CircleID

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Microsoft's Popular Domain Scooped by UltSearch

• Comment posted Aug 01, 2003 12:03 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Serves 'em right for using a "gimmick domain of the week" for their embedded links instead of a logical subdomain of their main domain, microsoft.com… subdomains don't expire and can't be cybersquatted, and there's only the one main domain at…

.Pro Asking for Second-Level Domains (Again)

• Comment posted Nov 05, 2003 7:44 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  On the other hand, .name has already been approved for second-level registrations, a modification from the original agreement; it would be unfair to allow that while denying other TLDs' similar modification requests.

Another Good Decision on Internet "Gripe Sites"

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2004 3:20 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Although, if it's a "non-commercial web site criticizing a company", then why did its owner use a .com domain for it?  .org or .info would be more appropriate.

New Mobile Domain Another Bad Idea

• Comment posted Mar 17, 2004 3:17 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I don't like the idea of TLDs being proprietary rather than generic… like ".yahoo"… if I wanted somebody else's trademark to be within my e-mail and Web addresses, I'd use addresses within my ISP's or hosting provider's domains.  It's to…

Non-Commercial Website Domain Names Using Trademarks

• Comment posted May 01, 2004 10:51 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I'm glad the courts agreed with the right of fair use of names for commentary purposes, but this protest site has the right idea by moving to the .info domain, which makes much more logical sense than .com for a…

Explaining China's IPv9

• Comment posted Jul 07, 2004 6:58 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Isn't there already a system called ENUM that's intended to map between phone numbers and DNS addresses?  And there's a proposed .TEL TLD to do just the same thing, incompatibly.  People really do like reinventing wheels, don't they?

Comments to ICANN's Whois TF3

• Comment posted Jul 20, 2004 2:07 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Regarding Alfonso's comments, I sympathize, but the public availability of WHOIS information is not some new, sinister, imposition of the evil net cabal (as some commentators seem to imply), but rather, it's been a feature of the system since antiquity…

• Comment posted Jul 15, 2004 4:34 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Good comments, but I feel I must remark on one issue mentioned in passing.  I think the idea of registering a separate domain for a temporary event that is useful only in the short term, and not renewing it, is…

The Site Finder Reprise

• Comment posted Jul 27, 2004 3:13 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  The proper address of ICANN, a noncommercial organization, is www.icann.org, not icann.com as mistakenly linked in this article.

Internet Governance Has Become a Non-Issue

• Comment posted Sep 28, 2004 7:17 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I'm not sure what the heyday of Infocom has to do with the WWW, since the time of that famous producer of text adventure games preceded the existence of the Web by a number of years.  (Infocom was around from…

Languages in the Root: A TLD Launch Strategy Based on ISO 639

• Comment posted Oct 13, 2004 3:29 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I'm not sure the DNS is the proper place to encode language information… the HTTP protocol already has a method (though underutilized) to do this through the "Content-Language" header and content negotiation, and HTML also has means of identifying languages…

AOL Fires Across the Bow of Spam-Friendly ISPs

• Comment posted Nov 02, 2004 4:17 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I'm opposed, myself, to ISPs blocking port 25 outbound, since many users (myself included) have legitimate reasons to use outside mail servers.  In my case, I use an e-mail address in my own domain, hosted on a Web hosting provider,…

dotMP Goes Mobile, Limits Access to WHOIS Data

• Comment posted Nov 30, 2004 2:46 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Their site says that ".mp is the only Internet top-level domain (TLD) designated exclusively as the mobile address." This seems like misleading marketing hype to me, given that .mp is not officially designated as anything other than the country code…

Third-Level Domain Name Hijacking

• Comment posted Dec 15, 2004 8:36 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Anybody with any domain can create subdomains of it, some of which might infringe on somebody's trademark.  That's not really something you can do anything about, except for after-the-fact action against somebody actually using such a name in an abusive…

How to Stop Spam

• Comment posted Jan 26, 2005 8:07 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  It's not just people who run their own servers that have a use for port 25; there are also people who use an e-mail provider other than their own ISPs, like for instance one associated with their Web hosting provider. …

Domain Owners Lose Privacy

• Comment posted Mar 08, 2005 4:03 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I'm not supporting the anti-privacy provisions in WHOIS policy, but they're hardly a new imposition; they've been part of the system since the ancient days of the Internet, when they weren't really controversial because mostly large institutions like universities had…

Shambles at the .Pro Registry

• Comment posted Apr 01, 2005 1:58 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I see that EnCirca is actually threatening to sue a blogger who dared to write the truth about them: http://blog.lextext.com/encircaletter.pdf Apparently, freedom of speech and press are no more compatible with the agenda of this sinister company than the integrity…

Spirit of .Pro, Where Art Thou?

• Comment posted Apr 01, 2005 1:58 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I see that EnCirca is actually threatening to sue a blogger who dared to write the truth about them: http://blog.lextext.com/encircaletter.pdf Apparently, freedom of speech and press are no more compatible with the agenda of this sinister company than the integrity…

• Comment posted Apr 01, 2005 1:44 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Ten years ago, Network Solutions violated the spirit of the original gTLDs by dropping the ball on enforcing their intended purpose, leading to the current crazy-quilt where lots of nonprofits improperly use .com addresses.  Newer restricted TLDs were designed to…

Why Restricted TLDs Should Not Be Gatecrashed

• Comment posted Apr 01, 2005 1:52 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I see that EnCirca is actually threatening to sue a blogger who dared to write the truth about them: http://blog.lextext.com/encircaletter.pdf Apparently, freedom of speech and press are no more compatible with the agenda of this sinister company than the integrity…

Fitting .JOBS Into the Marketplace

• Comment posted Apr 14, 2005 1:48 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I've always thought that a company-specific jobs site ought to be done as a logical subdomain of the main company domain; thus, if the main domain is foo.com, the jobs site would be at jobs.foo.com.  Just what is gained by…

Phish-Proofing URLs in Email?

• Comment posted Apr 19, 2005 3:21 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Some banks (Citibank is a good example) don't help the situation, since they insist on using a whole profusion of silly-marketing-gimmick domain names instead of logical subdomains of their main domain; this means that customers can never be entirely sure…

ACPA Applies to Noncommercial Use of Domain Name

• Comment posted Apr 28, 2005 12:22 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Though, if the purpose is noncommercial, ".com" isn't the most logical TLD to use.

Hope for Human Resources with .Jobs Domain

• Comment posted Jun 22, 2005 1:21 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  It's perfectly possible to configure subdomains so they work identically with the extra "www." prepended to them… mine do. If companies are bound and determined to use Stupid Unnecessary Domain Names [tm] in the dot-com domain, like FooCorpJobs.com when they…

• Comment posted Jun 21, 2005 10:45 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I agree with everyone else who has commented here. While I'd like to see the silly "everything should be dot-com" mentality broken up, and adding and using new TLDs helps this, I see no sense to the use of companyname.jobs…

Criticism of Trademark Owner Deemed Legitimate Interest under ICANN UDRP

• Comment posted Aug 25, 2005 12:23 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  But, as I keep saying, if your aim is to make noncommercial criticism of a company, a .com address makes no logical sense.

.XXX as Proposed is Wrong for Families & Kids

• Comment posted Apr 10, 2006 12:52 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  The idea of a "kids" domain has been tried, at the country code level, with kids.us.  That doesn't seem to have caught on at all.

• Comment posted Sep 26, 2005 7:34 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Along the lines of what has already been said, where would you draw the line (in deciding what sorts of content need to be forced into a .xxx domain) on museum sites containing pictures of nude paintings and sculptures, health…

• Comment posted Sep 23, 2005 12:07 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Some of the people who were burning comic books in the 1950s as "evil" made claims about how most juvenile delinquents read comic books, a similar (lack of) logic to the claims being made here about porn.

• Comment posted Sep 14, 2005 12:45 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  If you seriously think that governments around the world should enforce a requirement that all "non-child-safe" sites go into one particular TLD, then I'd like to see you come up with a standard for determining which sites should be "adults…

To Meow or not to Meow: .CAT TLD approved by ICANN

• Comment posted Sep 26, 2005 7:29 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  This idea (of indicating what language a site is in) is yet another thing that has no need of a TLD; there are established standards in HTTP and HTML to do this without any special domains.  The "lang" attribute in…

The Non-Parity of the UDRP

• Comment posted Oct 01, 2005 5:29 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  One source that is being increasingly used by people seeking information is Wikipedia ( http://www.wikipedia.org/ ).  Their article on the Montreal Convention is at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Convention It's currently a brief stub, with a small amount of information, but since it's a…

• Comment posted Oct 01, 2005 1:47 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I don't think the exclusion of the "Montreal Convention" site is due to any conspiracy by search engines to suppress it, but rather simply due to its poor design.  It uses frames, which is a strike (or two) against any…

• Comment posted Sep 22, 2005 11:56 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Though, if you plan on setting up a site to provide critical information about a company, CompanyName.info would be a more appropriate address than CompanyName.com, since you want to show that you're there for info, not to commercialize it.

Splitting the Root: It's Too Late

• Comment posted Jan 05, 2006 4:13 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Regarding Google redirecting google.com to various country-code sites depending on where you are, one glaring exception is the United States, where they as of yet still don't use google.us as an actual site; it redirects to google.com.  If they were…

Is a Domain Name Property?

• Comment posted Dec 23, 2005 2:38 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Is a domain name property or a contractual arrangement?  Actually, it's both.  A contractual arrangement can itself be a property that can be bought, sold, or traded… it's done all the time with baseball players, for instance.  A player can't…

What's Wrong with Domain Names?

• Comment posted Dec 23, 2005 2:33 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Well, actually, there's nothing wrong with domain names… when they're used in the manner intended by the "founding fathers" of the Internet, to create logical, structured addresses for things on the net.  When you use domains sensibly, there's no need…

Google Sued for Trademark Infringement Based on Third-Level Subdomain

• Comment posted Jan 05, 2006 4:09 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I don't see how owning a trademark should give unlimited right to suppress subdomains that are the same as the trademarked name.  For instance, I own the domain haters.info, intended for the purpose of creating criticism sites.  If I were…

• Comment posted Jan 01, 2006 3:36 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I think somebody who allows other people to choose subdomain names for their own use within a domain owned by the original party is probably a "registry", "registrar", or "domain provider" under the terms of the law, at least if…

Urban Identity by City Top-Level Domains

• Comment posted Jan 03, 2006 9:30 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  There are a few errors or misstatements in this article.  2 billion will only be two-thirds of the world's population if half of the current 6 billion die off.  co.uk is not a "ccTLD", but a second-level domain within the…

The Politics of Email Authentication, 2006 Edition

• Comment posted Jan 06, 2006 2:53 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I also wonder if any of these authentication schemes would be able to deal properly with the first@last.name addresses supported by the .name registry, where the user doesn't actually own last.name by itself.  In this case, the mail is always…

Google's Most Popular and Least Popular Top-Level Domains

• Comment posted Jan 16, 2006 4:35 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Nonexistent addresses seem to be able to get into the Google index somehow; maybe they add any site that anybody links to, whether it really exists or not.  The search results for .iq include some obvious "joke" entries like phrases…

Warner Brothers Loses DaisyDukes.com Complaint

• Comment posted Feb 09, 2006 5:24 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  A word or phrase could originate from a trademark (registered or common-law), but that does not necessarily stop it from acquiring a generic sense that the trademark owner can't legally control. For instance, "SPAM" is a trademark for a meat…

Sponsored TLD Unnecessary? Ron Andruff Responds to Forrester Research

• Comment posted Feb 24, 2006 4:32 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  What sort of suckers does that guy expect to pay $49 for a four-page text file, when you can read a lot more, and more varied, commentary on new TLDs online for free?

Microsoft Choking Domain Parking Business Practices?

• Comment posted Jan 13, 2007 12:47 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Actually, a growing number of people are using better browsers than the crappy one from Microsoft. One of my sites, Dan's Mail Format Site, had 45% of its traffic from users of Gecko-based (Mozilla) browsers (mostly Firefox), and only 43%…

• Comment posted Jan 12, 2007 4:06 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Then use Mozilla… I do!

• Comment posted Jan 11, 2007 11:17 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Although I'm a Microsoft-hater myself, I don't see anything inherently "evil" about what they did here.  As far as I can see, this tool is something you need to specifically download from their site, and is not pushed on you…

Will Splogs Kill .INFO Domains?

• Comment posted Aug 26, 2006 3:52 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I have several sites in subdomains of dan.info, such as domains.dan.info, and they seem to be well-ranked in search engines under relevant queries.

.MS: Alternate Root and Monoculture as Good Things

• Comment posted Sep 27, 2006 12:19 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I use the Mozilla browser, so I guess I'm another one of those for whom addresses using this proposed proprietary system aren't accessible.  Why go to browser and OS-specific addressing instead of a neutral, universal system?  That would be a…

ICANN Ordered by Illinois Court to Suspend Spamhaus.org

• Comment posted Oct 11, 2006 11:28 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  If they switch to a .uk domain, it should more sensibly be under .org.uk rather than .co.uk.

Picking Domain Names by Search Results

• Comment posted Mar 01, 2007 12:30 am PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  At least they're using a .gov domain, in the proper TLD for governmental entities, rather than adopting some silly .com name (implying that they're a commercial entity) as some government entities (including a few state governments, the United States Postal…

UDRP Good for Trademark Protection, Not So Good for Political Process

• Comment posted May 24, 2007 12:49 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Since campaigns are noncommercial organizations (well, at least when nobody's skimming cash under the table from them...), it would be more logical for them to have .org domains, instead of the .com addresses given as examples here.

Dot Name Domain Registry Charging for Whois Access, Security Researchers Not Happy

• Comment posted Oct 02, 2007 11:56 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  WHOIS policy is a no-win situation for the registries… if they're wide-open, they're criticized for violating privacy, and if they impose limitations they're criticized for shielding abusers.

Short Domain Names Threatened by Proposed Policy on IGO Dispute Resolution Procedure

• Comment posted Oct 02, 2007 11:48 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  ICANN is a US-based organization, so they don't have the global immunity to litigation that the international treaty organizations have.  Should ICANN push this policy into effect, and some large corporation with lots of money, lawyers, and trademarks gets its…

Local ".city" TLDs as an Opportunity for City Portals

• Comment posted Oct 02, 2007 11:43 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  "City.com" doesn't make any sense as the address of the official site of the city government, anyway, since it's not a commercial entity.

How Rampant is Cyber & Typo Squatting? Just Ask WIPO After Reviewing Wipo.com!

• Comment posted Jan 01, 2008 6:13 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Their primary address is actually at www.wipo.int, a domain that's harder to cybersquat on since .int is more tightly controlled than most TLDs.

Politically Motivated Domains Heat Up in U.S. Presidential Election Race

• Comment posted Jan 01, 2008 6:09 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  I wish candidates and advocacy groups would use .org domains to reflect their noncommercial status, rather than all the .com addresses they're tending to use these days.

Russia's Internet Dilemma: .RU Domain Translates Into Cyrillic as .PY, the Domain Name of Paraguay

• Comment posted Jan 06, 2008 3:28 pm PST — by Daniel R. Tobias
  More technically, it transliterates to Cyrillic characters that resemble "PY", but are actually distinct characters, with different Unicode positions.  Similarly, the old "USSR" didn't really transliterate to "CCCP" as widely believed by English-speakers, but to Cyrillic characters that resembled those…

Scotland Wants Its Own Top-Level Domain '.SCO'

• Comment posted Apr 10, 2008 11:50 pm PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  Government sites aren't in .co.uk anyway… that's for companies.  .gov.uk is for governmental sites, and there are several other second level domains under .uk such as .org.uk and .me.uk.

Microsoft's Contribution Was TCP/IP

• Comment posted May 01, 2008 2:13 am PDT — by Daniel R. Tobias
  This seems like highly revisionist history from a pro-Microsoft bias.  The way I recall it, the Internet and the World Wide Web were taking off like wildfire in the early months of 1995 (after several years of being used mostly…