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But it's very valuable and he wants (needs?) the money for his retirement. Microsoft may not be willing to pay up.
by CydeWeys 7y ago
But it's very valuable and he wants (needs?) the money for his retirement. Microsoft may not be willing to pay up.
- gpm 7y agoWhat right does he have to 1.7 million dollars? The fact that he was the first person to register a domain? That's ridiculous. He did no work for it. He did not do anything to benefit society. His is just trying to extort society for that money by threatening to help criminals if we don't give it to him.
- huffmsa 7y agoHe has an asset that he values at $1.7 million. His right is that he owns it and can sell it as he see fit. He has no obligation to M$FT or any of their customers.
- gpm 7y agoWhat asset? He has an informal agreement with a informal group of organizations to respect his decision of what records to return in response to DNS requests. No one is obligated to follow that agreement. This form of abuse of that informal agreement should result in the group of organizations unilaterally terminating that agreement.
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> He has an informal agreement It’s a legally binding agreement. I guess we should start yanking peoples’ homes because all they have is an “informal agreement” with the seller?
- gpm 7y agoNo it's not. He has no legal agreement with my DNS provider for them to do jack shit. He has some legal agreement with his registrar, and maybe indirectly with ICAAN, but that legal agreement means jack shit to DNS providers, who are the ones that ultimately matter. For an example of DNS providers already using this fact for the public good, see AdGuard DNS
- crooked-v 7y agoHow is it abuse? Giant companies auction off lots of domains every day.
- gpm 7y agoHe is literally advertising to criminals... how is it not abuse.
- manigandham 7y agoHe is not. He's saying it can be valuable to criminals, just like many other products sold everyday. The fact that a criminal may acquire them and/or use them for nefarious purposes does not mean selling them is a problem.
- hobs 7y agoKnowingly aiding and abetting criminals puts you right in jail.
- crooked-v 7y agoHe's selling the domain through an auction/resale service [1], so any question of "aiding and abetting" goes to them, not him. At the high end, these services have extensive anti-fraud and anti-money-laundering checks (speaking from personal experience working for a small registrar), so the question of direct liability is pretty well covered. [1]: https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?domain=corp.com https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?... Otherwise, you end up with a world where anyone who comes into possession of a dangerous item is obligated to potentially keep it forever and force all of their descendants to keep it forever.
- manigandham 7y agoThe keyword is "knowingly". He's clearly well aware of the security risks and is doing his best to keep it safe (including asking Microsoft to acquire it for 10% of the revenue they make in an hour).
- krebsonsecurity 7y agoThis kind of reply reminds me of the vitriolic replies that companies leveled back in the day against the guys who registered donotreply.com. They would try to alert companies using a domain they didn't own for communications to their customers that this was a bad idea, and soon after got nastygrams from the company's lawyers saying they'd stolen their intellectual property and wiretapped their communications. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_told_you_not_to_reply.html http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/03/they_to...
- huffmsa 7y agoIf this were a meat space address, this wouldn't even be an issue. Then or now
- crooked-v 7y agoConsider this hypothetical: You buy a house, and its address somehow gets listed as an internal corporate postal address at BigCorp. You regularly get bag-fulls of corporate mail containing personal information. BigCorp refuses to changes their internal directories, and refuses to buy your home at a reasonable value. The only real difference in the corp.com case is that instead of just one BigCorp, it's one BigCorp that's gotten a bunch of other SmallCorps and BigCorps to all incorrectly list the same address too. On the same general note, "a business listed my phone number as theirs and refuses to change it" stories are pretty common, and often have the same "the business refuses to change it" quality.
- huffmsa 7y agoAnd you're perfectly within your right to sell that address to anyone you so please. For whatever price.
- QuinnyPig 7y agoYou’d think so, right? https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple-sues-ip-mapping-firm-for-turning-their-life-into-a-digital-hell/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/kansas-couple-su...
- buu700 7y agoAgreed. As much as I would appreciate Mike acting for the public's benefit here, society isn't entitled to him giving away his property. In his position, I would absolutely capitalize on the domain; consider that selling is one of the more harmless ways that value could easily be extracted from it. Maybe if I were a billionaire I would consider giving it away, but even then I would rather take the money and donate it than leave it in Microsoft's pocket, considering this is 100% their screwup.
- UncleMeat 7y agoHe has no legal obligation. But we can also call him an asshole. Plenty of assholes never break the law.
- huffmsa 7y agoMicrosoft has had 25+ years to fix this. They could have offered to buy the domain at any time. Instead they leaned on free benevolence from this guy.
- 14 7y agoI would argue yes just buying it first is all he needed to do to deserve to be able to set his own price. People buy and sell domain names all the time and the ones who scooped up Nike.com or NBA.com likely sold it for a pretty penny. They didn’t benefit society. I would argue there are lots of profitable ventures that don’t benefit society but we allow them I think smoking right away as one example. He is trying to take advantage of Microsoft mistake from what I understand. In the giant corporate world a mistake only costing 1.7mil seems like pennies and they should just grab it and put it behind them. On a side note what do you think of Bitcoin? I wanted to buy it back when it was less then 100 a coin but was broke. It would have shot up in price me doing absolutely nothing to benefit society and actually maybe one could argue hurting the environment as bitcoin mining is very energy intensive and also some may argue bitcoins facilitate criminal activities. But I would bet most here on HN would be okay with bitcoin as an investment. I see his domain no differently.
- crooked-v 7y ago> take advantage An asking price of $1.7 million is hardly "taking advantage" of a $286 billion company. Microsoft hoist themselves by their own petard here by letting this problem sit for 26 years: that's only about $65,000 per year, which is more than reasonable pay for somebody who's been effectively giving them free IT services that entire time.
- 14 7y agoI completely agree. It is pennies to this company this is no hardship for them. My personal name as a domain is being squatted on the .com domain for several thousand dollars. It is worthless and I can not imaging a time it will be worth something. But I don't complain and think I should get it for free. If I want my name domain I have to pay several thousand dollars. Had I bought it 20 years back it would have been pennies also. Such is life.
- CydeWeys 7y agoI agree that it's not taking advantage of Microsoft, but it's not because of the dollar amounts involved. If I do a fake refund scam to the tune of $20 on Amazon (which is a ~$1T company), that's still "taking advantage" of them. It doesn't matter that it's peanuts compared to their market cap, I'm still doing something wrong. And as an aside, your stated market cap for Microsoft is off by more than a trillion dollars.
- manigandham 7y agoHe owns it and can offer to sell it at any price. And it sounds like he's certainly helped to keep the security issues contained all this time. Your statement is completely ridiculous. There's no requirement to "work" or provide benefit to society before you can sell something you rightfully and legally purchased. Everyone investing in the stock market is the first to buy something at a lower price. Do they not own the stock? What work did they do when it increases in price? Do they have to prove to society that they're a good person when they offer to sell the stock?
- toomuchtodo 7y agoA domain is a registry entry in a database, a contractual right, not property. Sure, some people have treated it as property with IP mechanizations, but it is not an asset in the sense of a house or other tangible. If a decision is made you can't trade in them, or makes it difficult (ARIN with IP block space comes to mind), you're outta luck.
- manigandham 7y agoIntangible virtual items can be legal assets with ownership. This is not a new concept. > "If a decision is made you can't trade in them" Ok, but it hasn't been made. Ownership can be sold and transferred so that's what's happening.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoRegistration information does not equal ownership. My phone number is assigned to my mobile provider account. I do not own my phone number, as it is not tangible property.
- manigandham 7y agoThis is a pedantic argument that I suspect you know is completely irrelevant. The ownership is of the registration itself. When you buy a share of a company, it's also just assigned to you. But you still own it.
- Zenbit_UX 7y agoThere's little difference between this situation an one in which someone buys a property that then becomes famous in a movie or show. Except in my hypothetical example your response makes you sound like some sort of communist outraged by the profit your neighbor made off their house, when you bought the decidedly unfamous one next to it. > His is just trying to extort society for that money by threatening to help criminals if we don't give it to him. Is he? Where's your proof? Perhaps he's just sharing his very novel experience of a property he owns that the world honestly should know about for security reasons. What if this man dies in a few months and we didn't know about this, then his kids sell it to the NSA or Russia, would you rather that?
- bwilliams18 7y agoFrom the article:“It seems to me that Microsoft should stand up and shoulder the burden of the mistake they made,” he said. “But they’ve shown no real interest in doing that, and so I’ve shown no interest in giving it to them. I don’t really need the money. I’m basically auctioning off a chemical waste dump because I don’t want to pass it on to my kids and burden them with it."