As part of a large-scale privacy investigation, I have bought more than 100 domain names previously belonging to social welfare and justice institutions in Belgium. What I observed was unsettling.
This needs a government / IEEE / domain registrar policy of some sort. Maybe it should simply be that all expired domains are put into stasis for 10 years.
If you want to buy it and have access to it sooner, then you need to run (and pay for) a program of works to catch and proactively kill all linked accounts, and build a register of embargoed existing email addresses that must be set to bounce.
I knew this was a problem, but wow, had no idea it was this bad…
Because I have a [email protected] type email, I get SOOO many people signing up for accounts with my email, forgetting that theirs had some number suffix. I get peoples phone bills, pizza receipts, Amazon orders, parking meter e-receipts, Xbox live accounts, Dropbox logins, you name it.
I NEVER thought of what that would look like at a domain level!
I read a great post where a guy bit-squatted (bought a domain that was 1 flipped bit away) Google and managed to replace the Google logo on google.com for millions of people. He did the same for facebook and ended up getting thousands of post requests with user data which normally would have failed to resolve or just timed out.
There is still plenty of unexpected fun to be had with domains.
This needs a government / IEEE / domain registrar policy of some sort. Maybe it should simply be that all expired domains are put into stasis for 10 years.
If you want to buy it and have access to it sooner, then you need to run (and pay for) a program of works to catch and proactively kill all linked accounts, and build a register of embargoed existing email addresses that must be set to bounce.
I knew this was a problem, but wow, had no idea it was this bad…
Because I have a [email protected] type email, I get SOOO many people signing up for accounts with my email, forgetting that theirs had some number suffix. I get peoples phone bills, pizza receipts, Amazon orders, parking meter e-receipts, Xbox live accounts, Dropbox logins, you name it.
I NEVER thought of what that would look like at a domain level!
I read a great post where a guy bit-squatted (bought a domain that was 1 flipped bit away) Google and managed to replace the Google logo on google.com for millions of people. He did the same for facebook and ended up getting thousands of post requests with user data which normally would have failed to resolve or just timed out.
There is still plenty of unexpected fun to be had with domains.