Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Many discounted Sylvester Stallone when he produced ‘Rocky’ – the 3 Oscars it received in 1976 was perhaps a lucky strike, as the release of blockbuster ‘Star Wars’ had been delayed by 6 months. And yet, that was four years before the 70′s ended – which included the release of Rocky II.

In the 80′s, Stallone’s movies included Rocky III and IV – perhaps the most memorable one – and a set of action packed movies, including Rambo, Rambo II, Nighthawks, Cobra and Tango & Cash.

The 80′s was the time that teenagers of my era partied, listened to pop music and wore their hair in a series of crazy styles. We smoked cigarettes behind our parents’ backs and kissed inside movie theaters while eating popcorn.

We also played videogames – using our choice of 8-bit computers: the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64, the Amstrad and their 16-bit counterparts, the ATARI ST and Commodore Amiga. Videogames were for the most part horizontal scrolling platform games, with villains yielding knives and chains, or rocket launchers and AK47 assault rifles. The movies of that era came with a matching videogame, and every videogame felt as if it could become a movie.

The gummy-keyed Speccy fans fought the Commie “lamers” every weekend when we played videogames, but during the summer we hardly touched our computers and we’d go to the beach – friends again – to swim and flirt with foreign girls. Those were also the times that we lifted weights wanting to become like Stallone, and few of us liked Schwarzenegger – even fewer could write down his name correctly; to this day I use a spell-checker for that.

With The Expendables at the movie theaters, it’s like the 80′s are here all over again, in a strange time-warp of 30 years that has created a condensed display of the past. The music, the gunfire violence, the familiar faces of actor idols from the 80′s have become one huge Atlas all of a sudden; a giant that carries our teenage and childhood earth on his shoulders.

Living through the 80′s as a teenager is the best advantage one has when watching Stallone’s new movie; the action is mindless and the one-liners are longer than ever; in the past, Sly used to grunt a maximum of two words per scene.

And yet, it’s this exact mindless fun that reminds us that our teenage years was time well-spent, so that we can write about it now and pretend – once again – that life is one big action movie, or an 8-bit videogame.

After last week’s revelation about the stolen domain names, jis.com, leading.net, southeast.net and jaxnet.com, I had a phone conversation with domain investor and developer, Elliot Silver.

My call breakdown shows that our conversation lasted for one hour and forty minutes and it was the first time that Elliot and I talked, as our paths never crossed during TRAFFIC or any other conference.

I must say that I am impressed by Elliot’s to-the-point, well-meant and objective conversation skills. Despite having had some times of friction a couple of years back, it was all a byproduct of “keyboarditis” – the condition that many online conversations suffer from, when typing, blogging and emailing is involved.

During those 100 minutes, Elliot and I discussed the past, the present and the future of domaining; as seen both from our separate points of view and from our joint conclusions. It’s strange, being able to align with someone during your first conversation ever, and to share tips and stories from your personal experience.

And that’s what life is about: a keyboardless state that involves going back to using our verbal communication skills. When we bridge the gap of silent interaction, things tend to become positive and constructive.

In the past, I’ve talked with various other domainers on the phone, sharing important tips or simply ensuring that misunderstandings caused by excessive typing got ironed out. Not everyone can allocate 100 minutes to a first time conversation, of course – but Elliot and I did exactly that.

In the end, Elliot’s clothes probably got wrinkly in the dryer and my salad lost its crunchiness but in a little over an hour and a half we managed to establish the amount of communication often claimed by conference attendees – all through a single phonecall and with no typing whatsoever.

Living so close to the Space Coast has its benefits; every time there is a shuttle launch I can view it, whether it is day or night.

NASA is a space agency with its main facilities in Florida and California and in other locations such as Texas, but here at the Kennedy Space Center is where launches occur. Meanwhile, the West Coast is home to space research facilities, where astronomers and biologists come together to perform lengthy research.

If it matters, I was involved in the Kennedy Space Center web site design, back in 2004 – perhaps, the best design so far visually and functionally if I say so myself.

So yesterday, when I received an email from NASA asking for permission to use my picture, I was left wondering what exactly they had in mind.

My domain portfolio includes domain names that are parked with Parked.com – the variety of templates and visuals and customization at Parked ares some of the things I like about them.

The domains I keep at Parked include a link to my domain managing portfolio company; if visitors click on the link they are then able to communicate with me via an email form. I prefer to use this method versus the built-in Parked form as I can track certain elements of visitors and trends.

It turns out that a NASA astrobiology scientist with an impressive career that spans almost 50 years with the agency visited AstronomyOnline.com and happened to like one of the template pictures provided by Parked.com. His email was a request for permission to use that picture in a media event.

After realizing what had happened, I emailed back explaining that the image was not mine but rather, an “advertisement” using imagery for effect and seized the opportunity to thank him and NASA for all that they’ve done throughout the years in space exploration.

Definitely an odd situation that brought a smile to my face as I realized that the Parked.com templates aren’t so bad after all!

Data is far from insufficient, but still, the equation does not compute.

As I’ve written many times before, numbers cannot be disputed. And the numbers about .tel are saying that there is zero growth in that TLD.

While 200k .tel domains were registered between launch to mid-summer of last year, the remainder of the year and a half that dot tel has been around hasn’t been impressive at all.

In August 2009 TelNIC achieved 200k .tel registrations, and by December 30k more had been added. From then on, .tel reached its peak in March of this year – oddly, right before the one year registrations were about to be evaluated on the “drop or not” scale.

It’s been downhill since, with numbers remaining flat around the 240k .tel registrations, despite the introduction of IDN .tel domains.

I read at Domain Name Wire yesterday, that TelNIC will be introducing single letter and two letter .tel domains, apparently in an attempt to add some cashflow via auction or direct sales.

Considering how there are 676 2-letter combinations, TelNIC would probably not release the roughly 240 ISO 3166-1 two-letter combinations; perhaps, as a last resort to add further funds to the bank. Who knows, one day we might see .fr.tel to be promoted as the French revolutionary TLD that would compete against .fr

The biggest failure of .tel has been its restrictive DNS layer and inability to offer – at least, as an option – the ability to turn that layer off and utilize proper DNS records. That, *might* have driven .tel sales up. But let’s not forget .tel was also promoted as a quick way to interact socially, by giving for example .tel URLs to the hot chick you met at the bar instead of a phone number. Unfortunately, the attempt to offer .tel domains to MySpace users wasn’t met with much excitement; once again, TelNIC bid on the wrong horse: who has time for MySpace, when everyone is using Facebook.

Overall, I mostly feel sorry for the few dozen outspoken fans of .tel who truly believed in its initial launch and hoped TelNIC would improve on the functionality and manageability of the .tel domains. As this hasn’t happened yet, the timing of releasing the single and two letter .tel domains appears to be simply for financial reasons.

Some recommended reading from the past:

Fool’s gold: The .tel hype

Fool’s gold Part 2: What the .tel FAQ means

Fool’s gold Part 3: It’s a .mad .mad .tel world

Fool’s gold Part 4: .tel it like it is

Fool’s gold Part 5: The onslaught of the zombie TLD

Here’s the summary for the impatient:

The domains jis.com, Leading.net, Southeast.net and Jaxnet.com are currently in the hands of a person who took control of a managing domain’s account and impersonated its owner.

I’m sure you want the juicy details, so please bear with me for a while, as I take a trip down memory lane.

The year is 1998 and I’ve just landed my first job in the US.

The company name: Leading Network Solutions – headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida.

As the newly hired web & graphics designer I’m substituting a good-for-nothing “photographer”; along with a ColdFusion programmer we start churning out the new web site for this “mom and pop” ISP, along with web sites for numerous clients.

Leading Net, as it was called for short, was by no means small but it was led by a married couple of Floridians who loved technology and aspired to make it big – and they did only because of hard work and honest hands.

Karl Renaut and his wife, Loretta managed a team of less than 20 people, including the Creative Services team that I was part of. There was tech support personnel for the dial-up services, support for web hosting, network engineers and system operators; we had sales guys and two shifts of ladies at the front desk. Creative Services had a designer/developer (me), a developer/programmer and during the summer of 1999 we had a really talented intern – the CS team was managed by an ambitious young man, Jason, fresh out of college, who nowadays runs his own PR firm in Jax.

From that old building in downtown Jax, we created what would become a chain of events – forging a path, a positive flow of happenings that took each of us who worked there to bigger and better things.

Karl Renaut was always soft-spoken, almost shy, a very respected guy who knew how to delegate. He gave us the go ahead, we simply had to make it happen. And we did.

Every Friday, Karl Renaut bought Papajohns pizza for the entire staff. Now, I’ve worked for some really large corporations and I can tell you that nobody else did that; at least, not every single week of the year for the entire staff and certainly not Papajohns! So Fridays were extra productive, but in all true sense we were a team of young people who loved and cared for our employers. On Karl’s birthday we were all invited to his house; we had a great time, co-workers and owners, spouses and kids, eating food and drinking beer by the pool. I will honestly say that I’ve never felt the same since; our passion was unparalleled.

In less than 6 months after I was hired we were growing fast and on July 9, 1999 the company merged with a Florida CLEC called Florida Digital which was based in Orlando. Suddenly, our “mom and pop” ISP became part of a corporate network named FDN.com; In the end of 1999 Creative Services was shut down and I moved to Orlando to become the FDN.com corporate designer and webmaster.  FDN continued to grow by leaps and bounds and as our paths separated eventually, I never stopped reminding myself what a great experience all this has been in such a short period of time.

End of story: This post is not about me, it’s about FloridaDigital.net and four stolen domains: jis.com, Leading.net, Southeast.net and Jaxnet.com – by now you know what the long introduction was about.

So let’s roll forward to the present – at a time when, a few weeks ago, I was surprised to see Elliot Silver making a post at his blog titled “How great domains drop“.

It was devastating to read that recipe for disaster, essentially a manual on how to hijack a valuable domain name with Karl Renaut as its registrant – jis.com – by grabbing its controlling domain, FloridaDigital.net that was expired. Was Elliot trying to publicize the incident in order to prevent any wrong-doings, or was that post simply a big gaffe?

As Murphy’s Law predicts, Karl Renaut was unreachable during exactly that time that I needed to regain contact with him. Having moved out of state, the soft-spoken software engineer had moved from FDN onto Nuvox and then Windstream; in a series of what I’d like to call “life upgrades”. Along with those came phone and address changes that took us apart for several years. The old team had a reunion last year but Karl was not present, as he moved out of Florida.

As Elliot’s commentators predicted, on July 19th – like clockwork – FloridaDigital.net entered auction at Namejet, where it was sold three days later for $2,500. A small price to pay for the keys to owning an aged three letter domain, JIS.com

In the days that followed, I was still trying to get hold of Karl Renaut and I finally did last week after he accepted my LinkedIn invitation. I was, after all, the “front end” guy, the one who redesigned Leading.net oh-so-long ago, before it was sold to FDN.

So what is the situation right now?

I’ll start by stating that FloridaDigital.net - the domain that was purchased for $2,500 on Namejet – was used by its Namejet winner as a Trojan horse to recreate Karl Renaut’s email account and to gain access to the Network Solutions account that manages (at least) four more domains that I’m aware of.

In the past few days, I made extensive use of DomainTools to daily capture the WHOIS changes for all four domains, all of which were systematically altered – but not much as not to raise any suspicion of activity.

Here’s a timeline:

• July 22 – Namejet account ‘freddt’ wins FloridaDigital.net for $2,500
• JIS.com – the domain that Elliot’s post disclosed to be linked to FloridaDigital.net – was to enter auction on August 1st. It never did, as you will see.
• July 23 – FloridaDigital.net WHOIS changes to a person in Rhode Island. I won’t be posting his info – not just yet – because it might be faked.
• July 24 – FloridaDigital.net nameservers change from NetSol’s “pending renewal” DNS to NS/NS1.FloridaDigital.net and GoDaddy web hosting IP’s. Our guy is getting ready for the big grab.
• July 31 – FloridaDigital.net WHOIS info changes to “Pending Renewal or Deletion”. This information is fake, because the DNS servers remain the same as before and the domain was renewed through the Namejet purchase. Our guy is trying to cover his tracks but he’s really an amateur.

So that’s when the use of FloridaDigital.net ends. Note the last day of change – July 31: the last day JIS.com would be available for renewal before entering Namejet’s auctions. It’s important to note that 139 people expected the domain to drop, pre-bidding up to $5,225 for it; little did they know that one “smart” guy had them all suckered.

Apparently, between July 29 – 30 our guy recreated the managing account “krenaut@floridadigital.net” which controlled the Network Solutions account. Since there are no records of those two days on DomainTools, we need to examine JIS.com next.

• July 30 – JIS.com still has the “pending renewal or deletion” nameservers from Network Solutions.
• July 31 – As if by magic, the old “Karl Renaut” account comes live in the WHOIS. Our guy creates “krenaut@floridadigital.net” and this is the time he accesses the NetSol account. Once there, he simply resets the password, creates a new one and has full access to the account and its domains.
• August 1 – All information remains the same, except for the registrant email, which is changed to “krenaut@gmail.com” apparently to use temporarily. Once used, that email is attempted to be deleted and it’s not accepting email currently.
• August 4 – A new email comes into play: “krenaut8@gmail.com”. Note that both emails are made so as to not raise suspicion of any foul play; as if indeed, Karl Renaut himself was tweaking things. Our guy knows, after all, that he’s probably under watch from the people that commented at Elliot’s post. Who knows, perhaps he’s one of them

No further changes to JIS.com are made. It appears as if the domain is dormant, yet not renewed despite being expired. Perhaps it’s a choice made by our guy, because despite his original focus on getting JIS.com as a bonus for gaining FloridaDigital.net, it’s now too hot to handle. It’s interesting to note that while DomainTools shows the domain as still expired, the NetSol WHOIS shows that it expires in 2011 with a last update date of July 30th. This would mean that it has been renewed by the guy who took over Karl Renaut’s account at NetSol.

In fact, our guy has discovered that Karl Renaut’s account has three more nice domain names, all aged and with former traffic and glorious history:

• JaxNet.com – Registered in 1993 by Karl Renaut as part of his original Jacksonville, FL BBS
• Southeast.net – Registered in 1994 as Karl’s business expanded into south and east Florida and bearer of the corporate name, Southeast Network Services Inc.
• Leading.net – Registered in 1997 – What would become Florida’s largest ISP until the merger with Florida Digital and the formation of the largest CLEC in Florida.

All three domains are now managed by the email “krenaut8@gmail.com” with the DNS being untouched; the exception being Southeast.net that is being tested on PIPEDNS.com servers with an IP of 69.175.54.106 as of August 10.

Let’s recap: Guy spends $2500 on Namejet, knowing he can also get the valuable domain JIS.com for that low price, after reading an interesting, detailed post at Elliot’s blog. Once he realizes the domain is under scrutiny, he treads slowly, but not before he takes over Karl Renaut’s NetSol account which contains three more domain names, on top of JIS.com

It’s important to note one thing: while FloridaDigital.net expired and was lawfully acquired by that gentleman through the Namejet auction, all three domains listed above have not expired. They are, therefore, the property of Karl Renaut and of the entities that were formed from the various corporate mergers, thus they currently belong to communications giant Windstream.

Also an important thing to note: Karl Renaut did not create those monkey accounts at Gmail and did not recreate his old FloridaDigital.net account and he did not reset his old password at Network Solutions. What we have here is a case of identity fraud, impersonation and felony theft of goods valued greater than $5,000.

Karl Renaut is fully aware of this situation and pretty soon Windstream will be very interested in claiming back their stolen assets that amount in the thousands of dollars.

As for our guy, he might as well keep the domain he paid for and hopefully he will learn a lesson in the process. I somehow hope he has the decency and understanding to acknowledge his huge mistake and to timely return the domains he didn’t pay for back to their legitimate owners.