6 ms·
The Passport Payment (2000)
- ncmncm 6y agoBiggest anachronism is his mailing (maybe home) address and phone number at the bottom.
- kijin 6y agoAccording to the story, it took somewhere between 13 and 19 hours for passport.com to resolve properly after he renewed it for Microsoft. Is that normally how long it takes to reactivate a domain name that has gone into a renewal grace period, or was something different back then? Perhaps the NXDOMAIN response was cached by ISPs for an especially long time because it was such a frequently visited hostname?
- orisho 6y agoNXDOMAIN is often cached for much longer because it's assumed not to change soon. Sometimes, as in this case, that's a wrong assumption.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoI thought NXDOMAIN results were cached for as long as the TTL in the parent SOA record?
- yrro 6y agoFor com. that's currently 24 hours!
- DanielDent 6y agoIt used to be that nameserver changes with TLDs were measured in days, not minutes. Even today some TLDs continue to operate this way.
- evolve2k 6y agoWhat are reasonable timeframe expectations for nameserver changes now?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- DaiPlusPlus 6y agoThat depends on the TTL of your DNS records. But if it’s a brand-new registration for a dot-com then I’ve found DNS queries work within 3 minutes of me completing GoDaddy’s regustration (and using GoDaddy’s DNS zone hosting) even through my ISP’s DNS servers (provided there’s no cached NXDOMAIN results).
- DanielDent 6y agoThe .com zone file is updated every few minutes. Caching behaviours will vary significantly. Frequently a significant fraction of traffic can be using new nameservers within minutes, with a long tail of traffic with older information. Each TLD does their own thing. For example, last time I checked, .ca only seemed to be serving a new zone file every few hours. How long new nameservers take will depend on your luck in terms of where you are in their refresh cycle.
- raverbashing 6y ago> in addition to a new copy of Visual Studio 6.0 (which I need to compile and run the decss program to decode my DVD's so that I can play them under Linux) Why would you need VS6 to compile a program for Linux?
- 0x0 6y agoDeCSS was a windows-only program back in those days.
- Lammy 6y agoAlso, because it's a joke and is funny :p
- ArgyleSound 6y agoHe was compiling a Windows program to decode his DVDs so that he could play them on Linux
- A_No_Name_Mouse 6y agoThis happened in 1999/2000, maybe someone could add (2000) to the title?
- dannyw 6y agoCould you imagine doing this today? You'd probably get lawyers making you sign agreements saying your payment of the domain renewal is not a ownership interest in the domain and threatening to take you to court for renewing their domain.
- dewey 6y agoI actually think it would be the opposite now. Things like bug bounties or a huge PR problem by the affected problem posting it on Twitter are new things. It was more prevalent to send lawyers for accessing public but not meant to be public URLs back in the days than it's now.
- SMAAART 6y agoAnd - of course - the same lawyers would bill MSFT $5,000
- StavrosK 6y agoI'm confused, how did he pay for someone else's domain? Was there no authentication?
- hadrien01 6y agoYou can renew a domain without being authenticated, but you won't be able to take ownership of it. It's useful if you can't find your login details and are in a hurry.
- StavrosK 6y agoOh huh, I didn't know that, thanks.
- namibj 6y agoBack then, control was authenticated as necessary for the proper functioning, but even today I see no reason why renewal should have to be gated behind login walls. Actually, I'd even prefer it not to be, because you might, in a pinch, be prevented from paying for them yourself electronically, having to call in a favor and promise to pay back as soon as you see that friend. Or you just prefer to pay someone cash for them to top up your domain, because you don't like mixing money and the internet, but have e.g. a personal domain for email.
- em-bee 6y agoyup, i use gandi for that reason. they support payment from anyone. it's especially convenient for volunteer community sites. we don't depend on the person who registered the domain and forgot to give access to others.
- nathancahill 6y agoVery good to know. I use Gandi too, didn't realize I could do that.
- jedimastert 6y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoIt’s always nice to hear about people doing the right thing. Thanks for sharing the story.
- swyx 6y agoperhaps the most surprising to me is the apparent willingness to enter credit card info online in 1999. I wasn't around for this period but wasn't the conventional wisdom back then that this was insecure? hence PayPal?
- paulie_a 6y agoI regularly made normal payments for normal products such as movies and nothing. It generally was considered safe.
- Symbiote 6y agoAverage non-technical people used well-known companies, but that included eBay and Amazon. Presumably Network Solutions was trusted by this customer of theirs.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoI could be wrong, but I think in 1999 Amazon was still only selling books. Certainly they did not sell the variety of goods they have now. There were thousands of online shops at the time, selling everything that Amazon sells today, and it was common to purchase from them using CC or PayPal.
- gruturo 6y agoNo, not at all? SSL had been around for 6 years already, credit card transactions were quite common, especially with known, reputable hosts (Network Solutions can be safely be assumed to have qualified at the time)
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoUnfortunately, not all websites used https or enforced it on pages that should have had it. It was very common to see payment forms submitted over http. That is why browsers evolved to the point where Chrome now won’t submit certain types of html form fields over non-https.
- terenceng2010 6y agoTry to go passport.com nowadays. It redirects you to Bing and search "passport" as result. Handy.
- calvinmorrison 6y agoI had an issue with my router which now uses myfiosgateway.com as the router config though it is hosted on the router (presumably so it can serve https?) And mark monitor showed up with a big "this is the actual internet so you don't wanna visit it" page when I was routed to the actual .com, kinda similar
- spyc 6y agoGreat move, kudos to Micheal!