Yahoo Class Action Settlement Is Bad News For Domainers!

Yahoo Class Action Settlement Is Bad News For Domainers!

Author cobster | 13.10.2009 | Category Domains

DirectNavigation.com wrote today about a notice that went out to anyone who advertised with Yahoo or the its prior service GoTo.com, on its PPC program(s) anytime from May 1, 2000 until September 22, 2009.

That’s a lot of advertisers.

The class action arose out of a suit by advertisers against Yahoo, alleging that Yahoo:

“””breached its contract with its customers by allowing Yahoo! ads to be displayed in spyware, domain name parking sites (also known as bulk registration sites), pop-ups, pop-unders, and typosquatting sites. Plaintiffs brought claims for breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, civil conspiracy, and unfair business practices.””

According to the settlement each advertiser is entitled to receive the earth shattering sum of $20.

Right $20 USD.

The lawyers, well they are getting only $4,170,000.00, in fees, plus reimbursement of expenses of approximately $100,000.

But I digress.

Back to how this settlement is bad news for domainers.

In settling this case, Yahoo basically agrees to allow advertisers to basically opt out of the domain channel starting sometime next year:
“””Yahoo! has agreed to develop and offer a new ad placement option that will enable Yahoo! Ad customers to control where their Yahoo! Ads appear.””

“”The Ad Placement Option will allow Yahoo! Ad customers to specify that their Sponsored Search ads should be displayed only on websites and other Internet properties owned or operated by Yahoo!, and the websites of certain “Premium” distribution partners.””

“”Yahoo! has agreed to make best efforts to launch the Ad Placement Option as early as the first quarter of 2010, but in no event later than September 30, 2010.””

“”Yahoo! will maintain the Ad Placement Option for at least two years from the date of its launch.”””

Moreover Yahoo says this change will carry over to its deal with Microsoft.

“”Microsoft will agree to implement ad distribution controls on the Microsoft paid search platform””

The problem is that there is general perception that the domain channel is full of typo traffic and generally undesirable traffic, as alleged in the lawsuit.

Unless Yahoo ad executive are trained to understand and educate their advertisers as to the difference between opting out of the domain channel completely, rather than selectively, keeping ads up on generic domains geared toward their business, all domains will suffer.

By the way, if you were an advertiser and want to check in on that $20 windfall, you need to submit a claim online by March 22, 2010.

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Internet breaks in Sweden after DNS maintenance error

Author cobster | 13.10.2009 | Category Domains

A problem during routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain, .se, took down the Internet for the country for about an hour on Monday night.

Basically, the .se registry used an incorrectly configured script to update the .se zone, Sweden-based Pingdom, which monitors Web site performance, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. A period was dropped at the end of DNS domain name system records for the Swedish top-level domain, breaking the entire DNS lookup chain.

What this meant was that Web sites ending in .se could not be accessed and e-mail to Swedish domain names stopped working. For some sites the problems will take longer to resolve because of the fact that DNS lookups are cached externally and those servers had to be flushed, Pingdom said.

There are more than 900,000 .se domain names and every one of them was affected, the company said.

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Clickjacking Chrome and Firefox

Author JoeDigital | 30.01.2009 | Category Computers, Domains, World Wide Web

If you are a user of either the Chrome or Firefox browsers, or even SeaMonkey, another Mozilla browser, you have probably experienced clickjacking, and didn’t know what had happened. We didn’t know what it was called either, until we stumbled across an article a couple of days ago, and things began to (literally) click into place.

For our experience, the clickjack episode almost always begin with a Google search, and when a link on the results page is clicked on, something different happens. Instead of loading the domain name we click, a completely different web page pops up, usually a directory page using the same set of keywords as a search term.

What happens is relatively simple, and at the same time very difficult to prevent. A would-be hijacker monitors traffic to a partcular IP address (Google), and traces a connection back to the sending party (the user) by following the return packet (search results). Now, when that person clicks a link on the search results page, the malicious party kidnaps the request, and returns a completely different url/IP address to the browser, which was expecting a response, and thinks that everything is going as planned.

What is important to note is that our experience has been rather benign, but the possibility of clickjacking for mischief is very large. Your browser can be tricked into sending cookies, or making other responses to  website, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. You could unwittingly be giving up personal information by doing something as simple and trusted as performing  web-based search
 
The good news is that this flaw seems to be prevalent in the Open Source browsers, but does not seem to have much affect on proprietary browsers, such as IE7 or Safari. Google and Mozilla both have already announced that the problem is under consideration, and will be eliminated in future releases. Google 2 is expected to be released into public beta sometime in the next few months, and Firefox has a new version due in a similar timeframe.

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Data Domain

Author JoeDigital | 09.12.2007 | Category Domains, World Wide Web

Organization Data Domain has announced Deduplication Storage system for eDiscovery products.

eDiscovery products will be the first ever indexing and data Deduplication solutions which works in sync towards streamlining this process. Organizations have faced in the past with information retrieval for compliance or litigation purposes, the process was tape based largely. Tools of Indexing largely help this process in getting streamlined, but still there is speed limitation towards searching tapes. Also there is limitation experienced towards tape identification and tape retrieval from storage locations remotely. Users can search archives that are disk based reliable and faster by the help of archiving or indexing data on data domain’s Deduplication storage systems. This also reduces the storage costs in disks as data domain storage model is very cost effective. Data domain now is expanding the opportunities of application for the storage capabilities. This has allowed merger of data Deduplication technology with eDiscovery engines enabling the users to have control over electronically stored information.

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want to be your own domain registrar?

Author JoeDigital | 01.12.2007 | Category Domains, Hosting, World Wide Web

Finally I can be my own registrar without dishing out 70,000$ to ICANN. New Canadian startup company myrebel.com gives you the option of becoming your own registrar without paying the huge fees (yet to hear back from myrebel.com about the actual cost). How do you ask is this done? Their solution is a leasing program that allows you to control a registrar dedicated entirely to you at a flat monthly rate with no other upfront costs. The new service features a user-friendly interface with a log file that details all domain operations. Users have the power to execute on any command – from registration to deletion to transfer – and My Rebel said this provides the highest level of security as no names can be adjusted without the user’s approval. Godaddy watch out! I might just take over as top registrar soon ;-)
Full article can be seen here http://www.dnjournal.com/articles/companies/myrebel.htm

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