Having written a bit about .uk domains over the last few days (or posted ill-informed rants, depending on your perspective), I was reminded of something I wrote in June about the .eu domain and its continuing lack of appeal within these islands.

Back in April, IT Week reader John McCormac argued that the Euro top-level domain would probably peak in popularity on the anniversary of its founding, on 7 April 2007, and thereafter find its real level of little interest. 

A graph of UK-based registrations since 1 January this year lends weight to McCormac’s view, although the slow recovery after April suggests that the .eu domain may regain it’s former popularity - albeit in about two years’ time.

Edwin Hayward of MemorableDomains.co.uk really doesn’t like me comparing domainers with ticket touts. “Until you can take a step back and acknowledge the total legitimacy of the domain resale business on a par with any other line of business, the rest of the discussion is fruitless,” he says. “If you're willing to recast the debate as being purely about the current domain deletion/drop/re-registration system, then that's another matter.”

I’ll happily do exactly as Hayward asks. Let me state very clearly that domaining is totally above board. Nominet thinks so. And I happen to have a few domains for sale myself. So yes, it’s the current cancellation and re-registration process that I believe needs attention, not the business of trading domains in general.

However, I’m not going to step back from the comparison with ticket touts.

“All you had to do to have a reasonable chance - as much as most other people - at a given [suspended] domain was to book it with a drop catcher,” Hayward explains “There are anywhere between half a dozen and a dozen public-facing drop catchers.”

Or in other words, if I’d paid a tout I might have got a ticket.

“What you have to realise,” Hayward adds, “is that beyond the folks who may be exploiting a loophole in the Nominet system (a very selective bit of quoting, in your follow-up post) there are many who play for high stakes totally legitimately, and have invested five figures or more to develop and constantly refine their own drop-catching software, host at the fastest possible servers with the least number of network hops to Nominet, etc. Of course they're going to do better than the average person, just like in any other undertaking where someone is approaching it from scratch and trying to compete against others who do it full-time for a living (competitive sports are a great example).”

Ticket touts, who profit from the arbitrage on a scarce resource just like domainers, also often apply a dedicated, hard-work ethic to their endeavour. As a result they often secure tickets ahead of ordinary punters and proceed to sell them on at whatever the market will bear. So I can't really see where the analogy breaks down. Other than the fact that Nominet’s rules don’t forbid it, whereas most ticket-issuing venues insist that their tickets aren’t transferable. And while ticket touting is widely hated (much like domaining), it’s not illegal.

“Getting back to the thrust of the issue,” Hayward says, thankfully, “what Nominet really needs to do is to devote a few more resources into ironing out any loopholes in the current system. If there were no back doors, no ways to ‘cheat’ the system ... then it's one possible fair system - amateurs (non-domain specialists such as small business owners and individuals) get some names at little cost or effort (through the drop catchers) and those willing to invest massive resources and funds (the pros - the near-fulltime drop catchers and domain investors) get more, because they put in more... and that's how it should be. It's called capitalism!”

This is quite a persuasive argument, putting the ball firmly in Nominet’s court. In the document I quoted yesterday, Nominet’s Emily Taylor said: “Nominet is expending significant resources in dealing with dropcatching, which is disproportionate to the percentage of our registrars who are engaged in this activity. We would prefer to focus resources on programmes which will benefit the majority of registrars.”

But given that Nominet is asking what it should do with its cash reserves, I don’t see why anyone should feel that funds allocated to enforcing the rules on dropcatching would not be money well spent. If Nominet can afford to close the loopholes, and it can, it has a duty to do so.

Finally, Hayward argues against a sealed bid system for suspended domains: “It means that the amateurs will get nothing since all the good names will be scooped up by those with the deepest pockets. This may be ‘fairer’ - and that is arguable - but I am positive it will be perceived externally as being even less fair than the current situation.”

I’m not as positive about this as Hayward. As he observes, the most successful dropcatchers are currently those who spend the most on their software and hardware and then sell caught domains on at market rates to those that can afford them. That's two sets of deep pockets standing between punters and lapsed domains.

It may be that there is no fair system, but I’m pleased that Nominet is at least looking for one.

Yesterday I began looking at the registration of recently expired .uk domains, prompted by this month’s Nominet report on the state of the domain name system. The report shows that a significant minority of expired domains (about one in 14) is registered within 10 seconds of becoming available for new ownership.

Dropcatching - grabbing expiring domains - is perfectly legal under Nominet’s rules. After all, the old owners only have themselves to blame if they lose ownership inadvertently. However, as I wrote yesterday, it’s unclear why Nominet has not made the resale process fairer - particularly given that some domains are worth very large sums of money.

It turns out that Nominet addressed this topic at the 7 November meeting of its Policy Advisory Body (PAB). Emily Taylor, director of legal and policy at Nominet, wrote a paper on domain re-registration specifically for that meeting.

Taylor told me this afternoon that there is often “a gap between what people expect, and what is actually happening”, but that Nominet is wary of introducing changes that might make matters worse. As she puts it, “Is there a problem, and if so what is a proportionate and effective response?”

Yesterday I suggested a sealed bid system might be appropriate, and indeed Taylor says Nominet has discussed “a wide spectrum” of responses: “If people think there should be a more even playing field, there’s a lot that can be done,” she said. Indeed, the agenda for the 7 November meeting lists the re-registration topic under “Wait list, auctions and lotteries”.

It seems clear to me that change is needed. As Taylor explained, some naive domain owners have even assumed that the easiest way to switch registrar is to let the domain lapse and re-register with a different firm. As Taylor’s paper explains, this tends not to work: “We are routinely asked how best to acquire a domain name if it is not renewed. The honest answer is ‘you won’t’... The technical resources and ability of dropcatchers make it highly unlikely that ‘ordinary registrants’ will be able to register a domain name on cancellation.”

As the report explains, even legitimate registrars would be lucky to successfully dropcatch a valuable domain:

“• Significant advantage is gained by a minority of registrars who circumvent our current systems (e.g. through creating fictitious memberships, and thus doubling access limits). We actively look for these and have implemented additional checks, but the practice continues.
• We are concerned that our current systems and processes may favour a very small subset of our stakeholders, to the detriment of the majority. Whilst fair competition between registrars is beneficial to the wider community, we are becoming increasingly concerned that advantage for a few is being gained through unfair means.”

Despite these findings, Taylor says change is not imminent. “It’s really early days and it’s hard to tell you the timescales - it could be months - it takes time to consult and to get [our response] right,” she said. “The PAB gives advice, but we also do wider consultations very regularly. It may well be appropriate to go wider in this case.”

Nominet is clearly interested in feedback on this issue, so if you have a view - either in favour of the status quo or urging for change, you should not hesitate to let Nominet know.

To check the other side of the coin, I contacted some of the people who took issue with my post yesterday, who I assumed to be domain traders set up as registrars.

Tony, who said he is not a registrar affiliated with Nominet, said, “I do not have any objections to a sealed bid system in principle ... [but it] would not work, however, because although you highlight that it would ‘make more money for Nominet’ (a mere profit shifting exercise at best), Nominet cannot be seen to make a profit - and I believe its articles of association would prevent it from doing this.”

Tony is right - any sealed bid system or other mechanism would have to be done at arm’s length, through third-party registrars, because Nominet is a not-for-profit organisation. And as Tony pointed out, Nominet already brings in more revenue than it knows what to do with. “I would much rather the company revised the charges it makes, but it is clear that Nominet UK would rather continue to amass this level of reserves, and frankly distribute them in a way which was not really intended when the company was established,” Tony said. “I rather think that Nominet UK is an iceberg, in that there is significantly more to it than most people can see.”

Tony added: “It may surprise you to know that in a fair number of cases, [domain traders] are just as critical of Nominet UK as you appear to be. Maybe for different reasons, I acknowledge, but it stems from the underlying problem of [Nominet’s] monopoly position ... and the fact that it is a private company.”

There are clearly two sides to this debate, but ordinary businesses and end users are unarguably caught in the middle.

I’ll keep you posted.

According to Nominet, the registry for .uk domain names, one in 14 lapsed domain names is registered within 10 seconds of becoming available to a new registrant.

The data, contained in a Nominet report on the domain name system, serves as a warning to firms that fail to keep their contact details up to date, or fail to monitor messages sent to the registered email address, or fail to scribble renewable reminders on their kitchen calendar. You can renew up to six months before the expiry date.

The ten-second figure is significant, because it highlights that a lot of re-registration activity is automated, with software hooked up to Nominet’s Domain Availability Checker (DAC) tool. Available only to registrars affiliated with Nominet, DAC is kept busy: “The DAC averages 25 million queries per day [and] the top 20% of DAC users account for over 80% of DAC activity,” Nominet reports. This is a lot, given that there are only six million .uk registered domains.

Part of the reason for this volume of requests is, no doubt, that Nominet is a little loose with the cancellation processes. For reasons that may be obvious, I was recently interested in snapping up the golem.co.uk domain, which was not renewed by its prior owner and was suspended early in September this year

You can’t reserve a domain in this limbo situation - Nominet operates a first come, first served system. But you can work out what day the domain will be made available.

The cancellation process works like this:

• On the domain’s expiry date, if the domain has not already been renewed, Nominet sends an email reminder to the registrant advising them to renew via their normal registrar.
• Seven days later, if the domain has still not been renewed, an invoice is sent to the registrant by post and email.
• After 30 days from the date of the invoice, in the absence of payment, Nominet suspends the domain name, removing records from its DNS servers but not from its Whois database.
• In the absence of a renewal, Nominet cancels the domain name 60 days later.

In other words, the domain becomes available for new registrants 97 days after the expiry date.

The cancellation process is automated, and I had assumed that this meant the golem.co.uk domain would become available to buy just after midnight on 6 November [Update: I've since learned that the expiry occurs at a random time on the appropriate day]. Maybe my maths was poor, because it actually became available on 8 November, and not at midnight but at some point between 8am and 9.30am - I’m not sure exactly. When I checked at 8am it was still suspended, but by 9.30 it had a new owner.
 

It was snapped up while I was on my way to work by a registrant called TagNames, through a registrar called TagNames. My assumption is that TagNames has a DAC account, although it is not actually listed as a Nominet member. Currently no nameservers are listed for the golem.co.uk domain, suggesting that its current owner is not urgently about to do anything at all with it. I assume TagNames is actually a domain speculator. 

This sort of renewal speculation is potentially a very lucrative business, and the profit is being actively pursued. Nominet’s report reveals that “around 50 registrants hold more than 3,000 domain names”. Maintaining 3,000 .uk domains requires an annual outlay of about £9,000 in Nominet fees alone.

One snapper-up of expired domains is Denys Ostashko, who is personally registered with Nominet as a registrar. Among others he now owns the lem.co.uk domain, which used to belong to a forgetful firm called LEM. Ostashko expects a “five figure sum” before he’d consider selling this three-letter domain. I doubt he’ll get a buyer at that level, but at an asking profit margin of a million percent he clearly doesn’t need to sell many to make the effort worthwhile.

While Ostashko and TagNames are doing nothing that is against the rules, I wonder why Nominet leaves space for what are effectively the equivalent of ticket touts.

Why doesn’t Nominet operate a sealed-bid system for auctioning off suspended domains? It would certainly be fairer than today’s automated first-past-the-post system, it would discourage speculation - and would make more money for Nominet to boot.

Update: I've come back to this topic in a follow-up post.

A while ago I decided I ought to become more like the queen. I haven’t yet got a corgi, or a headscarf, but I have given myself two birthdays: an official and an unofficial one.

My official birthday is the day I was born, as recorded on my birth certificate, passport and driving licence. My unofficial birthday is April Fools’ day in the same year. It’s recorded, by contrast, on a host of web sites, marketing lists and dodgy databases.

The reason is simple enough: I’m trying to insulate myself from identity thieves.

As we all know, lots of organisations will ask for personal details when they really don’t need the actual data. They may put date of birth as a required field when you register for a service, say, but they may simply plan to use this to send you birthday discount vouchers designed to make you spend more, or to categorise you by age group. There’s no harm, in these cases, to give data that’s economical with the truth. If the data is then stolen and used for fraudulent purposes, it won’t actually match any official records or existing bank account details, so will hopefully prove worthless. 

Of course your date of birth may be used to check that you are still who you said you were at some later date. That’s why it’s vital to pick a memorable but not personal date - hence April Fools’ day. It’s easy enough, then, to know what to say at any point in the future. You just ask yourself, again, is this the kind of organisation that needs the real data?

If I’m being asked by the police, say, I know that they will need the real deal. But if I’m asked for my personal details by an internet retailer, by contrast, I’d know that I would have originally given them April 1st, so that’s what I tell them every time they ask subsequently. 

If you’re not sure which date you gave, say to an organisation like BT (which you might not be able to consistently classify in your mind as official or unofficial) then I’ve found you can usually get away with giving the wrong answer if it’s followed by the right one and an excuse. And everyone is happy, and I’m a little bit safer from ID theft than I otherwise would be.

You can use the same sort of substitutions with other personal details. I won’t give my mother’s real maiden name to just anybody, for example - if I don’t trust you you’ll consistently find me providing what is actually my dad’s middle name. Again, it’s easy to remember both and to give the right answer only to organisations that really need it, and the wrong answer consistently to everyone else.

Of course none of these little tricks make a blind bit of difference when thieves get their info from a government department running loose with all the real data, which is why the HMRC breach is such a serious and unforgivable error. When data is leaked from an official source, there’s nothing any self-protection measure can ever do to reduce the risk.

Over a few beers last night I was chatting to colleagues Bryan Glick and Mark Samuels and the three of us - all of a roughly similar vintage - wound up reminiscing about the days when you might compile a tape to catch the ear of some fancied other. We ended up wondering if today’s youth, more familiar with crashed iPods and corrupted files than chewed tape and scratched vinyl, would even comprehend what a C90 was. So, being journalists, we investigated...

We seized on a passing example of the modern breed - one of the company's graduate trainees. As feared, talk of blank tapes produced thoroughly blank looks. So I attempted to explain the concept of the compact cassette, and C90’s dominance due to being the right length for holding the contents of a home-taped LP.

Sadly this simply deepened our victim's frown of incomprehension. “What’s an LP?” she asked. Further explanation triggered recognition of "those square things" her dad owns.

It’ll come to her too, of course. As Bryan pointed out, some day in the future she will find that the younger recruits will puzzle over the term Facebook. Give it 20 years and young people will probably think Facebook means those folders of 2D photos that grandma still looks at on her ancient laptop. 

Many of my friends labour under the mistaken belief that I fully understand how the internet works. Sadly, I don’t. I understand how emails and web pages get from A to B in broad terms, but at a detailed level I know there are big gaps where knowledge ought to be but isn’t. I assume most people who work in IT feel the same way, given how immensely complicated and layered the whole thing is.

This state of affairs means that occasionally friends ask for help and I confidently state, “That will be the work of mere moments!” And then spend a week figuring out how to accomplish whatever it is.

The latest request seemed simple enough: move an existing blog from its generic blogspot.com address to a “custom domain”.

This is a neat service whereby users of Google’s Blogger service can use a subdomain that they own, such as www.lembingley.co.uk, to point to a blog that might otherwise have a less personalised address, like lembingley.blogspot.com.

It’s handy because users don’t have to pay for hosting or muck about with FTP - the content still lives at Blogger and the domain switch is done with smoke, mirrors, and redirects. Once you’ve chosen the custom domain option at the Blogger dashboard, Google fixes it so that all internal links use the new domain, while incoming requests to the old blogspot address are redirected. When it works, it’s seamless.

Getting it to work requires setting up a canonical name (or CNAME) record on your nameserver. This was hiccup number one. My pal’s domain was registered through UKReg.com, which uses Fasthosts as a registrar, which doesn’t support CNAME records on its namesevers. A little to and fro resulted with Fasthosts’ tech support, who really weren’t interested in the problem but seemed happy with my suggestion that I’d find another registrar. I can only assume that CNAME redirects threaten to undermine hosting revenue, or something. Other registrars, such as Pipex’s 123-reg.co.uk, seem to manage this feat.

Anyway, this left two options: move to a different registrar, or simply switch nameserver supplier. The latter seemed to offer less hassle. After a bit of research, prodding and poking I settled on EveryDNS.net as a suitable free nameserver host. I went back to Fasthosts and switched nameservers, after setting up the CNAME record at EveryDNS. Pingability's Quick DNS Check service proved handy at this point. I waited a day for the world’s DNS servers to synchronise, then went to Blogger and selected the custom domain option.

A while later I tried typing in the new domain name and, amazingly, it worked. Kind of.

Previously, my pal had used Fasthosts to do simple web and email address forwarding. Requests for any of his subdomains had gone straight to his blogspot.com home page; emails to any address on his domain had gone to a GoogleMail account. Having switched nameservers, none of this worked any more. Now, only requests for the www subdomain were routed to his blog - any other subdomain request, including the root domain, returned a 404-page-not-found error. Worse, emails to any address at the domain had literally nowhere to go.

I haven’t worked out if you can set up DNS records to forward emails to a personal GMail account, but it is possible using Google Apps, so I created a new Apps account, set up appropriate email forwarding and catch-all options, and followed Google’s instructions to add its mail servers to the EveryDNS records. And after the DNS changes had filtered through to the world at large, email began trickling in again.

So I’ve kind of finished the job, and kind of haven’t. Email is working perfectly, but the site isn’t. Requests to any subdomain other than www still return a 404, including http requests to the root domain name. I’d be grateful if anyone using Blogger custom domains to better effect could drop me a line with suggestions.

At the end of the process, what struck me was how much you can currently get for nothing - if you’re prepared to weather a few ads next to your emails. Anyone running a small business can create a quite convincing web presence using nothing but a £2.95pa domain name, Blogger and Google Apps. Your end-user site won’t be troubled by other people's ads, and you won’t pay a penny in hosting fees.

No wonder Fasthosts didn’t want to play ball.

My walk from the Tube to my desk every morning takes me through Trafalgar Square, past the infamous “fourth plinth”. This morning the covers had been removed from the latest piece of art to grace the empty space (after a brief visit from a waxwork of Jonny Wilkinson). I stopped to have a good look but I can’t say I’m a fan of Thomas Schütte’s Model for a Hotel 2007.

I’m all for art - I was once in the unusual position of trying to decide between starting a degree in engineering and going to art college. Early 20th Century paintings, influenced by Japanese woodcuts and the then-new art of photography, are my kind of thing. I’m interested in architecture too - everything from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water to the ecological benefits of middle-eastern courtyard townhouses. But I’m left completely unmoved by the new occupant of the plinth. Maybe if the assemblage of coloured glass planes had been unveiled in the spring I’d have felt differently, but on a grey November day, in the grey surroundings of the square, its boiled-sweet colours looked garish, childish and out of place.

I know it’s not fashionable these days to think it, but Trafalgar Square was built to commemorate military matters - which is why the three other plinths are occupied by bronzes of top brass, and the big column in the middle is topped off with a sailor. Even the lions are made of melted-down captured cannons. Sculptures that celebrate London’s diversity or play with colour and light are fine, but surely this is the wrong pedestal to put them on.

My vote would be for sculptures that encourage the viewer to think differently about war - to underscore the modern sensibility that there is no glory in combat, but that it’s still important to remember why our local government is free to erect an ugly pile of junk, rather than a figure of a dictator.

So I’d suggest a statue of Alan Turing. Not only was he instrumental in winning World War II, he was also gay. His image would be in keeping with the place but would also remind us that it takes a lot more than stiff-upper-lipped generals to safeguard the peace.