Month: January 2005

Doster Goes Down the Tubes

Shortly after competition for domain names was opened up, I switched all my domain names from Network Solutions to Dostster. At the time, Dotster had good word-of-mouth and positive reviews. Unfortunately, the company has really gone down hill the last couple years.

Recently it pulled off two bone-headed maneuvers.

First, it automatically created free .info domains for its users. For example, since I own LeftWatch.com, Dotster automatically gave me LeftWatch.info. But I don’t want LeftWatch.info . . . ever. All they did was clutter up my account management screen with a bunch of domain names I have no intention of ever using. Dotster does have an e-mail address to send correspondence to get rid of the .info domain names, but I just can’t take the chance of having them accidentally delete the .com address while they’re at it, so I’ll just stick it out for a year.

But it gets worse. Seth Dillingham notes that Dotster committed a major privacy faux paus in its consolidated domain name report,

Unfortunately, the email’s recipient list also included anybody else who was listed as the owner or administrative contact of any of the domains mentioned in the newsletter. My company provides full domain hosting services. Think about that.

I’m lucky that I am the sole contact on my (or Macrobyte’s) domains, and only a few clients have listed me as the admin contact on their domains. Still, those clients now have a list of most of my Dotster-registered domains, and now they all know about each other. (Good thing none of my clients are direct competitors…)

What will they try next, to top this hit? Maybe they’ll send everybody’s auto-renewal credit card info to everybody else, or do a courtesy mailing to their entire customer base with everybody’s passwords. Yeah, that would be cool.

Got that . . . if I had Seth listed as the admin contact, I’d now know about all of the Dotster-registered domains on which he is listed as an admin. Ugh.

Probably time to switch to another registrar.

Chris Nolan’s Nonsense about Daily Kos

I can’t stand Daily Kos but the sort of ignorant hit pieces like Chris Nolan’s article are just absurd.

Nolan is upset because the Markos Moulitsas, who writes the Daily Kos, was a paid consultant to the Dean campaign,

Last week, Zephyr Teachout former Howard Dean campaign director of Internet organizing put a post up on what she – and she has got to be joking – calls a private website saying that Dean paid a bunch of bloggers who supported his candidacy.

Now, let’s get something straight from the start. There are no angels here. The two bloggers who accepted payments from the Dean campaign, Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong aren’t the innocents they’d like you and the rest of their partisan readers and supporters to think they are. They have no qualms about having their readers think they’re some new kind of journalists but they are, really, political activists and organizers.

Huh? Moulitsas had a pretty obvious disclosure on his front page that he was a consultant to Dean during the period he was accepting money from the Dean campaign. The only one trying to deceive here is Nolan who either is lying or hasn’t done his homework.

Plus I don’t know where the hell Nolan comes up with the claim that Moulitsas wants his “readers [to] think they’re some new kind of journalists…” Moulitsas’ blog has always been a hyperpartisan pro-Democrat activist site.

Apparently Nolan has no qualms about deceiving her readers into thinking that he actually knows anything about his topic.

Its also a bit odd to see Nolan apparently argue that its impermissible for people to blog about things in which they have a direct commerical interest. WTF? So Dave Winer should have kept Scripting.Com free of any mention of Userland or Radio or Frontier?

Presumably they simply should have arranged to buy stock through an insider deal.

HowToons.Org

HowToons.Org is an amazing cartoon site — a proposal for a syndicate Sunday comic that uses an 8 1/2″ x 11″ cartoon to teach kids how to make something cool that also teaches. For example, there’s a HowToon describing how to make a soda bottle rocket and another showing how to construct a basic motor – and, of course, a prototype marshmallow shooter.

The website also has videos showing people associated with the project constructing many of the devices.

All very cool.

The FanWing: A Plane Sans Wings

The New York Times has a brief, but interesting look at a wingless airplane (seriously). The wings are replaced by a tube filled with rotating blades that reduces the drag on the top surface, allowing the FanWing to take flight. According to the New York Times,

Compared with a traditional airplane, the FanWing can fly at much lower speeds and with much greater stability. It can take off from a relatively small runway and cruise at the leisurely pace of a car. If it ever catches on, the FanWing would make a good air taxi, ferrying people on short hops from city to city, or out to airports. It is more fuel-efficient than a helicopter and potentially safer than a normal plane, since a FanWing cannot stall, no matter how sharply it points up or down. The only real danger is if the fan blades jam and cease spinning — then, [inventor Patrick] Peebles admits, “it drops like a rock.”

Source:

FanWing, The. Clive Thompson, The New York Times, December 12, 2004.