HOEI

The MakeUseOf.com domain seems to have been hijacked over the weekend.   The guys over at MakeUseOf.com have set up shop temporarily on a Blogger platform at makeuseof-temporary.blogspot.com. The hosting company (GoDaddy.com) released the domain to someone who was impersonating the owner of the domain.  Here is what Mark from MakeUseOf.com had to say:

“Now it turns out that in order to transfer the domain, Ferank (or someone helping him) called up GoDaddy and impersonated Aibek. At that point he had already access to our account (or at least had enough information to recover the username/pass for the account) and basically said “hi, I’m the owner of MakeUseOf.com, please transfer the domain”. GoDaddy then complied. “

The Real Truth Behind The MakeUseOf.com Domain Crack

The plot has thickened because the hijacker (aka Ali Ferank) has requested a ransom of $2000 for the safe return of the MakeUseOf.com domain name.

What I would do if I woke up in Mark and Aibek’s shoes:

1) I recommend that the MakeUseOf.com team go over and take a swim in the ICANN registrar transfer policies to determine what pressure can be placed on GoDaddy.com to take some responsibility for what happened.

2) I would get Google involved since the  person currently holding the registration is using Goggle as the email host provider.

The following shows the current WhoIs for MakeuseOf.com:

Registrant Contact:
DomainsGame LLC
Ali Ferank

Alhana baghas nara St
Dubai, NA 85445
AE

Administrative Contact:
DomainsGame LLC
Ali Ferank ()
+1.5544415212
Fax: +1.5555555555
Alhana baghas nara St
Dubai, NA 85445
AE

A quick nslookup for the MX record for the email domain listed in the registration information shows that DomainsGame.org is using Goggle as a host for email services.

> domainsgame.org
Server:  vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net
Address:  4.2.2.1

Non-authoritative answer:
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx3.googlemail.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx4.googlemail.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx5.googlemail.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = aspmx.l.google.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 20, mail exchanger = alt1.aspmx.l.google.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 20, mail exchanger = alt2.aspmx.l.google.com
domainsgame.org MX preference = 30, mail exchanger = aspmx2.googlemail.com
>

3) I would give these guys at Moniker Privacy Services a call to see who registered DomainsGame.org.

A WhoIs on the DomainsGame.org domain shows it registered to:

Admin ID:MONIKER1571241
Admin Name:Moniker Privacy Services
Admin Organization:Moniker Privacy Services
Admin Street1:20 SW 27th Ave.
Admin Street2:Suite 201
Admin City:Pompano Beach
Admin State/Province:FL
Admin Postal Code:33069
Admin Country:US
Admin Phone:+1.9549848445
Admin FAX:+1.9549699155
Admin Email:

4) I would not assume this to be an international issue just because the person gave a Dubai snailmail address.

Conclusion

In the meantime GoDaddy has told the MakeUseOf team to realax in a bowl of legal stew.  GoDaddy is obviously trying to determine their liability in this matter before taking too much action.  Lets hope that GoDaddy is not one of the registrars described in the Wikipedia explanation of Domain Hijacking and Domain Theft.

“However, it is well documented that some registrars will admit no fault in accepting the forged credentials and will refuse to correct the record until forced by legal action. In many of these cases, justice is not done and the hijacker retains control of the domain. The victims of such theft often do not have the resources or willingness to invest the effort necessary to regain control of their domain, which may require a lawsuit or a lengthy and time-consuming arbitration process, especially if the hijacker and victim are in different countries.”

GoDaddy.com has a chance to avoid more of the “GoGaddy Sucks” articcles if they handle this correctly.

One of my other blogs (Grill’n Time) has been entered into the Blogging Idol 2 competition that is produced by Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips. The competition will run through the month of November 2008 and offers a great incentive for me to revive this blog.  There are over $4500 in cash and prizes up for grabs from the following sponsors:

• A lifetime subscription to Keyword Country (worth $2,000)
• An annual subscription to the Trackur corporate edition (worth $1,000)
• $300 courtesy of Sponsored Reviews
• $300 courtesy of BidVertiser
• $300 courtesy of TNX
• $100 from Daily Blog Tips
• $300 in text links from Text-Link-Ads
• A 3-month subscription to the SEO Book Training Program (worth $300)

You can help me win by subscribing to my Grill’n Time RSS feed by clicking HERE. There will be some design changes tot his blog along with some great new tasty treats from the Osborne Family Kitchen like:

• Southern Sweet Tea
• Homemade Popcorn that taste just like the movie theatre
• What to do with leftover homemade biscuits
• Some great new grilling ideas
• And much more

You can also help me win this competition by sending your friends over to check out Grill’n Time.

The first questions to ask before buying a laptop is, “what will the laptop be used for and what are your accessory needs?”  I will give a couple of examples of decisions I have faced when searching for a laptop in the past.

User 1 – For a stay home mom who will be surfing, checking email, and saving a ton of digital photos (accessory via USB) Oh, and we doesn’t really like touchpad mouse option:

Answer: Look for cheap, wireless, DVD Player, and pointing stick option.  You may need to look for a huge hard drive, but maybe not.  I’ll come back to that.  You can find a good fit for this solution on auction sites or when employers cycle out and replace old machines. The last one is how I scored a $100 laptop (2 Ghz, 1 GB Ram, 40G HD).  I had to add a PCMICA wireless card since the smoke’n deal did not include integrated wireless.  As for storage, you may be able to make use of a networked server/workstation shared drive to Backup and store excess photos.  This is what we do sine we have a fairly small hard drive.  This latptop at your house can be a Mac, Linux or Windows machine.

User 2 – Road warrior network security engineer running virtual machines on the laptop and doing extensive data gathering (packet captures and vulnerability assessments) in addition to email, browsing, and document creation/editing (including detailed network diagrams and data manipulation using spreadsheets and databases).

Answer: Get a fast machine, with a good amount of memory and storage space. It must be fairly light weight and it MUST run Windows XP or Server 03 (MAC is a bad choice). You must run a dual boot feature with Linux or at least have a copy of Linux running in a virtual machine that executed from your hard drive.  Other virtual machines are often useful, but they can be stored on removable media.

That leads me to my final point.  Don’t get to wrapped around the axle on hard drive space on this machine but rather go with the largest drive that is available at the fastest generally accepted speed category available on the market.  For instance, I would go with a 200GB – 7200rpm/16MB Cache over a 320GB – 5400rpm/8MB cache.  Hard drive performance (i.e., spindle and read/write speed, cache, etc) is one of the most overlooked performance features on PCs and laptops. As for additional space, you will likely need some removable media anyway.  Removable storage is dirt cheap at less than $150 per TB.  As for solid state drives, they still have some maturing to do before a serious road warrior should trust them.

Rachel over at Christians in Good Company has a post titled Google Reader: Friend or Foe? and it made me consider how feeds may be adversely affecting blog traffic.  I am not talking about your blog’s feed hurting your traffic even though that could be true since you don’t get hits on those readers if you are providing full post content in your feed, but rather I am talking about the feeds we read via tools like my Google Readers on my iGoogle page.  Much like Rachel, I often skip the process of visiting and commenting on posts I view in my reader even though I traditionally would have left a comment on many of the posts I read.  In my opinion that can and has led to the decline in traffic on my blog(s) since I am not leaving those little link crumbs pointing back to my blogs since I am not commenting nearly as much as I used to.

I am a Blogging Idol competitor.  I have joined this battle of the blogggers to help motivate me to do more with this blog and potentially win three thousand dollars.  Check out the details over at DailyBlogTips.com.  The contest winner will be the blogger that increases the most in RSS feed reader count between now and July 31.  That said you should subscribe to my feed in the upper right sidebar of this page to help me win the $3000 prize.

It appears that the new Alexa ranking system has benefited a couple of sites that I manage.  The ranking for HOEI was in the 500K range and GrowingKids was in the 600K range with both climbing before the change.  GrowingKids was launched in July of 2007 and has finally pasted HOEI in Alexa rankings with a new ranking of 344,414.  Traffic on GrowingKids.org has doubled since the beginning of the year and the RSS subscribers have nearly tripled so the Alexa ranking is not at all a surprise.  There have been criticisms of Alexa about the rankings favoring sites with technical content.  It seems that the new ranking system is proving to change that technical bias at least from my perspective.