July 17 Open Registration For Dot Me
Because .ME is about YOU!
ME domains, with their universal appeal, are expected to be in high demand. So some “premium” names – including verb-oriented domains, such as “Contact.ME,” “Drive.ME” or “Fly.ME,” – will be held back for auction after Open Registration.
So if the price of gas has prevented you from parading your vanity plates all over the city....strut your stuff on the web
July 17 15:00 UTC: Open Registration
World's Oldest Blogger Has Died
Olive Riley had posted more than 70 entries about her life since she began her blog in February 2007.
She shared her thoughts on modern life and experiences of living through the entire 20th Century, including two world wars and the Great Depression.
Her final entry was on 26 June. Olive Riley died in the nursing home in New South Wales on Saturday. She was 108
http://worldsoldestblogger.blogspot.c om
Breaking the Internet's glass ceiling
It has taken four years to develop but now, due to a small scratch on a piece of glass, University of Sydney scientists say our Internet is set to become 60 times faster than current Telstra networks.
The scratch will mean almost instantaneous, error free and unlimited access to the Internet anywhere in the world,CUDOS (Centre for Ultra-high bandwith Devices for Optical Systems) announced today at the Opto-Electronics and Communications Conference (OECC).
"This is a critical building block and a fundamental advance on what is already out there. We are talking about networks that are potentially up to 100 times faster without costing the consumer any more," says Federation Fellow Professor Ben Eggleton, Director of CUDOS, based within the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.
Eggleton, whose team beat their deadline by a year, says that up until now information has been moving at a slow rate but optical fibres have a huge capacity to deliver more. "The scratched glass we've developed is actually a Photonic Integrated Circuit," he says.
"This circuit uses the 'scratch' as a guide or a switching path for information - kind of like when trains are switched from one track to another - except this switch takes only one picosecond to change tracks. This means that in one second the switch is turning on and off about one million million times. We are talking about photonic technology that has terabit per second capacity."
This initial demonstration proves it is possible to achieve speeds 60 times faster than current Australian Networks. With further development, the process is likely to produce even faster results.
"Currently we use electronics for our switching and that has been OK but as we move toward a more tech-savvy future there is a demand for instant web gratification. Photonic technology delivers what's needed and, more importantly, what's wanted."
Based on a highly fruitful scientific collaboration between CUDOS teams at the University of Sydney and the Australian National University, with the Technical University of Denmark and supported with Australian Research Council (ARC) funding, CUDOS' research was presented in a paper delivered at the OECC today.
http://www.usyd.edu.au/news/84.html?newscategoryid=2&newsstoryid=2411
GoDaddy Changes Policy on Employee Bidding.
Domain registrar GoDaddy has changed it's policy on employee bidding.
GoDaddy General Counsel Christine Jones released a statement announcing the company’s change in policy:
Go Daddy has reviewed the auction and found nothing improper.
Adam Dicker’s knowledge on the auction was no different from what any customer coming to our TDNAM site would have had.
To ensure customer confidence and to avoid any possible future questions of impropriety all GD employees are now and in the future prohibited from participating in TDNAM auctions, purchasing, sales & back orders.
Policies of Other Domain Service Providers
GoDaddy isn’t the only major expired domain service and auction house that lets its employees compete with customers. NameJet employees, and its partners Network Solutions, and eNom are allowed to bid on domain names through the service.
Enom has stated that their employees need managemSnapNamesent to sign off to purchase a domain from Namejet. However, they do have a strict policy against employees competing with customers in auction. Basically, the only way an employee can purchase a domain from Namejet is if no customer(s) have backorder the domain and management signs off.” This applies to Enom and NameJet, but not necessarily Network Solutions.
SnapNames, on the other hand, doesn’t let its employees bid against customers. The company stated policy is, “Oversee.net employees are strictly disallowed from bidding against customers.”
Sedo - Sedo places perhaps the most restrictions on its employees of any domain company. Kate Donahue, Director of Marketing for Sedo, explained:
Each employee (even our founders) are required to sign an agreement that they will not speculate in the domain market in any form during the term of their employment with Sedo. They must also disclose any domains which they had owned prior to their employment with Sedo. We do have one exception which allows them to purchase domains including their name, children’s or family names so that they can use them for personal sites, etc.
Pool - Pool allows employees to bid in auctions with restrictions, Employees can bid on an auction by either a) making a single, upfront proxy bid that can’t be changed or
b) “bidding to win”. In the latter scenario the employee can’t back out of the bidding at any point. He or she has to win the auction they enter. This prevents them from pumping up the price only to stick a customer with the bill.
GoDaddy allows executives to bid against own customers in auctions
We happened to catch this news show up on Slashdot -- obviously it was far too disgusting to skip out on mentioning here, from the original source, NoDaddy:
When a GoDaddy customer forgets or otherwise fails to renew a domain, GoDaddy sells it off to the highest bidder through their TDNAM subsidiary. Some registrars--even Network Solutions--give the domain owner a percentage of the proceeds of such auctions. But GoDaddy keeps all the spoils to themselves. Anyway, it was recently discovered that the Vice President of TDNAM has been bidding on (and sometimes winning) TDNAM's own auctions. This drives up the prices for normal customers and also leads to conflict of interest issues since normal bidders need to trust TDNAM to keep various information secret, such as their proxy bids, bidding history, the domains on their watch list. Also, GoDaddy doesn't tell you when your bid price was inflated due to TDNAM executives bidding against you. They are one of the few auction services which don't even give you the nicknames of competing bidders.
DomainNameWire contacted other domain auction services, and none allow unrestricted employee bidding on their own auctions like GoDaddy does. Enom (a patner in NameJet) notes that "We definitely do NOT let employees compete in auctions. Even if controlled, that practice has bad news written all over it." Yet GoDaddy seems to think it is fine for executives to inflate their auction prices by bidding against customers. They responded to DomainNameWire that they allow this. There is a big risk that these employees have access to private information of the normal bidders, that they get special discounts, or that they may sometimes shill bid to increase prices without trying to actually win.
NoDaddy is a site operated by Fyodor, a user mentioned here on Hostjury several times in the past when his own domain names were suspended by GoDaddy.