Random babble by Paulh

For the 3rd time in week i landed at Slightly Shady SEO and spent the last half hour reading a dozen posts; quality info, already given me some new ideas on what to add to my own toolbox. Now i know i have at least 2 readers here, so rather than msn’ing them a link i thought i would give Slightly(very) Shady seo a link too.

To be honest i was hoping my poor excuse of a blog would be more like http://www.slightlyshadyseo.com/ but i can barley write - think i just lost my only 2 readers by sending them somewhere else 

A few weeks after goolge announce their wikipedia killer Google knol Wikipedia  founder jimmy Wales announces the launch of a new search engine.

Be nice to see this project succeed but i think google will win the battle for both search and online encyclopedia 

Anyone, all you nasty spammers have a new site to influence from the 7th of jan- at least let it get off the ground before you kill it!

Few years ago it seemed everyone was slating Goddady and recommending Moniker. Thanks a lot!! Just glad i only used moniker for a handful of domains as a trial.

Apart from being ridiculously expensive, their admin interface sucks ass. I had a few domains up for renewal, but had to let them expire since it was impossible to pay for the damn things. Credit card after credit card failed to go through with dumb uninformative errors messages being the only sign anything actually happened.

Finally decide to transfer the few remaining domains to another registrar, what a friggin ball ache. Once you go through their shit interface and answer their question as to why you want to transfer, your domains are unlocked for 10 days. Great, so now start the transfer process with new registrar and await email asking for confirmation. And wait, and wait. Hmm this has always worked before, contact moniker for assistance, wait, 5 days for reply saying check your email host, not actually answering my question. So they can keep the fucking domains.

Has to hurt a hosting business when you make the front page of Google news for a security breach.

Whats gob smacking is not that Fasthost got hacked but the terrible way they handled it afterwards. If they had made a better job of keeping customers happy after the hack then they wouldnt be stil making front page Google news with headlines like this

Customers are protesting over the measures taken by web firm Fasthosts following a security breach.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7131431.stm

Several months ago when working on a tool I noticed an exploit for capturing live domains.

With only a small days worth of test data containing 100,000 whois records I noticed about 1% of the domains were registered to hotmail accounts. Being bored and curious if people were really this stupid I tried to register some of these hotmail accounts. I immediately found hotmail accounts that were no longer used and took ownership. Worked out about 1/30 hotmail accounts in my listed were dead.

So back to the whois data and to find out who the registrar is. Goddady was the first one I tried, instead of login, go to the forgot password option and give them your new shiny hotmail address. You now have full control of a Goddady account with at least one domain. This isnt unique to goddady or hotmail. Hotmail was just the easiest one to try on mass. Guessing I still have control of these few example domains, would like to give them back but I lost the list. Oops!

Moral of story, whether its hotmail or our own domain never let the email address you use for online accounts expire. Some devious arse stands a chance of capturing that email address. They can simply watch what email comes in to that address and retrieve the passwords for online accounts you have, not just for domain registrar accounts.