Man, what a cock.
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60-foot penis painted on roof
Month: March 2009
Categories
Acquiring an expired domain name II
Just to update on my previous entry. When I last checked you will recall that the domain whois had changed to an Enom placeholder.
Shortly after this I received another email alert from my script to tell me the domain whois had changed again. It had returned to the ‘Domain not found: Code FW-1’ which surely indicated something was afoot. Hoping for the name to be dropped, I was dissapointed to find that it eventually changed to the following (modified to omit domain name):
Administrative Contact:
Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.
Whois Agent (vrcnpthfc@whoisprivacyprotect.com)
+1.4252740657
Fax: +1.4256960234
PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St – F1
C/O domainiwanted.com
Bellevue, WA 98007
USTechnical Contact:
Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.
Whois Agent (vrcnpthfc@whoisprivacyprotect.com)
+1.4252740657
Fax: +1.4256960234
PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St – F1
C/O domainiwanted.com
Bellevue, WA 98007
USRegistrant Contact:
Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc.
Whois Agent ()Fax:
PMB 368, 14150 NE 20th St – F1
C/O domainiwanted.com
Bellevue, WA 98007
USStatus: Locked
Name Servers:
dns1.name-services.com
dns2.name-services.com
dns3.name-services.com
dns4.name-services.com
dns5.name-services.comCreation date: 23 Feb 2009 17:25:00
Expiration date: 22 Feb 2010 11:00:00
After some more investigation, I have found that ‘Whois Privacy Protection Service, Inc’ is the Whois protection service offered by Enom for $6/year. So if you ever see a whois record like this, it has definitely been registered through Enom.
So the existance of the record is either a handy pseudonym for some cowardly domainer who snaps up his domains via Enom, or is in fact Enom itself using insider information to snag and slap adverts on prospective domains while wishing to hide the fact they engage in such contemptible practices. I put the probability of it being one of these at 50/50.
So, it looks like my half-desired name is gone, at least for a year. While it might be annoying I still won’t explicitly state which domain it was, simply to deprive whomever now owns of it of those few curious hits it would get as a result.
Categories
eBay – profiteeringly insipid
I have used eBay for a very long time, and I’ve seen the features and interface of the site slowly evolve during that time. As it has become increasingly popular and one of only a couple of major portals on the internet where it’s possible to sell items to a large market, the blatant abuse of its position has become apparent even to casual users.
This hit home fiercely for me tonight when I tried to make a listing and found that I could not turn off Paypal as an accepted payment option. Historically you’ve been able to disable it by unchecking the appropriate box, but that box no longer exists. I searched and hunted for a way to turn it off, and couldn’t find one. I searched on Google and eBay’s help centre but found nothing except outdated articles that referred me to account options that seemingly no longer exist.
Eventually I realised, as I tried for the 5th time to submit my listing, that the following error was appearing:
To ensure security on the eBay marketplace, it is now mandatory for all listings to offer PayPal as a payment method. Enter a valid email address in order to receive payments.
Let’s examine this for a minute. Since eBay acquired Paypal some years ago, it has become forcefully more integrated with eBay’s main site. This worked out great for eBay, as they make a fee + percentage for item listings, and then another fee + percentage for accepting payments via Paypal.
Sellers who didn’t like this double-profit practice could simply decide not to accept Paypal, and instead demand cheques, or point buyers to one of the now barely seen alternative online payment providers, like Nochex or Bidpay, the latter of which is now defunct.
But consider the gravity of the statement above, eBay now won’t let you not accept Paypal. If you list on eBay, buyers have to be able to use Paypal to pay, and since the site is cunningly constructed to funnel you into instantly paying via Paypal, this will mean that a whole load of sellers will unwillingly have an automatic ‘transaction fee’ cut from their payments, and go straight into eBay’s pocket. The guise of doing it for ‘security’ is just fucking laughable. eBay and Paypal are so exploitable for scammers that it can be a real misery for both legitimate buyers and sellers who meet their scamming counterparts. I could vent a good couple of spleens on an article about the unchecked and well practiced scams that are possible on eBay, but it would just be another cherry on the giant turd pie.