A Cincinnati company called metaphor, and their affiliate editspot, did some research on a domain name. The name they wanted was available, but they didn’t purchase it right away. A few days later they did try to purchase it, but it was gone. A company in the Bahamas had purchased the name and offered to sell it to metaphor for $30,000 instead of the $30 they would have paid to their registrar.
Personally, I spend a lot of time frustrated because most of the domain names I’d like to have – more common iterations of write technology or wine girl – have been parked somewhere and aren’t used. But I could buy them for a large amount …
According to today’s Cincinnati Enquirer:
More than 162 million new “domains” – the name under which a Web site and e-mail server operate – were created in the first quarter of this year alone, up 26 percent from the same period last year, according to a report by Verisign, a major player in the domain industry. And growing by 40 percent were instances of “cybersquatting” - the practice of buying a domain name that is a registered trademark for someone else – according to a MarkMonitor survey.
metaphor is suspicious of how the Bahamas-based company learned of their chosen domain name. metaphor had originally searched through Network Solutions. I know I usually search through PairNic. Whether or not those searches “leak,” metaphor wanted to make sure that it didn’t happen again. They created a desktop tool that directly searches the domain name database without having to go through a provider. You still have to purchase the domain through a provider, but you can research your chosen name without leaving the comfort of your desktop.
You can download their free desktop tool for Mac, Mac Dashboard, and PC at LiberateDomains.com.
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Events, news, apps, and more – let me know at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, via Twitter, or via Pownce.
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Any of these tools are only as trustable as the person running them and the source it queries.
Users on a unix/mac platform already have a tool built into their command line called “whois”, which does what this tool does, but without the fancy interface (and without the ads).
Another trick that is about 80% reliable is to do a DNS lookup on the name. If your DNS lookup finds nameservers, it’s taken. If not, it might be available.
My brother Michael is suspicious and I agree with him.
The company that claims to have been held-up is the same one that’s promoting this software.
They have an interest in exaggerating the problem. How did you substantiate the $30k claim?
Did you read the $30k request? Did anyone else get held up for nearly that much money?
What you all suspect is been proven here:
Try read these blogs about the issue, its not a rumor, its proven:
http://kevinboss.net/website-design/be-careful-when-checking-if-a-domain-is-available
http://blog.domaintools.com/2008/01/network-solutions-steals-domain-ideas-confirmed/
Because of that, I have now stopped using Network Solutions and GoDaddy as the sites where I search for avaliable domains, but also as the companies where I buy my domains. I dont want to support companies that does such amoral things.
Those two companies is on my blacklist now.
I have been recommended by a friend, that these following sites are reliable and secure:
1. http://www.77gb.net (.com is for those who wish to become a free reseller)
2. http://www.monikers.com
This is just for your information. Just spreading my experience with others so they dont experience what I have. Spread the word.
Good luck and best regards,
Hello,
I’m one of the developers of LiberateDomains (Mac and Windows desktop versions). I just wanted to chime in, some of the comments seem a bit misinformed.
Dan is correct in that you can just use a terminal to perform whois lookups, that’s what I usually do. But most people aren’t comfortable with using a terminal. My boss certainly isn’t, and he was the original reason I created the app. We had just lost a domain name to a squatter because he had looked the domain up on NetworkSolutions, but didn’t register it immediately.
Looking up the ns records via nslookup is also a reasonable technique if you suspect the registries themselves are assisting the squatters, but it’s probably more like a 99% chance that the domain will have ns records if it’s already registered. Squatters don’t let domains just sit around, they put spam pages and fake search engines on them so they can make money from them.
And to Andrew: Please check back on our site tomorrow, all source code will be posted under an open source license. The lawyers are debating which license we should use right now, I had hoped to release the source at launch, but the lawyers need to be happy if I want to keep my job.
This is also the reason for the ads. We want to make this freely available, but it costs money to publish and support software, we hope the advertising revenue will help cover those costs, but we’re not sure it will yet.
Once you have the source code, I invite you to take a look, you’ll find that we are not doing anything suspicious with queries you enter. You can even compile the code and compare the binary to our downloadable binary, the checksums should match unless you change something before compiling.
And yes, Wan-Fu China really wants a ton of money for the domain name idea they stole from us, but the exact amount is $27,000. That is not an exaggeration. The squatters often demand even larger sums from large corporations and celebrities.
And of course the company being held up is the same one that made the software (that’s us). Why do you think I wanted to write this program?
So please check our site tomorrow and download our source code. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Thank You,
Troy
The source code was released yesterday as promised. If anyone has recommendations to improve the program, especially when it comes to the privacy of the whois query, I’d love to hear about it.
Cheers,
Troy
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