I have long had in my mind's eye a kind of chart with a bell curve in it that intuitively explained to me why, over time in a democracy, the lowest common denominator of cultural and political discourse will sink, which will have a negative feedback effect on the overall robustness of society. Today I got an email from my longtime internet penpal Larry Wallman, quoting Ron Paul, that finally motivated me enough to whip up excel and try to plot it:



What Larry Wallman sent via email was his famed "Sunday Comments", which, since I no longer daytrade at all, is actually the only reason I subscribe to his stock market newsletter...

[quote]
Last week, Ron Paul of Texas, said something so profound that it needs to be said here, please read this carefully:

"But the people who are screaming for the housing bailout are the people who got their houses for free. You know, they didn't have to put any money down. The house went up in value. They even borrowed more money. Then they spent it. Now they want you and I to bail them out so that they can keep their homes" - Congressman Ron Paul

You cannot explain what's going on with the latest "bail out" any better than Mr. Paul just did. People got into homes with no money, borrowed against the home because supposedly the value was increasing and then when they found they really couldn't make the payments when the rates reset, they whined to Uncle Sam and now YOU and I are going to have to pay to bail them out. Will I get their home in return for bailing them out? Will I get a percent of the profits if they sell? No. Will I get a lousy Christmas card? No. I get absolutely nothing. You get absolutely nothing. The only people that get something are the politicians who will get votes. Lets face it, if I was a deadbeat, living in a house I had no right to even consider, let alone buy, I'd vote for the idiot that is going to allow me to live there too.

And so it goes, the death spiral of the US economy.[/quote]

Let me explain why my chart may explain why these economic death spirals are inevitable as the tides...
Continue reading "The Long Tail of Entitlement Trumps Self-Reliance and Intelligence"

This one came in via postal mail from Hungary, a pretty straightforward looking "invoice" for our trademark in something called the "TM-Collection - International Register of Trademarks".




I'm sure if one were to confront these companies they would tell you they are "offering a service" not trying to chump you with a fake looking invoice, but I contend that the latter is indeed the end-game behind all these. Why? Because when somebody is trying to sell you a service that you don't already own, use, subscribe to, etc, the order form is invariably accompanied by a sales letter. No sales letter = no sales pitch. If it just shows up looking like an invoice, its a scam.








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10 years ago on this day, we removed the password block on easyDNS.com and sent out a couple of innocuous email announcements to the PHP and Mysql mailing lists announcing that we had developed a DNS management system using php and mysql and it was now open for business. We had three nameservers, 1 in our office (where the "other server", that ran everything was), one downtown in somebody else's cage at 151 Front street, and some friends of ours in Buffalo who were running an email company called chek.com let us run a third nameserver on one of their servers. That was the initial setup of easyDNS...
Continue reading "Ten Years of easyDNS"

Hi There,


There is a new DNS Cache poisoning disclosure that has been inadvertently leaked before it was scheduled to be released by Dan

Kaminsky (IOActive). This is a very serious flaw in the DNS protocol that impacts caching resolvers, like the resolvers hosted at your

service provider that help your workstation resolve IP addresses to domain names.


This bug does not directly impact authoritative name servers like the ones used to host your domain names at EasyDNS. Our name servers do not

request answers from external sources, and rely entirely on internal cache files to offer answers. So for example, nobody will be able to change your IP information on our end. That part of the bug is unfortunately located at the caching end.


That being said; this is still a serious flaw, and we are taking this opportunity to upgrade the DNS software on our authoritative name servers to ensure that we are 100% compatible across the board with the newly upgraded caching name servers located at your Internet Service Provider. These upgrades should not impact name resolution if you are using more than one of our name servers to serve answers for your domain name (actually, please ensure that you are).


To make sure your Internet Service Provider is up to speed, you can use Dan Kaminsky's test script at DoxPora Research. If your Internet Service Provider is not yet up to speed, you may want to give them a nudge and/or change your DNS resolver configuration to a more trusted service.

Update It is now making news that an exploit to this attack has been released., please see our post about our newly launched DNSresolvers.com if you are looking for safe resolvers.

We've gotten a few invitations to apply to be a .ME top-level domain registrar, to which we assigned no urgency after we took a straw poll internally and found that pretty well zero of our customers were asking for it. Today, Techcrunch reports that the .ME landrush, at least through one large operator, had degraded into a fracas. We have an unwritten policy here: new Top Level Domain roll outs are to be avoided until they i) get past sunrise without erupting into a malestrom of lawsuits and ii) get past "go-live" without imploding.


It runs contrary to industry standards where registrars whip their customer base into a frenzy over an exaggerated need to protect one's trademarks and claim one's stake in the latest "must have" TLD. The fact is, all you really need to care about are .COM, .NET and .ORG plus the ccTLD of the country you live in or do a lot of business in. (I will probably catch flack for saying .BIZ and .INFO are not crucial must-haves to your domain portfolio - we grabbed ours, at considerable expense in the case of .INFO and it was our experience in the roll out of these two that largely formed our policy.)


That most of these new TLDs roll out with initial 2-year registration period minimums are just an outright cash grab from the registry that most participating registrars are happy to join in on. They know that the sunrise and landrush frenzies they hope to whip up are the single greatest revenue events these TLDs ever experience. After the hoopla dies off and organizations realize how unimportant owning say ".ZX" is in their overall domain strategy and the domainers who piled in find out the aftermarket for the TLD is lackluster at best, the renewal rates predictably fall off a cliff.


So when the next "must have" TLD comes along and participating registrars start lovebombing their customers with reasons why they absolutely must"protect their name" in the new TLD, we often commit the egregious sin among investment bankers, VC's and pundits - that of "leaving money on the table" and we just don't rush in and push the new TLD. If it prevents us from leading our members off a ciff in to a major debacle, we consider ourselves as having done our job. (This was a similar rationale to why we never entered the IDN space, as long as you need a browser plug-in to make internationalized domain names even borderline usable they are, in our opinion, of marginal utility - we stayed out of it)


This is in line with our lifelong strategy of cultivating members who actually use their domains rather than pushing the "get your name before its gone" angle for every TLD under the sun on anybody who can fog a mirror. When we launched back in '98, we couldn't even register domains at all, so our member base was exclusively people who were actively using their domains and wanted outsourced DNS and/or forwarding. That set the tone for our positioning and culture ever since, and while now we do have a lot of customers using us "as registrar", our core is always the active domain users.


We have almost zero "domainers" with large portfolios of parked domains and speculative registrations because our model simply doesn't work for those types of users. It's not a judgement against domainers, it's just not where we came from.



All that said, you would probably think we are opposed to the new "free-for-all" TLD expansion policy hinted to in the recent ICANN meeting in Paris. We are not. We would welcome this new tlds policy (if it ever actually happens) because it removes the artifical scarcity and counteracts that "cashgrab" mentality we sniff at the root of many a new TLD. If new TLDs are coming out all over the place, two things happen:


1) Organizations realize that it is no longer practical to attempt to "protect their name" in every TLD space, so they stop trying. This removes a lot of the "easy money" underwriting new TLDs, some of which would otherwise launch for the thinly disguised reason of trying to milk the Sunrise for all its worth.


2) The above impetus gone, new TLDs will have to compete in a much more open market. Registries, while having de facto localized monopolies within their own TLDs will have to provide actual value to compete with other TLDs.


That appeals to our sense of market freedom: less artificial barriers compelling a drive toward providing more value and benefits. The winners in the end should be the domain registrants, who are, let's not forget, our customers.

We've gotten a few invitations to apply to be a .ME top-level domain registrar, to which we assigned no urgency after we took a straw poll internally and found that pretty well zero of our customers were asking for it. Today, Techcrunch reports that the .ME landrush, at least through one large operator, had degraded into a fracas. We have an unwritten policy here: new Top Level Domain roll outs are to be avoided until they i) get past sunrise without erupting into a malestrom of lawsuits and ii) get past "go-live" without imploding.


It runs contrary to industry standards where registrars whip their customer base into a frenzy over an exaggerated need to protect one's trademarks and claim one's stake in the latest "must have" TLD. The fact is, all you really need to care about are .COM, .NET and .ORG plus the ccTLD of the country you live in or do a lot of business in. (I will probably catch flack for saying .BIZ and .INFO are not crucial must-haves to your domain portfolio - we grabbed ours, at considerable expense in the case of .INFO and it was our experience in the roll out of these two that largely formed our policy.)


That most of these new TLDs roll out with initial 2-year registration period minimums are just an outright cash grab from the registry that most participating registrars are happy to join in on. They know that the sunrise and landrush frenzies they hope to whip up are the single greatest revenue events these TLDs ever experience. After the hoopla dies off and organizations realize how unimportant owning say ".ZX" is in their overall domain strategy and the domainers who piled in find out the aftermarket for the TLD is lackluster at best, the renewal rates predictably fall off a cliff.


So when the next "must have" TLD comes along and participating registrars start lovebombing their customers with reasons why they absolutely must"protect their name" in the new TLD, we often commit the egregious sin among investment bankers, VC's and pundits - that of "leaving money on the table" and we just don't rush in and push the new TLD. If it prevents us from leading our members off a ciff in to a major debacle, we consider ourselves as having done our job. (This was a similar rationale to why we never entered the IDN space, as long as you need a browser plug-in to make internationalized domain names even borderline usable they are, in our opinion, of marginal utility - we stayed out of it)


This is in line with our lifelong strategy of cultivating members who actually use their domains rather than pushing the "get your name before its gone" angle for every TLD under the sun on anybody who can fog a mirror. When we launched back in '98, we couldn't even register domains at all, so our member base was exclusively people who were actively using their domains and wanted outsourced DNS and/or forwarding. That set the tone for our positioning and culture ever since, and while now we do have a lot of customers using us "as registrar", our core is always the active domain users.


We have almost zero "domainers" with large portfolios of parked domains and speculative registrations because our model simply doesn't work for those types of users. It's not a judgement against domainers, it's just not where we came from.



All that said, you would probably think we are opposed to the new "free-for-all" TLD expansion policy hinted to in the recent ICANN meeting in Paris. We are not. We would welcome this new tlds policy (if it ever actually happens) because it removes the artifical scarcity and counteracts that "cashgrab" mentality we sniff at the root of many a new TLD. If new TLDs are coming out all over the place, two things happen:


1) Organizations realize that it is no longer practical to attempt to "protect their name" in every TLD space, so they stop trying. This removes a lot of the "easy money" underwriting new TLDs, some of which would otherwise launch for the thinly disguised reason of trying to milk the Sunrise for all its worth.


2) The above impetus gone, new TLDs will have to compete in a much more open market. Registries, while having de facto localized monopolies within their own TLDs will have to provide actual value to compete with other TLDs.


That appeals to our sense of market freedom: less artificial barriers compelling a drive toward providing more value and benefits. The winners in the end should be the domain registrants, who are, let's not forget, our customers.

Apparently today is iPhone-day in Canada, and this is one of the smaller line-ups for them, out near my place on the way into work. Bear in mind it has been raining fairly hard all morning and from what I've heard, the data pricing on the Rogers iPhone isn't the greatest.

Readers of this blog know I've been using a an unlocked iPhone on fido for quite some time now - I have a very old contract with Fido, unlimited data transfers that's been grandfathered in ever since. You can't buy these anymore, which is why I faithfully renew this contract with Fido and just use whatever phone I want on their network by only buying GSM unlocked phones, or in the case of the iPhone, finding out how to unlock them.

My former CIRA-Board colleague Michael Geist has pointed out that if Bill C-61 passes, GSM unlocking your (repeat YOUR) own phone will become unlawful. (I was unaware of this, which is why I recommend everyone subscribe to Michael's blog feed, he keeps on top of this stuff).

Suffice it to say, this is retarded but life is sometimes a tale told by idiots, especially when we implicitly feel like we couldn't get through our daily lives without installing a few of them to govern us.

This morning's post basically comes down to three themes for me:

1. People are lemmings. The ones that really wanted an Iphone waited, and waited, and waited until somebody told them "now is the time but you have to use Carrier X" and they will wait, in the rain, for hours to get it on terms dictated to them by somebody else. A cursory cost/benefit analysis by any of these people would have led them to the conclusion that they would have been further ahead buying one off of Ebay, or even right here in Toronto at a place like Bongo Wireless, already unlocked and able to use under one's own existing cellphone contract.
   
   
2. Apple is making the same mistake again. They originally lost the desktop market to windows because they wouldn't open up the licensing, yes, they've bounced back in recent years but not too long ago, they were on a deathwatch. All it takes is somebody (*cough* google *cough*), it doesn't matter who, to come up with the next "sexy must have wireless device" and release it unlocked and unrestricted and Apple will take it up the nads again. The sheer volume of the "grey market" for iphones should have telegraphed to Apple that there was far more upside to selling the damn phone unlocked to anyone who wanted it with any carrier.
   
   
3. For good or ill, for the right reasons or the wrong reasons, Artificial barriers create opportunities. If Bill C-61 passes, I will not sign some NDP petition, I will not picket in the streets, I will not go egg Jim Prentice's car. I will go into business. I have already been researching GSM unlocked, Wifi-enabled, dual-mode SIP/VOiP smartphones: there are a bunch being manufactured in China, there are a few Linux based ones - I'm going to start selling these things and running my own sip proxy to route the VOIP traffic. I am betting that over the long term, people will choose open access and mobility over lock-in - we built easyDNS on this concept - the telecom landscape is ripe for it.
   

For some reason, PrivateWorld.com, the domain name I recently moved my personal blog to, a domain I've owned since 1997 and used to house the company website from a previous partnership (Private World Communications) was delisted from the Google index. I'm not sure when it happened as I was receiving traffic from google via this domain almost immediately over the cutover.

To avoid a possible penalty for duplicate content I began using a 301 redirect from my previous Mark.Jeftovic.net blog hostname. No good deed goes unpunished, they say. Once PrivateWorld got dropped from the index I was gone completely since the 301 redirect had basically transferred all my pagerank and indexed pages to the now dropped name.

I think way to handle a situation like this is to ask around on the Google webmaster groups and ask about your particular domain, because Google staffers tend to read these and can sometimes address your site's particular circumstances.



Then watch this video and follow the steps therein. If you haven't already used the Google webmaster tools , there really is a wealth of information and diagnostics there about the Search Engine visibility of your website. I added my sitemap there so I could see what Google saw, I've requested reconsideration - which is supposed to take weeks, but after a few days I seem to be tricking back into the google index.

One of things I did notice under the webmaster tools is the keywords associated with my site content looked pretty "spammy" and I think those were old and dated back to a brief time when I just had the domain parked with a commercial domain parking service. If this is what got my domain dropped from the index, it is mildly startling to say the least. I'm used to seeing parked domains not appear in the google index, but I have also routinely "unparked" domains by developing them and found them appearing in the index within reasonable intervals (less than a few weeks) without seeming to be penalized for their past "parked" status.

So it's a mystery, but an unsettling one when it's unknown why it happened. When my personal blog gets dropped from the index, it's not the end of the world. But had it happened to a domain more central to my business interests, like say, easydns.com, it would be a non-trivial event that would really impact my business - and that scares me. So even though I seem to be re-appearing in the index, I'm hoping my reconsideration request produces an explanation on what caused this.

Some time ago Tucows (AMEX:TCX, TSX:TC) issued a press release reminding the world that they hold a sizable portfolio of premium domain names, the subtext to which was ostensibly "look at us, we're undervalued". Jay Westerdal over at DomainTools commented in his blog in essence that the premium domain portfolio of Tucows was not priced into the stock and in his estimation he could see the stock doubling within 2 years. Jay's assessment was an estimate. After looking at this in detail, I personally think Tucows has an intrinsic value between 0.94 and 1.58 per share (currently trading at .60) - Note that everything that follows is based on the CDN listing price.
Continue reading "Tucows may be overlooked as a value stock (no, really)"

Ad from Craigslist:

Pro Day Trader (Millions_) (Toronto)

Pro Day Trader Looking for venture capital
High return possible (potential Millions)Glad to negotiate
Several years experience in equities,futures
Only serious inquires !200k to do it right
Thank You Don

I've seen ads like this many times. It begs a few obvious questions:

• Why seek outside capital to daytrade? The risk premium to the investor would make the cost-of-capital quite prohibitive
  
• If these daytraders are so good, where is their own pile of cash that they've taken out of the market? And why aren't they using that to stake themselves?
  
• What kinds of gains are these guys promising? I've talked to daytraders advertising on craigslist, some of whom claimed consistant, repeatable returns of 20% per month but couldn't explain to me why they weren't several orders of magnitude wealthier than Warren Buffet or George Soros who have managed 15-20% annual returns for decades (and who eschew daytrading like the plague, btw)
  

I have been following a couple of high-end daytraders (Wall St. Window and The Informed Trader) over the course of this last bear market after the credit markets locked up. They are both saying the same thing: this has been one of the toughest markets to trade that they have ever seen. They've both spent most of their time sitting on the sidelines, in cash watching the market for some feel of where it's going.

As professional daytraders know, "cash is a position" - often the best trade is no trade.

My suspicion when I see ads like this is that I'm reading the ad from a guy who's addicted to daytrading, gone bust and looking for somebody else
to stake him so he can wipe out again.

I've come to the conclusion that the only way to become a successful daytrader is to do it fulltime. You can't run a business and daytrade on the side. So personally I don't daytrade (anymore). But I do highly recommend The Investors Quotient: The Psychology of Successful Investing in Commodities and Stocks - which teaches us that the most important aspects of trading are having a coherent system one sticks to, mental discipline and other psychological factors. In other words, becoming a successful trader is not about conquering the markets, it's about mastering oneself.

In a couple weeks I'm off to the The Search for Value seminar at Western for a week where I hope to hone my acumen at fundamental analysis and value investing.

I have known for some time that the practice of "slamming" was not exclusive to the domain name industry. In my business we are well acquainted with outfits like Domain Registry of Canada and others. There are other related "business models" in the online space: trademark monitoring "services" that look like they come from an official source, nebulous business "directories" you're supposed to "renew your listing" in. These often look like invoices, run several hundred dollars and probably bank on the fact that a certain number of accounts payable departments will just treat them as such and remit payment on them.

We almost got stung in an offline counterpart to the domain slam: A company calling themselves Ontario Energy Savings came to our door and nearly slammed us over to their company for a 5-year contract on gas.
Continue reading "Ontario Energy Savings or Ontario Energy Slamming? "

I like Techcrunch a lot, and have always been proud that they're an easyDNS DNS hosting client, but sometimes I find myself shaking my head a lot as I scroll through their feed in my bloglines reader. The still pre-revenue Twitter just got something like a Q-round funding giving them a post-money valuation somewhere north of Canada's GDP and some of the A-rounds being announced stand less of a chance succeeding than bluetooth enabled salad forks.

While the current VC's of these deals may succeed in their own business plans (that of achieving subsequent fundings at ever higher valuations, or effecting a liquidation event where some large elephant with too much money takes the entire thing over), whoever ends up ultimately owning these start-ups at the highest valuation will never recoup that "investment" out of earnings from the venture.

With some of these Web 2.0 companies it's like trying to build a business plan and monetize a really hot knock-knock joke. It catches on like wildfire, soon everybody's telling it in the elevator or at the water-cooler. Your cab driver knows it and so did your waiter at lunch. And then some VC firm comes along throws 60 million into the pot thinking eventually people will pay to hear it, or that they can sell advertisements just before the punch line.

I don't see it happening.

Today's post considers far-fringe deep-politics within the context of individual spirituality and consciousness cultivation. It doesn't aim to come off sounding apathetic (9/11 was an inside job? So what?), but it takes a serious look at the "what if it were true" consequences from a viewpoint of "what could we do about it that isn't as bad as the mindset that precipitated it in the first place"?

I come to the conclusion that retribution-oriented finales, be it a blood-in-the-streets revolution or a neo-Nuremburg spectacle where the guilty are hung from meathooks en masse, though understandable, entirely predictable and possibly even probable, are not the enlightened choices. Rather what is needed is a mass exodus from the Herd. It is the Herd that makes these crimes against humanity possible, and it is the Herd which must be fled from and dissolved. Without it, corrupt power mongers are absent a pack of lemmings to drive off a cliff.

I'll then end the post with 7-steps anybody can take to quit the program and say goodbye to the Herd. Bon Voyage!
Continue reading "What would Eckhart Tolle do with incontrovertible proof that 9/11 was an "inside job"?"

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to receive the news that Tim Denton has been appointed a full time commissioner to the CRTC (that's our version of the FCC for you American's in the audience).

Having served with Tim on the CIRA Board back in the day, I know that Tim knows his telecom policy, understands technology and he's a lawyer. We need more people like that and I think he'll be in a position to bring his unique blend of expertise to the organization.

As an ex-drinker I'm not generally a militant straight-laced stick-in-the-mud (like the way I am a militant ex-smoker). I couldn't care less if people drink or what they think drinking does for them.

But I find the new Canadian Club Whiskey ad campaign a little silly or bothersome on a couple of levels for some reason, maybe you as well. If so, you may enjoy this ad parody.