Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

How many times have you stayed up all night, doodling the outlines of that new project that somehow managed to crawl into your mind?

Ideas are concepts that are triggered by external stimuli. They are paths formulated along the neurons of your brains. You begin to materialize them once you describe them – once you get them out of your own head!

These plans often arrive in the form of a business plan or venture. Your brilliant concept expands itself on paper, assumes a life of its own, becomes an entity that lives and breathes your own dreams.

All of a sudden, you are on your way to creating *the* killer application or *the* ultimate web site for a product or service no-one thought before. Nobody is going to stand in your way!

But what is the most important part of your business plan?

As humans, we always look up, further. The Greek word, “anthropos” means exactly that – “he who gazes up“, towards the sky and the stars. As humans, we often get caught up into our own dreams and ideas.

Your business plan needs a safety switch, a security line. An exit plan.

By defining at the beginning what will happen when your own plan won’t succeed, you are defining the minimum percentage of your success. With an exit plan, you are not limiting yourself, you are simply ensuring that you won’t get burned if things go wrong.

Exit plans can be as simple as points along a timeline. They can be as complex as a set of processes that will engage once certain parameters fail to produce certain results. They are there to ensure that your vision is realistic and that should you fail you will be able to recover quickly and fully.

In the world of domaining, investments in one TLD or another, a specific market or a certain vertical need an exit plan. Times are fluid and focus becomes blurry, but with an exit plan you will be able to predict the signs of losing the game – thus winning it in the long run!

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The auction over at Sedo of the domain 24.org ended at $7,100. This is a rather disappointing result for a number that returns almost 5 billion results in Google.

The seller, however, took advantage of the traffic of his other domain, 24.net to increase the pageviews of the 24.org auction – the redirect was taken down once the auction ended. Where I come from, this is called ‘cooking the books’.

Regardless, the low selling price of 24.org is a direct result of Sedo’s decision to move the ‘ending soon’ auctions to a secondary page; a move that has hurt sales as many domain auctions used to receive bids the last minute, simply from the exposure they received on the Sedo.com homepage.

When I sold 360.org a little over a year ago for $25 grand, little did I know that it’d set a record as the biggest NNN.org sale to this day. It’s also a financial indication of our bad economy, since a NN.org like 24.org just sold for almost a quarter of that amount.

24.org is a great domain, a number indicative of man’s obsession with 24 hour cycles; our day begins and ends on a twenty four hour continuum. Anything that happens ‘around the clock’ can be displayed with the number ’24′ – much like the number 360 is a full circle.

Good luck with 24.net next time. At least, it really has the traffic it loaned to 24.org for the 7 days of the auction.

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Since January, a game of massive proportions has been launched against the euro and the European economy, by American banks – led by Goldman Sachs.

The very bank that is currently under scrutiny at the US Senate, has been known for years to play dirty games not just against institutions but also against entire countries. For an eye opener, I suggest visiting GoldmanSachs666.com

Late last year, Goldman Sachs offered a loan to Greece, then went around and bet against it. It’d be as if your bank that gives you a mortgage speculated that you won’t be able to pay your monthly dues and bought insurance against you.

This is what sports bookies do: they don’t care if they bid for or against a result.

This unethical practice is being currently uncovered by the US senate, at the same time as a war against the Greek economy has been launched. Those outside of the political arena are quick to speculate that an orgy of mismanagement is to blame.

The truth is very different.

Every country has a national debt, including major western powers such as Germany, France, the UK and Russia. Why did I leave out the US?

Because California alone has a debt matching that of Greece.

Imagine having a car loan and the bank increased the rates every month. Imagine that at the same time, they lowered your credit score, each month so that you could not refinance the loan.

That’s exactly what is happening right now with the Greek economy.

Now, all this definitely makes excellent cannon fodder for the news media. Instead of focusing on Wall Street, the mortgage crisis, the failing US economy and the 10% unemployment that President Obama has failed to manage – they are eager to bring the war overseas.

Some media have attempted to induce humor – albeit of the offensive kind – stating that in order to repay its debt, Greece must sell important national monuments or several of its islands in the Aegean.

Humor can go that much far though.

I’d love to see the faces of Americans, if they were asked to privatize the Capitol, or to give the Statue of Liberty back to France. Perhaps, if the Grand Canyon were about to be sold to Mexican investors to turn it into a mega mall, then it’d become apparent what Greece is being asked to do.

The Parthenon is not for sale, dear Westerners.

If anything else, the stolen marbles of its frieze, on display at the British Museum – after being ‘treated’ with storage, molding and vulgar scraping of their Pentelic marble – are being demanded back.

Visit BringThemBack.org to understand that there will be war long before Greece surrenders its heritage and national monuments to the predatory bankers of Wall Street.

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Today’s domain security status is marked by several issues that affirm the system’s weaknesses – along with the observation that the underlying managing forces do not wish any such change to occur.

Very simple methods of domain security are being neglected or even avoided. Registrars should lock domains by default and make it harder to remove the lock. An experimental layer of domain locking at Registry level should be provisioned with less bureaucratic delay and more regard to the dozens of domains that are being hijacked daily. Very few make it to the news.

There are plenty of reasons why domain names should be treated like real estate titles and their ownership recorded, tracked and secured. It might sound revolutionary and extreme, however I believe that a Registrar should offer the option of a physical, bank-like vault that would give ultimate access to its owner in the event of an account change of ownership.

I exchanged a few emails with domainer and investor George Kirikos who has some interesting suggestions to make, and I quote:

It should be like a land registry, and we should *own* the domain completely (with no expiry), with perhaps an annual fee for the domain resolution aspect (i.e. if the domain name has nameservers, you pay a little each year; but, if you fail to pay that annual fee, you still own the name, it never expires, but it just fails to resolve).

Who would have thought, back in the 80′s, that an online network of interconnected computers would be used one day to relay information, almost unrestricted around the globe?

Surely, the oldest domain registered, Symbolics.com, is a landmark in the history of “manual” domain registrations and that of the commercial Internet. Despite its 25 year old existence as a domain, Symbolics.com was not used as a web site until well after the introduction of the world wide web in the early 90′s.

Still, those that knew back in the day that they had the opportunity to register domains, went after some short ones. Without exception, all of these LL.com domains registered during the early ‘gold rush’ were for corporations: Hewlett Packard, Texas Instruments, General Electric etc.

Here’s a list of the LL.com domains registered in the 1980′s – the pioneers, if you must, of short domain registrations.

It’s interesting to note that the 3rd oldest LL.com, ub.com, was sold recently to Ultimate Bet and it’s being used as a shortcut forward to their primary web site.

Would you have thought LL.com’s were still available to register in the 2000′s? That can’t be possible!

Well, you’d be partially correct; they were not available to register but they became available after a handful of LL.com domains dropped, as late as in 2003!