If you were diabetic, you couldn’t get sugar, but they gave you extra butter instead. She developed an aversion to canned pineapple chunks that persists to this day. She still has her ration book, a souvenir of trying times, squirreled away somewhere.
She was in generally good spirits. She knows that Covid-19, if it gets through the front door of her granny flat, will very likely be the end of her. Her mind is fully intact, but her body is all kinds of fucked up. But she and the family members who bring her food are taking the proper precautions. And, she said, she’s been self-isolating since November anyway. What’s another 12 weeks?
The WWII comparison was not at all surprising to hear, of course. A lot of us have been thinking similar things. The media is currently resplendent with uplifting examples of what we Brits refer to as the “Blitz spirit” — unity and stoicism in the face of overwhelming adversity.
There are significant differences, of course.
The enemy now is not an identifiable political faction with a skull on its cap, but a remorseless, invisible beastie. The Allies are not a collection of like-minded liberal nations, but literally the entire human species.
The baddies don’t want to shoot you. They want to infiltrate your nasal cavity and make you accidentally kill your parents with a hug. You kill them with soap.
Back then, we required young men to travel overseas to kill and potentially die to serve the greater good. We asked the women they left behind to take to the factory floors and work traditionally male jobs. Now, all we ask of them is that they don’t go down the pub on a Saturday night, and apparently sometimes even that’s too big of an ask.
Society is asking me to work from home during the day and do nothing more than watch TV and play Xbox in the evenings. Fine. I can do that. I was doing that anyway. This, apparently, is how my generation gets to save lives.
It doesn’t feel like much of a sacrifice.
Worldwide, people are sitting alone at home, twiddling their thumbs, watching slightly-less-than-hi-def Netflix, and wondering how they can do more to make a positive difference in this civilizational battle.
In the domain industry, we’ve recently seen the Internet Commerce Association attempt to help out people who are financially struggling due to coronavirus with its #DomainAssist Twitter campaign.
I’m not sure how effective it’s going to be, but ICA members have money, are trying to make a difference, and I’m certainly not going to knock them for it.
But there is one battle that the domain industry is uniquely positioned, and maybe even obligated, to fight.
That’s the fight against misinformation.
The World Health Organization started alerting the world to the Covid-19 “infodemic” in early February.
“We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom said at the Munich Security Conference February 15. “Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.”
Hear that? The world’s top doc says that misinformation is just as dangerous as something that could kill your grandmother.
Just as crime flourished in London during the Blitz, 21st century fraudsters have been quick to take advantage of the coronavirus panic.
The fake news ranges from the harmlessly satirical — a quarantined Tom Hanks being supplied with a volleyball for company — to the life-threatening — tales of how ingesting silver, taking cocaine or drinking bleach can protect your from the virus.
In India, fake news is persuading people to drink cow piss.
Some of these scammers are just conspiracy theorists raging against the Big Pharma machine. Others are actively trying to make money hawking bogus and dangerous fake vaccines and cures. In the era of pandemic, they’re just as bad as each other.
It’s serious stuff. An infected person who thinks they’ve ingested the magic cure is less likely to take the proper precautions and more likely to transmit the virus to others, who will transmit it to others, who will transmit it to others… and then a bunch of people die.
So far, the WHO and other health authorities have rightly been focused largely on the social media platforms where the majority of this bogosity spreads.
The likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google have made changes to their usage policies or content-promotion algorithms in response to the crisis.
Twitter has banned tweets that go against the official guidance on reducing the spread of the virus. Facebook is promoting authoritative news sources and fact-checking misinformation. Google searches for coronavirus return curated, science-based info embedded in the results page, and banned coronavirus-related advertising. YouTube is taking down videos peddling dangerous misinformation.
The social media side of the technology industry certainly seems to be backtracking on its usual “we just a neutral platform” stance.
But it’s not just happening on social media. Many of these posts lead to web sites that are harmful. Some are simple frauds and phishing attacks. Others promote fake cures or urge readers to ignore the official science-based advice.
These web sites use domain names. Thousands have been registered in recent weeks.
NewsGuard has identified dozens of web sites that are promoting coronavirus misinformation. Fact-checking sites such as the AFP and Snopes have identified many more.
So here’s my open question, which I pose to every registry, registrar and reseller reading this:
If you are told about a domain name under your management that is publishing dangerous misinformation, will you take it down?
I’d like to think I know the answer to this question already, but I’m not sure I do.
Registries and registrars are notoriously reluctant to act on complaints about the contents of web sites. Many require a court order before taking action.
During peace time, worthy principles such as free speech, privacy, and legal due process all play a role in this kind of decision-making.
The latest version of the Framework to Address DNS Abuse lists four types of content that its dozens of domain-industry signatories “should” (as opposed to “must”) act on — child sex abuse material, illegal opioid sales, human trafficking, and credible incitements to violence.
The underlying principle leading to this list is “the physical and often irreversible threat to human life”.
I’m reminded of the ethical conundrum faced by EasyDNS and CEO Mark Jeftovic back in 2014, when the company changed its usage policies after a guy died due to fake pharma bought via a domain under its management.
“In one case we have people allegedly pirating Honey Boo Boo reruns and on the other we have people dying. We don’t know where exactly, but the line goes somewhere in between there,” Jeftovic wrote at the time.
I don’t wish to pick on EasyDNS or Jeftovic — changing one’s mind in the face of new evidence is an admirable trait — but I think his quote poses the question quite well.
There’s a line where free speech ends and incitement to virological violence begins.
Figuring out where that line is is something the domain name industry is going to have to get to grips with, fast.

WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! In other news, ICANN 67 was… “muted”

Without wishing to scaremonger about Covid-19, I don’t mind admitting that I’ve never been so terrified of anything as much in my adult life.
I have relatives in their nineties or with existing lung conditions, and I’m generally a pretty unhealthy middle-aged bloke myself. In the last few days, I’ve become increasingly concerned that not every member of the clan is going to make it out of 2020 alive.
I’m sure many readers are feeling the same way right now.
The UK government’s response may or may not be scientifically sound, but it seems to me the underlying strategy is not to prevent people from getting the disease, which may well no longer be possible, but rather to spread out infections over as long a period as possible, so as to reduce the peak strain on the National Health Service.
My feeling, which I don’t think is particularly paranoid, is that Boris Johnson, in apparent contrast to other world leaders, has made the call to throw a generation of British grannies under the bus in the name of herd immunity.
We’re living in dark times, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
I hope all my readers stay safe. And, in all seriousness, keep washing those hands and stay at home if you start coughing!
Awkward segue incoming.
There was little doubt in my mind that ICANN made the correct decision three weeks ago when it cancelled the in-person Cancun public meeting and quickly organized a much-truncated online-only ICANN 67 instead. There seemed a possibility that it was acting through an over-abundance of caution.
But, given the developments in the coronavirus pandemic since ICANN pulled the plug on Cancun, all such doubt has surely been eliminated. ICANN made entirely the right call.
That’s not to say that 67 was a roaring success. It suffered from the entirely predictable and unavoidable limitations of online conferencing.
When I say it was “muted”, I mean that in two senses of the word.
Watching the American late-night talk show hosts last night performing to empty audiences this morning was a surreal experience. Like watching survivors of the zombie apocalypse broadcasting a plaintive SOS into an eerily silent ether.
I kinda felt the same listening to ICANN 67.
While I’m no stranger to remote participation — that’s how I experience most ICANN meetings — there’s usually a detectable sense of place, of a jostling community on the other side of the Zoom room. I hesitate to use a word as strong as “vibrancy”, but you probably know what I’m getting at.
There was none of that at 67, which largely played out in much the same way as a regular policy working group call.
And that’s when we get to the other sense of the word “muted” — I lost count of the amount of time squandered to technical issues such as dropped or laggy connections, background noise, and, most commonly, people not realizing that they have to unmute their lines before speaking.
I don’t think a single session I attended was not plagued by periods of uncomfortable silence.
As I said, this was entirely predictable and largely unavoidable. I don’t think the fact that each session’s Zoom room appeared to be configured differently helped, but it’s probably a problem that will be mitigated as people become more accustomed to the Zoom platform.
The next ICANN meeting, numbered 68, is currently still scheduled to take place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from June 22, but I think that it’s almost inevitable that we’ll be looking at another online-only session.
Malaysia currently has 158 confirmed cases of coronavirus, suggesting that it’s still in the relatively early stages of the pandemic compared to, say, Europe.
With UK experts predicting peak infections here around late May, it’s entirely possible ICANN 68 would take place while Malaysia’s problem is significantly worse than it is today.

Covid-19: It’s official, domainers are faster than journalists

The .com domains matching the new name of Coronavirus were registered today before even the first news reports emerged.
The World Health Organization today officially named the deadly disease Covid-19. CO for Corona, VI for virus, D for disease and 19 for 2019, the year in which it was discovered.
The announcement was made at a WHO press conference in Geneva this afternoon. The press conference, which streamed live on YouTube seems to have kicked off shortly after 1500 UTC.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus officially named the disease Covid-19 not too long after the press conference started.
At 1509 UTC, WHO’s official Twitter account tweeted:

🚨 BREAKING 🚨

"We now have a name for the #2019nCoV disease:

COVID-19.

I’ll spell it: C-O-V-I-D hyphen one nine – COVID-19"

–@DrTedros #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/Kh0wx2qfzk

— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) February 11, 2020

Within five minutes, an anonymous domainer had picked up covid-19.com — according to Whois records, it was created at NameCheap at at 1513 UTC.
But domainers hate hyphens, right?
Even after Tedros spelled it out for clarity, including the hyphen, a domainer with an even fastest trigger finger decided to omit it, registering the domain covid19.com at 1510 UTC, three whole minutes before the hyphen version and an extremely impressive ONE MINUTE after the WHO tweet.
As far as print journalists go, you have to wait a full thirty minutes before you start to see lines from the likes of Reuters and the AFP.
The lesson here is clear: if you’re one of those domainers who tries to snap up novel terms from the news as quickly as possible, you need to cut out the middleman and go directly to source.
And ignore the bloggers, too. It took me two and a half hours after the WHO tweet to publish this post.
I’m pathetic.

Watch: climate change denier on why she trusts .org more than .com

This isn’t news, but I found it amusing, irritating, and slightly confusing — a clip of a climate change denier rubbishing a scientific article because it appears on a .com domain rather than a .org.
The video below, featuring comedian Joe Rogan interviewing conservative political commentator Candace Owens, dates from May 2018, but I first came across it when it popped up on Reddit’s front page this morning.
In it, Rogan attempts to school Owens on why human-influenced climate change, which she believed is a liberal conspiracy, is a scientific fact. At one point, his producer pulls up an article from Scientific American, the respected, 174-year-old popular science magazine, which uses scientificamerican.com.
Owens responds:

What web site is this? .com though? That means it’s making money. I don’t trust that. If it was a .org I would probably take that, but this is just a random web site.

The argument has been made, in the ongoing controversy over .org’s sale to Ethos Capital, that .org domains carry a higher level of trust than other TLDs, through the mistaken belief that you need to be a not-for-profit in order to own one, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever heard that belief openly expressed in a widely-viewed forum by a public figure, albeit not a very bright one.
Confusingly, at around the 11.50 mark in the video, Owens starts banging on about how she doesn’t trust research conducted by “.orgs” such as mediamatters.org.
She appears to be someone who, in the age of fake news, pays attention to TLDs when deciding what is and isn’t true online. I can’t decide whether that’s an admirable quality or not. At least she has a filter, I guess.