October 6, 2004
From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:quick domain name capture - and the award goes to..
In declining to defend Edwards' Halliburton charges specificaly, Cheney meant to direct people to factcheck.org last night but mistakenly said 'factcheck.com'. The latter page now refreshes to George Soros' anti-Bush page.
Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at October 6, 2004 12:57 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksLooks like the bandwidth award goes to Soros as well -- his page loads, whereas factcheck.org is in "slashdotted" state. The funny thing is, if factcheck.org is really run by UPenn, why didn't they put it under Akamai like their main web site? UPenn is the only university I've seen do this, BTW, and I wonder why -- football traffic, perhaps?
I don't think you can register a domain and have it available so quickly, so I'd imagine someone already had this site and just did a redirect.
I was just at the link to factscheck, and they pretty much savage Cheney. Edwards had a few misleading statements, but Cheney just lied, lied, lied last night.
http://www.georgesoros.com/ now carries this correction message:
FactCheck.com Correction
We do not own the FactCheck.com domain name and are not responsible for it redirecting to GeorgeSoros.com. We are as surprised as anyone by this turn of events. We believe that Vice President Cheney intended to direct viewers to FactCheck.org.
The registrant is in the Cayman Islands so I guess that'll be that, for now.
Registrant:
Name Administration Inc. (BVI)
Box 10518 A.P.O.
Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands B.W.I.
KY
Domain name: FACTCHECK.COM
Administrative Contact:
Domain, Administrator admin@nameadmininc.com
Box 10518 A.P.O.
Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands B.W.I.
KY
+1.345.946.6879
Technical Contact:
Domain, Administrator admin@nameadmininc.com
Box 10518 A.P.O.
Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands B.W.I.
KY
+1.345.946.6879
The Volokh Conspiracy forwards a report that someone watching the debate apparently looked it up online while the debate was still in progress, saw that it was registered and for sale, bought it on the spot, and set it to redirect to Soros.
The Volokh Conspiracy is talking out of their ass. It takes more than a few minutes to activate a newly purchased domain name and direct it to a web site.
Domain names are routed to servers by a distributed set of domain name servers, and it's impossible to update all of them simultaneously. At a minimum it would take a few hours, and then only if you could get someone with direct access to one of the root servers to walk over to a terminal and do the edit directly.
Now, if the site was already set up, it would take only a few seconds to modify it to forward traffic, and that's aparently what happened.
The story is that factcheck.com is owned by a company in the Caymens that buys up old domains and near misses and uses them to push ads. But they couldn't handle the bandwidth spike so they redirected to Soros's site because they agree with his message.
Bones, VC was passing on an account sent by a reader, not presenting it as Gospel. But I understand that when people originally checked the site last night after the debate, it was all ads, and by this morning it led to Soros. So I have no idea whether we're talking "a few seconds" or "a few hours." Not that it matters very much.
Bones: No, it doesn't.
It *may* take a while for the information about the new domain to propigate to the root nameservers, but it is possible to get that information loaded in a few minutes.
OTOH, a simple whois tells us this story is probably false:
[...]
Domain Name: FACTCHECK.COM
Registrar: DOMAIN NAME SALES CORP.
Whois Server: whois.domainnamesales.com
Referral URL: http://www.domainnamesales.com
Name Server: NS1.15X.NET
Name Server: NS2.15X.NET
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 12-sep-2004
Creation Date: 04-feb-2004
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Expiration Date: 04-feb-2007
[...]
Registrar of Record: DomainNameSales
Record last updated on 12-Sep-2004.
Record expires on 04-Feb-2007.
Record created on 04-Feb-2004.
So it's almost certainly NOT created last night.
WayBack Machine tells us that the domain was created in November 2002. But it seems like it haven't been updated since November last year. Or rather, an error message appeared then.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.factcheck.com
A domain doesn't have to change hosts just because it changes ownership. Many squatters also offer hosting so it is entirely possible a new owner could have the redirect in place quite quickly.
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