Expired Domain News

Gridiron site gets unwanted makeover
Ukrainian company buys rights to lapsed Fort Walton Beach High's fan football Web address.

By WENDY VICTORA Daily News Staff Writer
Northwest Florida Daily News
29 Aug 2004
Since 2000, Fort Walton Beach High School football fans have been visiting the Touchdown Club's Web site to see pictures of their favorite young gridiron heroes.

Lately, they've been finding pictures of naked women.

"Here it is a damn school site and somebody's bought it and done that to it," said Ricky Maddox, who helped start the Web site four years ago when he was president. "Somebody dropped the ball." The site changed hands when the club, which supports the football team, unknowingly let the domain name lapse.

In late July, a company named Beta Corporation, which is based in Ukraine, purchased the name. Within weeks, the site was filled with graphic pictures and dozens of links to other sex-themed Web sites. The Northwest Florida Daily News decided not to print the domain name. Though the Web site was operated by an outside organization, it was linked to the Okaloosa School District Web site.

"The day it went up, it was only on for an hour, hour and a half," said Fort Walton Beach High School Principal Alexis Tibbetts. "This is not on our school Web site anymore. We killed that link immediately within minutes of finding it. "I didn't want anyone to find it," she added. "It's very raunchy." She said the school has received about a half-dozen calls from people who went to the site for schedule information or to buy tickets for football games.

"The reason they were calling was to let us know," she said. Touchdown Club president Johnnie Ford said the club hopes to buy the name back next week. He said neither he, nor the president before him, knew that anything needed to be done to maintain control of the site. "We just assumed that the school was paying for it," he said. "Nobody's been paying any bills and there's no record of it anywhere." The school district has offered the services of School Board attorney Jeff McInnis to help the club resolve the matter.

Chris Nielsen, an Internet consultant in Minneapolis, said what happened to the Touchdown Club is not uncommon.

"Typically what happens is that they forget about it or the e-mail address (of the contact person for) the domain name changes," he said. "Then they are not contacted when the renewal time comes up." Nielsen said expired domain names become available again, and that their new uses vary. He said ethical companies will often buy the names and try to use them to generate related business.

For instance, a Web site with Fort Walton Beach in its name might be purchased by a company hoping to promote tourism or beachwear. "If they're not ethical, it could be anything from casinos to porn," he said. "Most of these people are normal people but there's a definite sleaze element."

A spokeswoman for the Federal Communications Commission said that no governmental agency has control over domain names. The same company that owns the Touchdown Club's Web site has one that was created for a women's health conference last December. That site also features naked women in explicit poses.

Beta Corporation did not respond to e-mailed inquiries for this story. Nielsen said that the site probably appealed to the company because it was linked to other Web sites. Domain names with links generate more traffic.

Nielsen estimated that the Ukrainian company paid $7 for the name. Booster club officials will have to pay a steeper price to retrieve it. The number that has been discussed is $250. But how the transaction would take place is still being decided.

Beta Corporation wants it handled through a credit card transaction. Booster club members are not willing to hand over a number. "They will seek other means," said Tibbetts, who said she was sorry that the whole thing happened. "It's just something that we all learned a very valuable lesson from."

.com under attack

The SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC) has issued a warning about new attacks which corrupt some DNS servers so that requests for .com sites sent to those servers connect users instead to Websites maintained by the attackers.

These attacks, also known as 'pharming,' target the .com Internet domain, redirecting some Internet users from .com Websites to Web pages controlled by the unknown attackers. Statistics indicate that at least 1,300 Internet domains were redirected to compromised Web servers in an attack in early March.

ISC advised network operators to block traffic to and from the IP addresses involved to stop the redirection. The attacks use a strategy called DNS cache poisoning, in which malicious hackers use a DNS server they control to feed erroneous information to other DNS servers. The attacks take advantage of a DNS vulnerability that allows any DNS server that receives a request about the IP address of a Web domain to return misleading information.

Internet users who approach a poisoned DNS server for their Web surfing requests might find that entering the URL of a well-known Website directs them to an unexpected or malicious Web page, or in some cases a completely fraudulent Website.

Second-Level .Pro Domain Names Available for Registration

RegistryPro (registrypro.pro), the .Pro registry operator, announced yesterday that it has received approval from the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to begin offering second-level .Pro domain names immediately.

With the .Pro Top-Level Domain (TLD) launched earlier this year, registrants could only sign up for so-called “third-level” domain names, but the newly available domain names enable professionals to use the simple domain name format. The .Pro domain presents several important benefits, such as a distinctive and secure Internet presence for the Web site, email traffic and confidential transactions. Each .Pro domain registration includes a digital certificate for authenticating email communications or Web site-based transactions.

"Availability of second-level domain names increases the demand for .Pro names," said Michael Delciello, general manager of RegistryPro. "This simplified naming format helps professionals market their .Pro domains, and makes it easier for their clients, patients and other Internet users to find and use the .Pro Web sites."

RegistryPro offers .Pro domain names only to licensed MDs, lawyers and CPAs in the United States and expects to expand globally. It also may consider expanding the number of professions qualified to register .Pro domain names.

DropListPro.com Launches Smart Search for Expired Domains

DropListPro.com, an expired domain search engine, has released a new and improved design and all new features, which include a search wizard, smart search, and many more.

(PRWEB) June 14, 2005 -- While there are more than 20,000 domains being registered each day, most people don’t realize that there are also just as many expiring. After a domain expires it may be up to three months before it becomes available. www.DropListPro.com shows when these domains will be coming back on the market and how to acquire them.

To increase the speed of finding quality domains, a smart search has been contrived. When activated, the search engine will not only search for the keyword used, but also the most relevant related terms. For example, if the user searches for "loans," the search engine will return all domains containing loan, lend, debt, credit, borrow, or mortgage. The smart search also works for common industry specific words or acronyms like "seo," which will also return results containing searchengine, optimize, or pagerank. "I have to say that I find DropListPro.com, as it is currently, the best I have seen overall," says current customer Kelly Pitts.

The staff at DropListPro.com understands that everyone may not be as computer savvy as industry professionals. Taking that into consideration, a search wizard has been developed. The wizard is a step-by-step guide through the process of using DropListPro’s search engine. As the user progresses through the wizard, the search filter is dynamically filled-out after each simple question.

“For average users, DropListPro.com simplifies process of finding expired domains,” says sedo.com. Other features have been added as well, such as searching by exact drop date, excluding words from the results, and the ability to search by multiple keywords. This will facilitate the ability for average users and industry professionals to acquire a decent domain without the need of thousands of dollars.

A demo of an expired domain name search engine can be found at (http://www.droplistpro.com/demo.php). For additional information or to schedule an interview, contact Chris Richmond at (702) 281-1828 or via email at (http://www.droplistpro.com/contact.php).

Contact:
Chris Richmond
702-281-1828

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