June/July 2002 President's Report: Internet 101 By now, many of you are aware that our website, ASCAZ.org, is “down”. Unlike the typical server-woes that most peoples’ website experience from time to time (particularly those limited-traffic Geocities websites!), the scope of our club’s problem goes far beyond what even I thought possible—until this week. Here’s a brief synopsis of the problem: There are two parties involved in the delivery of a website. First, the hosting company who typically owns the web server all web page files live on. Every month, we pay a fee to rent space on the server, and they in turn, keep that server available to the public to download the pages from. The second party is what is called a Domain Name Registrar. A domain name is the address people type to get to a particular site—i.e. www.ascaz.org gets people to our club’s site. A registrar keeps track of all the different domain names out there on the world wide web, and makes sure no two people have the same name, so that you always get the right site when you type in the right address. In addition to the monthly fee paid to the host company, you also pay a fee to the registrar to “register” your domain for a period of time, normally two years. We did that. Everything was working fine. Life was good. Until... Our registrar was bought out. And the new company, Verisign, began consolidating and administering the domain names that were previously registered by the company they acquired. Some of you who are e-commerce savvy will recognize the name Verisign as the the company who makes sure cyber-thieves don’t steal your credit card number when you order things from on-line stores. You’d think a company whose main business involves such sensitive data would be able to handle a simple domain name, wouldn’t you? Verisign deleted our registration while they were doing whatever they were doing. Verisign ALSO deleted the invoice from their system that shows our hosting company PAID for the domain. So despite the fact that Verisign can see we’ve had the use of our domain name for the past 16 months, they don’t recognize that we’ve ever owned it. So they de-activate our domain and make it available for registration. Without contacting the club, OR contacting our host company, who is by this time aware that sixty-some-odd customers are experiencing this same problem. Enter the cyber-squatter. The grubby little parasites of the internet. There are people, or groups of people, who earn money by registering domain names they think people will want, and then sitting on them until an interested party pays a hefty premium to buy them from the squatter. Often, they will register a celebrity’s name, like “cindycraford.com” or a company’s trade name or slogan( “meltsinyourmouthnotinyourhand.com” ) in hopes that that person or company will decide they want that domain and elect to deal with the squatter. Sometimes it backfires and they get sued for copyright infringement. When Verisign made our domain name available (and complicated things by not telling anyone), a cyber-squatter swooped in and registered ASCAZ.org. So, not only do they not have any record of our ownership, someone else now owns our domain, and has it for sale to the highest bidder! (this is the “under construction” sign you now get when you go to our site—I am firmly against construction signs, and prefer to roll out a new site all at once than to frustrate users who try to access data that isn’t yet available.) I am working with our hosting company, and the owner’s contacts at Verisign to get this issue resolved. With luck, our hosting company and Verisign will be able to amicably settle this problem and get ASCAZ.org back on line. If they don’t, with the hosting company’s cooperation, I think we have legal grounds to get the issue resolved, in any of several ways, should we choose to pursue it. Or we can forget about having the address ASCAZ.org, and spend the next year having to remind people to go to a new address. The moral of the story is: If you register a domain, do so yourself. Don’t be wooed by the ease of having your hosting company do it for you. Be sure you have a direct relationship with the registrar company. Insist on getting an invoice from the registrar. Keep this invoice, and your cancelled check or check number in your records FOREVER. Insist on getting your account number and password to do your own maintenance on your domain account. This will help you should you ever change host companies, and need to point your domain to a different server (the domain account with the registrar is where this association is made). Keep your domain account information absolutely current, and set your e-mail address to whichever one you check most frequently. Don’t deal with Verisign or its subsidiaries under any circumstances. Our host company recommends using Tucows.com instead right now, but there are any number of ICANN-accredited domain name registrars out there to choose from. I hope to have this resolved one way or another in the next week or two. If we do end up having to move to a new domain name, be sure to watch the Tales and your e-mail for an announcement of the new address! Until next time, Claire (whose hair is going gray much faster than normal these days arguing with all these people!) P.S. – I want to extend a HUGE thank you to Jean Burton, Bev Stephens, Becky Ruppel and Becky Uhl for all their hard work in putting on the CA Sharp seminar. You are the best OJ and bagel-toting, presenter shuttling team a club could ever want!