Web Address Theft a Real Concern

A bit on the basic side, but this Wall Street Journal article documents and provides some tips for avoiding web address theft.

One that they didn't really cover, that's not really even in the scope of "stealing," is when domain squatters swoop in when companies accidentally let their domains expire. There are lots of bots out there crawling the internet and recording traffic patterns, so if the registration on a well-traveled site expires there will almost always be a squatter in line to pick it up for at least a short time.

These cases are especially tough, because the squatter technically did nothing wrong. They represent themselves accurately and all that, so it's not like they're impersonating someone to "steal" a domain. That said, they certainly are shady since their goal is either to sell the domain name back to the original company that let it expire, or to simply capitalize (using Adwords, etc.) on the traffic that the former owner had built up. Sometimes the registrars and hosts will work together to make it right; sometimes the ransom costs thousands of dollars, even for small, relatively-unknown domain names.

Godaddy.com is nice that they automatically extend domains registered through them for another full year. I suspect they badger you daily or weekly if they do this favor for you and extend your domain without making you pay.

Windows Server 2008 Preview

SearchSystemsChannel.com provides a nice little roundup of new features in Windows Server 2008.

The Terminal Services Gateway sounds very intriguing . . . Microsoft continues to deploy features that are eating Citrix's lunch. Maybe not, considering that Citrix does not seem to be putting much effort into its Terminal Services overal products like Presentation Server. We've had much more contact from Citrix regarding their push into optimization and performance enhancements found in NetScaler.

Another nice feature will be IIS 7.0, which is an enhancement to Microsoft's industry-leading Internet Information Services. Mostly pretty obvious enhancements in IIS - more modular, better .NET integration, better diagnostics.

Windows Server is absolutely vital to Microsoft (yes, understatement of the year -haha). It's the place where Apple and Linux still trail by a fairly wide margin (yes, I'm aware of Apache server and its popularity, but look at the numbers and you'll see IIS more than holding its own in that space). Largely driven by Microsoft themselves in their Small Business Server, business are more and more reliant on client-server-based computing. MS made a great play to release SBS and extend their Server product to small business, to ensure that their desktop OS, which is all but required if you're running a Windows Server, would remain popular and viable. No word on Small Business Server 2008 that I've seen yet, but I'm sure it won't trail Server 2008 by too much. Knowing Microsoft, they'll probably give it a totally different name anyway . . .

We're running 2008 Server on a test server and are just starting to play with it. Like Vista-versus-XP Pro, it's largely the same experience, but with a few nice little features and tweaks. Looking forward to the launch.