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Maryland License Plates Now Inadvertently Advertising Filipino Online Casino
- daveaiello 3y agoI guess you need to do a 'whois' on whatever domain is printed on the license plates you are about to receive, before you accept them?
- activiation 3y agoThey should send replacement plates to affected people.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agonah just seize the domain
- sclarisse 3y agoWhile Maryland has been happy to use eminent domain to seize things for far more dubious reasons, like during the Baltimore Colts saga, those things typically have at least been in Maryland
- thereddaikon 3y agoWhere exactly "is" a domain name?
- throw0101c 3y ago> Where exactly "is" a domain name? In a database, which, for dot-org, would be owned by Public Interest Registry, which is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, US: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Registry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Interest_Registry * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.org Though the technical side of things is run by Afilias / Identity Digital, located in Bellevue, WA: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afilias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afilias
- mkj 3y agoThe D root server seems to be in Maryland, perhaps they could sort that one out. https://www.iana.org/domains/root/servers https://www.iana.org/domains/root/servers University of Maryland Maybe the H server too.
- last_responder 3y agoNo. Absolutely not.
- ygmelnikova 3y ago[dead]
- currentyear2023 3y ago[flagged]
- jrochkind1 3y agoAs a Maryland resident who happens to have this special "commemorative" license plate, I do find this newsworthy and of interest. I got my car in 2012 -- this was the "standard" plate for 2012-2016, that you got whether you wanted it or not (unless you paid for a "specialty plate", an existing program. https://mva.maryland.gov/about-mva/Pages/info/27300/27300-29T.aspx https://mva.maryland.gov/about-mva/Pages/info/27300/27300-29...) State MVA puts a URL it does not own or control in any way on a license plate that will last for decades, never even considers that the URL could change hands, is pretty hilarious. I've hated this license plate for 11 years now -- I don't want to advertise flags and wars on my license plate. I wonder if via this snafu I can get them to replace it with a regular one; there seemed to be no normal way to ask for a standard one to replace this 2012 commemorative one up to now. > “The MVA does not endorse the views or content on the current website using that URL, and is working with the agency’s IT department to identify options to resolve the current issue.” The "option," we all know, would be paying now-hostage-level price for buying the domain. I don't know whether I'd rather my tax dollars went to that or replacing the plate of any 2012 plate holder who asks. What I'd really rather is they stop spending any resources on annoying mandated special commemorative license plates. Bring back two-color solid license plates.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agocan't you just get a different license plate if you want to though
- csbingel 3y agoIf you give more money to the incompetent agency, yes.
- FridayoLeary 3y agoIn the uk its trivial to replace a plate. What would you do if it falls off? Over here i've seen number plates written by hand on a white card.
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- culopatin 3y agoI wonder if they would be more active in trying to fix it if it was some weird fetish porn site
- interestica 3y agoFor people into girls named Mary?
- helsinkiandrew 3y agoIs it legal for US citizens to use that gambling site in the US? I thought the US courts believe .com and .org to be 'in' the US and have seized gambling .com domains that are targeting US citizens in the past.
- jazzyjackson 3y agoWelcome to America's Hottest Talkline.
- mauvehaus 3y agoPeople wondering what the heck this is about should go listen to episode 167 of Reply All[0]. It's been a couple of years since I heard it, but IIRC, the talk line in question squats on disused phone numbers that were similarly published on long-lasting media. Or that the publishers forgot to get allocated, or similar. That's the very TL;DR version made hazy by the passage of time. Apologies for no doubt missing any number of salient points. [0] https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/awh2a4 https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/awh2a4
- bdw5204 3y agoIf the government is going to put a domain name on license plates, you'd think it would make sure the domain name stays registered as long as the license plates remain in use. They're lucky it was snatched up by a casino and not something worse like hardcore pornography or a hate group. To fix this, the state of Maryland should identify everybody who still has this license plate and send them a replacement plate in the current style. They have that information in a database somewhere, associated with names and addresses, so they should be able to run a simple query. If not, that means they probably need to fund a project to upgrade their databases to a modern implementation of SQL.
- bombcar 3y agoGovernment plates should use .gov or some similar tightly controlled domain (.edu might be acceptable). Florida has "myflorida.com" which is an official government website, but .com is not a limited and controlled TLD; so in theory registration could fail and someone scoop it up. If it were "myflorida.gov" that would be much less likely. ahahahah http://myflorida.gov http://myflorida.gov redirects to dot com (it's dot muffin)!
- vxNsr 3y agoThey probably registered the .com before .gov was easy to get. FWIW when I click your .gov link I get an SSL warning in safari on iOS.
- bombcar 3y agoHa! I'll update it to http which works, but that's hilarious. I know whitehouse.gov uses lets encrypt; I wonder how many TLDs have domains using them, and which the rarest is.
- LeifCarrotson 3y agoThey should have done that, but it probably took a contractor minutes to create a TEMPORARY, EXAMPLE domain like "starspangled200.org." The plan would have been to change this later to read md.gov/starspangled200, which will 301 redirect to maryland.gov/starspangled200, which needs to be made to point to a new starspangled200.maryland.gov subdomain because the Windows server running www.maryland.gov requires everything to be under the www.maryland.gov/Pages/<page name>.aspx URL scheme... But project management ran over budget, and the people who needed to be contacted about those changes couldn't be reached, and when the subcontractor's project manager talked to the vendor's project manager who emailed the wrong government IT department, some information was lost. The necessary forms needed to be filed, but to do so the contractor needed a particular vendor ID number and approval for that takes months, how many more projects do you plan to do for the state? And anyways starspangled200.com looks pretty clean, do we really want to do this optional redirect? So they spent some pocket change and registered it for 10 years, and handed off the task of renewing it to some administrator who could spell DNS but knew nothing else about it with a stern warning that things would break if it was not renewed. Disclaimer: I have no specific knowledge of this project.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jmclnx 3y ago>The website printed on the plates is not owned by the Motor Vehicle Administration. Where there is the problem. Maryland sub-contracted out the site, probably stopped paying for it or the "contractor" closed done. Someone grabbed it. Well I hope Maryland is enjoying what may be mo more than 10 cents per year per plate they are saved in taxing people. And as a bonus, they also are now giving out free advertising. Next step, force people to replace the plates and maybe charge them a fee for doing that.
- dylan604 3y agoYou left out the last half of the quote which is just as telling to me, "and is working with the agency’s IT department to identify options to resolve the current issue.” Their options are Jack & Shit, and Jack already left town. You think this gambling site is going to voluntarily give back the domain for pittance that this state agency could afford to offer it? You think a DMV of a state is going to come up with the funds for a highly publicized domain squabble? The public blowback from that should be intense. The agency's IT department has already shown their incompetence and lack of funding by not being able to pay the registration fees for a domain long enough for something they used on an official state "document".
- sp332 3y agoEven though the original company went out of business, maybe the trademark is still owned by someone. They could use ICANN's dispute channels to challenge ownership of the name.
- dylan604 3y agoThis is a website used on official government issued "documents" (I don't know what the proper word for a non-paper item like this would be). The fact that it was a 3rd party entity that registered the domain is also farcical. That would be like the federal government letting some 3rd party register whitehouse.gov or healthcare.gov and then that 3rd party allowing the domains to lapse. Let's just pretend for the sake of the argument the .gov and .com TLDs being equivalent. If that's too far of a stretch, why in the world was a .com TLD allowed on a gov't document? Why not a conical to the already existing maryland.gov domain? The whole thing reeks of incompetence or even some sort of corruption
- nemo44x 3y agoNothing from a government entity should ever have anything other than a .gov or similar TLD associated with it.
- efields 3y agoLesson learned. I don't think this is worth more thought other than reflection, hopefully by someone close to this decision, hopefully by someone who can put in some recourse to minimize the chance of this happening again. This is hilarious and inevitable.
- ryandrake 3y agoI always wonder if anyone really even learns anything from these kinds of episodes. They probably didn't even know the URL was gone until the media reported it. I'd be willing to bet nobody responsible is going to even give it thought or reflection, let alone produce a post-mortem and change any of their internal processes. > This is hilarious and inevitable. Hilarious, yes, but only inevitable because of widespread incompetence. Whenever I get a little Impostor Syndrome and question my own competence at my own job, it feels good to read these kinds of articles to reassure myself that there are people out there orders of magnitude less competent.
- nova22033 3y agoIt would be funnier if the domain was bought by a drivers ed school..
- jollyllama 3y agoI understand why people are upset about this but this is probably among the least intrusive gambling ads that we have to deal with. What if the only legal form of gambling advertising was urls on the back of license plates that states auctioned off? In principle, it would be terrible, but in practice, it'd be a great improvement.
- aimor 3y agoI just registered a domain for 10 years (the maximum allowed) and was wondering how likely I was to remember to renew. Auto-pay probably wouldn't work with credit card numbers changing. I might still be using the same email or at least have it forwarded. A phone calendar reminder? I did that once long ago and when changing phones the reminders didn't sync correctly. Maybe buy a physical 10 year calendar. Anyway, I figure that's what happened here from 2012 to 2022.
- consp 3y agoDo credit card numbers change? I thought only the expiration date changed and maybe the cvc code or equivalent security check.
- onychomys 3y agoIf somebody steals your number, your bank (or credit card company) will send you a new physical card with a new number. Or at least mine did, ymmv.
- RandallBrown 3y agoAuto payments usually fail when the card is expired.
- aimor 3y agoThat's true, it's the expiration and code that change.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Gordonjcp 3y agoWhy can't you just go and get a new number plate, without an advert on it? In the UK you just take your vehicle registration document to any motor accessories shop and have them make up a plate, for not much money.
- jcrawfordor 3y agoOnly the state (and a few odd cases like the federal government) manufacture plates in the US, and they usually don't have a published process exactly for obtaining a new plate when you already have one. That said, my experience in a couple of states is that DMV clerks have no problem putting in a plate as lost/damaged/stolen if you just ask for a new one. The fee where I live today is only $15, but I live in a poor state, Maryland might be steeper.
- bsagdiyev 3y agoYeah it isn't that hard. File it as lost/stolen and get a replacement. When I sold my last car I forgot to turn in my NC amateur radio plate with my callsign. I guess they recycle them. When I went to finally do it the lady at the license plate office just marked it lost/stolen and let me keep it.
- ygmelnikova 3y ago[dead]
- cpeterso 3y agoThe email addresses for Lafayette, California’s police ”tip line” are random Gmail addresses: 94549Tip@gmail.com and 94549Traffic@gmail.com. How is that not a problem for government record keeping? At least the Gmail addresses won’t expire like Maryland’s domain name registration. https://www.lovelafayette.org/city-hall/city-departments/police https://www.lovelafayette.org/city-hall/city-departments/pol...
- somat 3y agoHad to look it up but that is the zip code for Lafayette. it was probably the best out of several bad choices. A direct gmail domain is understandable for a small city government but it does look unprofessional. I liked how governments were one of the few organizations that took advantage of the hierarchical nature of dns, you would get things like dmv.ca.gov and courts.sf.ca.gov Unfortunately that is going away as well. everybody has to have a second level domain and now you have stupid things like lovelafayette.org instead of lafayette.ca.gov
- dghughes 3y agoThe War of 1812? What a bizarre thing to commemorate. If anything it was a draw and I say that as a Canadian. The USA were the aggressors and never got anything so really it was a loss for the US.
- rocket_surgeron 3y agoMaryland put "War of 1812" on the plates because of the Battle of Baltimore, specifically the siege of Fort McHenry, which inspired Marylander Francis Scott Key to write the poem that would later become the national anthem. Fort McHenry is in the lower left of the license plate. The star spangled banner flies above it. The "bombs bursting in air" are the fireworks. It doesn't commemorate the war, it commemorates the anthem, it just says "War of 1812" because that's when the event occurred. It was a terrible design but I've got amateur radio plates so I avoided it.
- MR4D 3y ago> “The MVA does not endorse the views or content on the current website using that URL…” Maybe they should learn that they did actually endorse it, and they should be liable for it. Imagine if the NBA put that same link on their jerseys, and then a white supremacist organization bought out the URL. Would they be liable for “endorsing” it? Of course they would! Same for Maryland. Morons.
- bastard_op 3y agoHaving worked for a lot of my local state agencies including DOT, they're always run by goobers and not at all surprised something like this happened. Someone was too lazy to renew the domain, and chaos ensues once a domain scalper gets a hold of it. Someone probably bought it because they didn't know why, but it got a lot of random traffic from the eastern US. It's registered at godaddy currently, if they were smart they'd transfer the domain to an unfriendly and very non-nato country quickly if this bubbles over somewhere officially. I'd probably have opted to just redirect to a random fetish porn site for grins, but if you have a gambling empire and stand to profit why not, you already have free marketing for life courtesy of the Maryland government.