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Submission + - Network Solutions new sleazy tactic?

Submitted by TheFoxMeister on Thursday September 06, 2007 @12:44AM

TheFoxMeister writes: I've recently tried to help two people transfer a few domain names away from Network Solutions to eNom and discovered that Network Solutions has devised a new (I think sleazy) way of denying the transfer of domains away from their service.

The transfer process for most TLDs requires that you get an Unlock Code (aka EPP Transfer Key) from the current registrar, have the current registrar disable the Transfer Lock, and you must make sure your e-mail address is valid for the WHOIS Administrative Contact for the domain (so that the approval e-mails can be received and reacted upon).

Having done all that, including updating the e-mail address, I submitted the transfers. Imagine my surprise when Network Solutions sent the following e-mail to both of my friends:

—
Dear Network Solutions® Customer,

We were unable to process the request to transfer (domain name removed for privacy) to another domain name service provider.

Specifically, the domain name registration was not eligible for transfer because:
The domain cannot be transferred to another registrar for a period of 60 days following a change in Primary Contact or WHOIS Admin Contact.

If you have any questions, please contact Customer Service at registrar@networksolutions..com.

Network Solutions is committed to delivering high quality services to meet your online needs. We hope to continue to serve you in the future.

Sincerely,

Network Solutions® Customer Support
—

Yes, they denied the transfer, and will continue to deny the transfer for another 60 days, because the Administrative Contact e-mail address was changed. What, can they do this? I checked the ICANN site, and found the following:

++++

http://www.icann.org/transfers/dnholder-faq-03nov0 4.htm

A registrar may legitimately deny a transfer request in certain limited circumstances, as follows:

* Evidence of fraud
* Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) action
* Court order
* Reasonable dispute over the identity of the person authorizing the transfer
* Domain name is on hold due to payment owed for a previous registration period
* Express written objection from the domain name holder
* Domain name is in Lock status (Registrars must provide a readily accessible and reasonable means for name holders to remove the lock status. Contact your registrar for assistance.)
* Domain name is within 60 days of initial registration
* Domain name is within 60 days of a previous transfer

Registrars are required to specify a reason when denying a transfer request. Contact either the current registrar or the registrar you wish to transfer to for assistance.

++++

As you can see, there is nothing here that would allow Network Solutions to deny a transfer, based solely on the customer editing their WHOIS contact details.

I opened up a ticket with Network Solutions to ask about this new tactic. They responded with "Due to the nature of your inquiry, we have escalated the issue to the Executive Team for further review and immediate attention. For your reference, the Service Request number for this inquiry is (snip). An Executive Specialist will be contacting you in 1 business day to help address and resolve the issue."

After one business day, no response. I asked again for assistance. They responded with "Regarding your inquiry, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience. Please be advised that your issue is still being processed for resolution. It has been assigned the Service Request # (snip — same number as before). As soon as it is, you will be contacted at the soonest possible time to update you on any further developments. Your continued patience is highly appreciated. "

So, now they are not committing to any type of response. It's been 2.5 business days so far.

eNom has been no help either. They say they are investigating and will let me know if they find anything out.

I also contacted ICANN (via transfer-questions@icann.org), and after 2 business days I have not even received a courtesy reply.

I guess Network Solutions has succeeded in holding these domain names hostage for the next two months.

Submission + - Dinosaurs fate sealed by giant asteroid collision

Submitted by

jkcity

on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @09:35PM

jkcity writes: "The BBC is reporting that a giant space asteroid collision 160 mil years ago is what sealed the dinosaur's fate. Its research done by Southwest Research Institute by a US-Czech research team. It goes on to say that it caused a double of earths impact rate over the last 160mil years and fragments of the 3km a second collision would have struck Mars, Moon and Venus. 298 Baptistina is currently the largest surviving remnant of the Baptistina family of asteroids(game)"

Submission + - Visiting Britain? Judge wants your DNA sample

Submitted by dsinc on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @08:56PM

dsinc writes: According to Justice Stephen Sedley, a senior judge, the entire population of Britain — and all visitors — should be added to the national DNA database. Britain's DNA database — which is 12 years old and the largest in the world — grows by 30,000 samples a month, taken from suspects or recovered from crime scenes. Judge Sedley is not happy with the current incarnation of the database, because "ethnic minorities are disproportionately included." His solution — include everybody — seems very surprising, because he currently considers the database to be "indefensible". http://tinyurl.com/2jwaon

Submission + - Paul MacCready died last week. (www.aqk.ca)

Submitted by

aqk

on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @06:41PM

aqk writes: "Did any /.ers notice this ?
I admit I do not often read obits, but one thinks this guy might have gotten a slightly larger eulogy from the masses.
If I hadn't been a member of the Skeptics Society , I might not have found out at all!
More about MacCready at Wikipedia

Now: go fly a kite in his honour!"

Submission + - You can not reverse-engineer our GPL-violations... 6

Submitted by

phorm

on Wednesday September 05, 2007 @06:17PM

phorm writes: "If appears that Monsoon Technology, the makers of the Hava media-transmission systems, don't quite understand the GPL. As some users pointed out in their forums, their systems appear to be based on Linux and various GPL'ed software, with the output of "strings" and other tests showing signs of running busybox and others. A monsoon spokesperson on the forum has indicated that they are aware it uses GPL'ed software, and are "working" on making source available, but at the same time are dropping various threats against supposed reverse-engineering of the software by those that determined the GPL violations.

A few snippets from the Monsoon rep include: I have a little secret to let you in on — HAVA runs Linux! Yes, much of the source is GPL and we should publish those sections which we have modified per the terms of GPL. A project is underway to pull this together. A couple of observations — some of you appear to be violating the terms of the End User License Agreement
You recognize and agree that the HAVA Software including its structure, source code and the design and structure of modules or programs, constitute valuable trade secrets owned by Snappymultimedia or its licensors. You will not copy or use the HAVA Software except as expressly permitted by this EULA and, specifically, you will not ...

(b) yourself or through any third party modify, reverse engineer, disassemble or decompile the HAVA Software in whole or part, except to the extent expressly permitted by applicable law, and then only after you have notified Snappymultimedia in writing of your intended activities; Seems to me that some of you have just come out blatantly admitting you are reverse engineering the firmware — or trying to. How should we handle this? As responses have indicated, the methods used to determine the violation do not seem to constitute reverse-engineering. Moreover, the initial friendliness of the rep is severely marred by the apparent hostility of the later message, as forum members have indicated. The overall message seems to be "we have not lived up to our obligations under the license of the software which we are using, but we'll get to it... sometime. Meanwhile, do not attempt to poke around our code yourself or things will get ugly."

The owners of BusyBox have been notified of this violation, however the response is still troubling. Is this the response we should come to expect as more and more commercial software uses and misuses GPL'ed components?"

Submission + - ISO rejects OOXML (computerworld.com)

Submitted by jcatcw on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @10:31AM

jcatcw writes: Microsoft's Office Open XML was rejected by the International Standards Organization today. To be accepted as a standard, a proposal must pass two hurdles, and this one failed both of them. Now, Microsoft will have to respond to negative comments and hope it can get a positive vote in early 2008. In the meantime, MS may be losing revenue to open source competitors, according to Computerworld.

Submission + - Microsoft Fails to Gain Approval for OOXML (consortiuminfo.org)

Submitted by

Andy Updegrove

on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @08:44AM

Andy Updegrove writes: "Microsoft's bid to gain approval for its OOXML specification in the first round of global voting has failed. I now have official confirmation of that fact, and expect to have final numbers soon. In the meantime, Microsoft has just issued a press release, putting the best spin it can on the results. That release is titled "Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process."The release focuses on the degree of participation (51 National Bodies), and level of "support" (74% of all qualified votes, without differentiating between P and O countries).It also refers to this level of support at "this preliminary stage of the process," and compares it "favorably" to the number of countries participating in the votes to consider ODF and PDF, but without mentioning percentage levels of support, which would include Observer as well as Participating member votes.The drama will now switch to the long run up to the February 25 — 29 Ballot Resolution Meeting, and to how much Microsoft will be willing to change in OOXML in order to convert a sufficient number of no votes to yeses, in order to finally gain approval, if it can, for its beleaguered specification."

Submission + - Best Rootkit Eliminator?

Submitted by

BeanBagKing

on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @08:32AM

BeanBagKing writes: "I've never worried much about rootkits, but now I'm starting to see the light. The question is, whats the best? I've read several reviews, but all of them are months, if not years, old. Blacklight is no longer free, one called RAIDE has been released that's supposed to "revolutionize" rootkit detection. Several of these, such as Rootkit Unhooker, seem to crash Vista every time they're launched. Larger companies (Kaspersky, Symantec, McAfee, etc.) don't focus on this, but with Sony attaching rootkits to everything from games to music to fingerprint readers, this seems like something we should concern ourselves with. What can I put on my Vista machine to detect, eliminate, and optimally, prevent rootkits?"

Submission + - India planning a 7 satellite constellation

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @07:10AM

An anonymous reader writes: India is planning to build a constellation of seven geostationary satellites at a cost of $ 400 million to meet the navigational system requirements in cars, trains and aircraft. The first launch will be sometime in 2010 and the remaining satellite will be up in orbit by 2012. The seven geo-stationary satellites will cater to the navigational systems of vehicles, provide accurate timing signals and also find applications in surveying as well locating things in times of disaster.

Submission + - Government won't allow green car sales (msn.com)

Submitted by

Geoffrey.landis

on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @07:03AM

Geoffrey.landis writes: "Auto industry blogger Lawrence Ulrich notes that Honda is now making a "Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle" (or PZEV for short) version of the 2008 Accord, an all-new vehicle that is redesigned to meet California emission standards. He notes "So, just how green is a PZEV machine? Well, if you just cut your lawn with a gas mower, congratulations, you just put out more pollution in one hour than these cars do in 2,000 miles of driving." But the irony is that it's actually illegal for automakers to sell these green cars outside of the special states they were designed for! Apparently, anybody selling one of these ultra-green vehicles out of the correctly-designated venue — which means either California, or seven northeast-states with similar pollution laws — "could be subject to civil fines of up to $27,500. Volvo sent its dealers a memo alerting them to this fact, noting that its greenest S40 and V50 models were only for the special states.""

Submission + - Belgium prosecutes the church of Scientology

Submitted by

sheean.nl

on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @06:59AM

sheean.nl writes: "The Belgian Federal Judicial Authorities plans to prosecute the church of Scientology. The church is accused of being a criminal organisation which involves itself with extortion, fraud, unfair trading, violation of privacy laws and unlawfully practicing medicine. Both the Belgian and the European departement should be brought to court, according to the authorities. An investigation has been started in 1999 after former Scientologists complained about extortion by the church, this investigation has now been completed and the authorities want the case to be put through. The Belgians call this case a world's first. In some countries, including the US, the church of Scientology is officially recognised as a religion, with high-profile followers such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta."

Submission + - China hosts nearly half of malware sites

Submitted by Neil Mallos on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @06:29AM

Neil Mallos writes: China is host to almost half of the world's malware-infected Web sites. According to a report by antivirus company Sophos, China — including Hong Kong — hosted 44.8 percent of the world's infected sites in August 2007. The United States ranked a distant second, hosting 20.8 percent of Web sites that contain malicious code. June saw a spike in spam hosted on Chinese domains, where the figure rose from almost zero to 450 spam domains.

Submission + - NBCU wants the internet "filtered"

Submitted by yet another steve on Tuesday September 04, 2007 @04:39AM

yet another steve writes: NBC/Universal wants far more than filtering of material uploaded to YouTube. They want broadband providers (ISPs) themselves to be required to filter internet content. Putting aside the obvious technical reasons why it won't work, the idea of mandatory filtering by your provider of everything you send and receive on the internet sounds a lot like... China. Killing freedom on the net to protect the sitcom.

This seems dangerous, intrusive and unprecedented... and I'm a little surprised it hasn't received more attention.

Check out: http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1019
and http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9745325-7.html?ta g=blog.2

Honestly, I haven't found a single source that seems to understand the gravity of the precedent. People are outraged that a corporation in a broadcast it controlled censored some words (not defending that act, btw), but this is the idea that EVERY packet you send and receive will be required to be monitored and FILTERED. It seems an unbelieveable proposal no matter what the intent.

They do this in China, right?

Submission + - Nuclear Info Kept Secret From Public and Congress

Submitted by Thermite on Monday August 20, 2007 @10:56PM

Thermite writes: On March 6, 2006 an accident occured at Nuclear Fuel Services in Erwin, Tennessee. According to reports almost 9 gallons of highly enriched uranium in solution spilled and almost went into a chain reaction. Before the accident in 2004 the NRC and The Office of Naval Reactors had changed the terms of Nuclear Fuels license so that any correspondence with Nuclear Fuel Services would be marked "official use only". From the article: 'While reviewing the commission's public Web page in 2004, the Department of Energy's Office of Naval Reactors found what it considered protected information about Nuclear Fuel Service's work for the Navy.' The result was that the public and Congress were both left in the dark for 13 months regarding this and other issues at the facility.

Submission + - Air New Zealand caught in Wikipedia Whitewash

Submitted by heretic108 on Monday August 20, 2007 @08:38PM

heretic108 writes: Many will remember the tragic Air New Zealand plane crash into Mount Erebus during a scenic Atlantic flight. Investigations at the time eliminated pilot error, placing the blame on the Air New Zealand corporation. Now Air New Zealand has been caught trying to censor the wikipedia article on the incident, in an effort to introduce doubt and reduce its perceived role in the tragedy.

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