Turns out I’ve been taggedtwice (or maybe more, who knows?).

In case they don’t cancel each other out, I suppose I should spill the beans;

  • Amsterdam is my favourite place on earth
  • I once out-smarted a domain name squatter who had somehow hijacked a domain used by my company and was holding it ransom; saved myself $2000.
  • I’m a sommelier. My favourite wines are dessert wines, fortified wines, Riesling, GSM blends, Viura, Tempranillo, Pinot Noir, and Nebbiolo.
  • I’ve been developing distributed software since 1983 when I wrote a two player “space war” game for the Commodore Pets at high school using the parallel port based network for the shared floppy drives
  • My wife and I were born on the same day; August 15, 1968

I’ll refrain from tagging others because AFAICT the meme has petered out; an advantage of being days behind in news and email, I suppose.

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  1. Okay, I’m intrigued. What’s the story behind the hijacking and trickery?

  2. We had a domain coming up for renewal in a few weeks, and when we went to renew we learned that we no longer owned it, even though it was still pointing to our servers. Very weird. But the next day a new page was put up – I forget what it said exactly, but it was a very amateurish “this domain for sale” like page with a hotmail address. I did some searching around on some of the text they used, as well as the email address, and found about 40 sites they owned. I was able to track down the old owner of a vacuum cleaner sales store in Florida, and he confirmed that his domain was stolen from under him a few months earlier, also just before renewal.

    During the search process, I also dug up information associated with the email address, including a location; Rawalpindi PK. I figured I was beaten then because of the jurisdictional issues, so I thought I’d contact the address and see what they wanted; $2000. I then decided to see if I could rattle their cage, and put together a detailed report of the sites I’d found as well as a list of names of people I’d contacted (although I’d only contacted the one). But I put this on my Web server, rather than send it in email, then I waited for the access… and it came a few hours later, from a rogers.ca (Canadian ISP) IP that could be traced – thanks to Rogers’ domain naming scheme – to a neighbourhood north of Toronto. I responded saying that I was prepared to go to court to reclaim my domain and would subpoena their real address, exposing whatever scam they had going. Of course, I wouldn’t really do that, but he didn’t know that. The next day my business partner (the technical contact) got an email about the domain being transferred back to him 8-)

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