Argentine version of Google falls into “wrong” hands | Hacker News Reader

Argentine version of Google falls into “wrong” hands

en.mercopress.com

> >According to the Open Data Córdoba group (which is dedicated to tracking expired Argentine domains) Google's domain had not expired and, in fact, the expiration date was in July. But the group too was unable to explain what had happened or why.

Ouch. I think someone's going to have some explaining to do in the post-mortem.

Yeah, MarkMonitor is not going to have a good time on this one (they're the company Google, and a bunch of other high-profile companies) use for domain management and tracking. They're supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening.

It's not known whether Google or the AR NIC made the mistake.

It's not known whether it was a mistake.

If the expiration was in July, how could it possibly have been Google's mistake that it got sold months before it expired?

MarkMonitor has been purchased by OpSecSecurity: https://www.opsecsecurity.com/resource/press-release/opsec-s...

I wonder if this has anything to do.

MarkMonitor's domain registrar component was not acquired (per the link).

I recently sold cryptocomicbook.com and decided to list some additional domains for sale, at the exact time I listed them a handful of ua.(TLDs) got listed for sale including ua.com and whoever listed them must have done it in bulk and given them all the same price ($76).

So I bought the ua.com for $76, at that point the seller must have realized what happened and immediately changed the sales price of all the other TLDs from $76 (example ua.co went from $76 to a min of $48,000), the marketplace confirmed the seller was verified as the owner or had authority to sell ua.com. Of course after the fact the marketplace reversed the transaction, they oddly reconfirmed the seller was verified/legit (I thought they would say the seller got past their verification but wasn’t legit), and they have refused to confirm why if the seller was legit that they reversed the sale transaction.

They reversed it because it was an honest mistake and most people like to know that if they make the same mistake it can be undone.

I have to agree - although I'm surprised the registrant actually used common sense here, it was the fair thing to do.

maybe it was a bug in their system, so they were on the hook

It may be worth noting that in most countries a contract essentially is established by the consensus of wills by the parties involved. An error in objecto ("I didn't mean the thing I accidentally said or listed") is a legitimate excuse and nullifies a contract. (The consensus didn't exist and thus the contract had never been established in the first place).

(This is also a reason why marketplaces, where things "just happen", are, let's say, complicated, as they do not adhere to this legal tradition.)

It can be a defense in the US but not likely the case here, the remedy wouldn’t be specific performance (ie give me the domain) but damages for a fair market value of what I paid for, specific performance is very rare in the US. There would also be claims against the marketplace (despite their terms of service indemnifying them) other laws apply that can’t be waived under both federal and state law such as fair trade practices acts and deceptive trade practices). The whole point being anyone could increase prices that were advertised and say oh my ad was in error rendering every contract reversible and subject to post hoc price increases.

I mean, that's what judicial discretion is for. Good luck convincing a judge that the seller honestly intended to sell his domain for 1000x lower than market value.

No that isn’t what judicial discretion is. In contract law judges are not permitted to unilaterally interject their understanding of a contracting party’s intent and revise the terms of a contract, try looking up the “4 corners of a contract”.

I’ll give a specific example of a buddy of mine who in 2008 (during housing bubble) used to buy foreclosed homes at auction. There was a $2-3M home foreclosed Miami Beach home on auction, he put in a bid for about $200k, then the clerk of court website crashed, he didn’t think much of it, come to find out it crashed for everyone locking in his bid, the bank moved to set aside the sale on the basis of uncontrollable 3rd party error, my friend showed up single handedly with a few cases printed up in support of his position and the court denied the banks motion and my friend received title to the house. If the bank had any remedy it was for damages against the courts system that caused the damage not against the contractual winner of the auction.

That's not a contractual mistake though, is it?

It was an auction, meaning anyone could bid, and he put a genuine bid for $200k. Just because the system crashed doesn't mean anyone actually made a representation they didn't intend to.

A more realistic example would be the wrong house getting listed for auction due to clerical error (but one still owned by the bank). I'm fairly sure that would be set aside.

Edit: sorry you were talking about my example and not the domain.

Auctions are contracts, in this case the seller (bank) agrees to accept the highest offer at the end of the expiration of the auction. So the terms are of the auction are time limited, historically the foreclosure auctions were done in person (sometimes on the courthouse steps), I’ve been at in person foreclosure auctions and the bank had a representative that ended up buying most of them (at least at the ones I attended)

The second example sounds a bit like the citi debt thing where they accidentally paid the entire principal when they meant only to pay a part.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/citibank-just-go...

Maybe I'm stretching it a bit, but the element of reasonably assuming that it was intentional seems similar. I'm sure there are some differentiating intricacies in the law though.

By returning your money you have suffered no damages. You're no worse off than before.

Yes, the US does handle this a bit differently. However, this is handled stricter in countries with a stronger tradition in Roman law. (E.g., "by breaking this seal you consent to the EULA found inside the box" is invalid in Europe, since there isn't really any object, which a consensus could be formed on, at the given time.) – And, of course, you would have do provide proof for having been in error, or the error has to be obvious beyond reasonable doubt. (In this very case, raising the minimum price for similar offerings immediately after the error was detected, may hint at not having intentionally offered this at an unreasonably low price at fractions of the market value.)

So many people think that the world runs algorithmically, like the code on their computer. Society is built upon interactions between real people. Everyone exercises a massive amount of judgement in whatever they do, for better or worse. And this is true for the legal system as well. Your "well technically I'm correct" arguments aren't going to work in front of a judge and jury the way they do on the internet.

This is one of the reasons I dislike the "literalist" judges and their "interpretations". It goes against what the law _is_, in my opinion.

Note: I have a law degree, but am not a lawyer

Maybe...I tested your theory and asked them to reverse my recent sale of cryptocomicbook.com on the same basis and my request was declined.

In either case there is both contract law and state federal law (unfair trade practices) that would support my claim in the courts if I were so inclined.

> I tested your theory and asked them to reverse my recent sale

Was your recent sale grossly and clearly mispriced with evidence such as similar domains selling for many orders of magnitude more?

Who is supposed to make that determination? It was below the marketplaces own valuation is that’s not enough and must use an ambiguous word like “grossly” essentially meaning in the sole discretion of the marketplace? In any case it’s neither in their terms or service nor supported by case law.

Who ever listed it agreed to the terms of service/contract multiple times and verified the price multiple times, it’s not incumbent on a buyer to point out to a seller their price is below market value (and that come directly from the case law for contracts). If there was an error (either by the lister or maybe a bug in the marketplace software) believe it or not the claim would be against them and not me, and presumably they would both also be covered by insurance specifically for those kinds of damages.

Im not saying I will take legal action, for example I offered them to just put my domains on their “premium listing page”. But I’m also not here to debate the legal merit of contract law.

You can't know that the person who listed it doesn't have a special MSA (service agreement) with their vendor that gives them premium support and or protections not offered to "normal" end-users, and you seem to believe there is some sort of clear black and white with how business may make decisions when there are incidents on their platforms.

As a person who misses a lot of flights, I can tell you that they can always reroute you, usually for free, and sometimes get you home faster, but if you're an asshole and constantly talk about how you've been wronged, you get to wait for the next flight.

Sorry you miss your flights a lot, but if I may, imagine you showed up on time and: A) the plane was gone and they explained you bought a ticket with an error in the flight time; or b) they informed you they cancelled your ticket and your couldn’t fly because the price of your ticket had an error.

Remember that recent viral video/news story of the Guy being dragged off a plane kicking and screaming because the airline had overbooked the flight. Airlines disclose they can overbook flights and remove passengers on such flights, usually people volunteer for freebies but no one did on this flight, they just happened to choose drag him off the plane forcefully kicking and screaming. Even when the airline had full contractual right to overbook and remove a passenger, they went about it all wrong, people still called him an asshole anyway but it was the airline that paid $140M for it.

You're beating a dead horse and seem to just be arguing past everyone, I'm not going to participate any more, sorry about your not being able to get ua.com for a really low price, that must have been a real downer.

> imagine you showed up on time and: A) the plane was gone and they explained you bought a ticket with an error in the flight time; or b) they informed you they cancelled your ticket and your couldn’t fly because the price of your ticket had an error.

With respect: those two points _do_ happen? So I must be misunderstanding your overarching point with them

I don’t think you tested this. And it’s not a theory. If you are a large customer of your domain registrar you will get special treatment. The same is true when you have large financial stake in many things.

I say this as someone who had their domain auctioned off when I was unemployed because I was too depressed to read my email and didn’t see the notice until I was out from my cave, losing a domain I owned since 1996.

I’m not in the side of the registrar, but no reasonable observer would think you should be able to buy ua.com for $78, so you haven’t done much in the way of “testing” by not being a high value customer, and by selling a domain that’s not valuable.

What I’m saying I tested is your theory that you can just ask the marketplace to reverse a transaction on the basis of your listing price being in error.

Of course I did that because I had just sold crypto comic book.com on their marketplace. And they refused to reverse my sale.

And you don’t think I did that ? Why would anyone make that up?

It’s really not on me to test the accuracy of a publicly traded company’s auction website or a seller who may or may not have priced their item in error. It would only be a moron who didn’t buy it under the circumstances, it’s not like I was responding to a Nigerian prince email, it’s a publicly traded company’s auction marketplace that claims to verify domain ownership before listing.

You selling your low value domain and asking for a refund is not the same as the owner of ua accidentally selling ua.com

UA is likely a LARGE customer of the domain service you use and pay multiple thousands of dollars more for managed services and support than you do. They will get special treatment because it's in THEIR contract, just not yours.

Try reaching out to them and ask what kind of contract you need to sign to get the ability to reverse accidental sales, they probably can quote you a price.

The law doesn’t care about the value of a contract, it’s enforceable or it’s not, and I don’t think you have the slightest clue how damaging it would be if I were to sue (again I never I would) and it to come out in discovery that the marketplace reversed the transaction I was the buyer and refused to reverse the transaction I was the seller because the seller the supported pays them more than I do and as a result reversed their transaction not mine. Or even a more generous interpretation of your comment that there is a non advertised fee you can pay to reverse transactions after the fact and the same is not disclosed to users and buyers of those particular domains.

I’m just telling a story of what happened, you seem to be arguing and it’s really bizarre. If you wanted to discuss the law in good faith fine, I’m happy to do that, but you are taking everything personal and lashing out with comments like my “low value domain” and just seem to want to justify what they did from error to paying for a special non advertised service that permits reversing sales...so I’ll step back.

This example doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the law. If you’re a big and important customer, you get more leeway to make mistakes and get them reversed. If you are small potatoes you don’t get to reverse mistakes. Go rack up a $1000 phone bill by mistake and see how difficult it is to fight. Then, go be a Fortune 500 company and see how easy it is to get a mistaken corp phone bill fixed. It’s not fair but it’s reality.

I realized, and I might be wrong, but this person almost certainly accidentally sold their domain at a low price and wants a refund. The example about them buying ua may or may not have happened but the point is they are mad that they didn’t get special treatment and I think that’s their general grievance. A grievance I can understand and agree with, but for which we should admit there’s not much we can do about it, and deflecting to a megacorporation won’t make it right.

It's not a blockchain domain registry.

As I read this I literally had a config file open in another window with references to ua.com. it's owned by UnderArmour and serves endpoints to their Fitness API.

This would have been one of the more interesting answers to the most common support question at my company: "Why wont my runs sync?"

Why should I believe in markets when transactions can just be reversed like this?

If you walked into a car dealership and saw a price tag of $100 on a car that normally sells for $250,000, would you also lose faith in the dealership when they return your $100 and tell you the car was not meant to be priced at $100?

If anything, the example should boost your confidence in the marketplace. Marketplaces exist to provide a fair experience to both the buyer and the seller. Not just the buyer.

> would you also lose faith in the dealership when they return your $100 and tell you the car was not meant to be priced at $100

Yes.

Now imagine it was your own car in the parking lot, and an employee of the dealership accidentally tagged your car for sale as one of theirs, and mistakenly and irreversibly sold it, all while you were test driving a new car :)

"you" would then sue for damages?

Then the dealership is on the hook for at the very minimum the actual market value of the car.

Looks like they owe me a new car.

Meanwhile, I can't even figure out how to buy domains with my name in them from people who just buy them and sit on them.

If you figure it out let me know.

The internet's implementation of name resolving is wrong.

If you type "apple.com" you should get a disambiguation page saying "Did you mean the grocery store, the record company, or the computer company?" and from there you can reach the desired website. Somewhat like how it works in Wikipedia.

Unlike land, names are not a scarcity and can be shared. So why pretend they are like land?

Land can be shared just like names, and the reality is there's only so many disambiguations one can learn. Even with that ability, consumers are only going to remember one apple.com.

This is a very interesting statement. My gut reaction is "no, that's wrong!", but I can't quite articulate _why_ that's wrong - so, please consider this reply in the spirit of an auto-Socratic dialogue, rather than an argument intended to dissuade you.

You're right that names themselves are not truly scarce*, but "convenience of being referenced by a name on the internet" most certainly _is_ a scarce resource. There can only be one "first resolved entity" - this is why companies invest in SEO**. So it seems like what you're actually arguing for (and apologies if I'm misrepresenting you here!) is a situation where it's not possible for the average internet consumer to directly reference a particular domain, but rather where all name-resolution queries _have to_ go through a hypothetical unbiased "top-level" search engine - one which indexes not documents, but domains. Is that right?

If that's the case, then we've then opened up several other problems: - who decides the order in which those results get displayed? You may not think it matters, but I can promise you that NEO ("Name Engine Optimization") would then become a lucrative industry. Apple-the-computer-company certainly wouldn't stand for being the third result for apple.com - how do direct links and bookmarks work? - If there's some sub-identifier ("apple.computer.com" resolves directly), then who assigns those sub-identifiers? If ICAAN or a similar organization, then we're right back at the current situation, but one level deeper - the IT company for the Apple grocery store would be fighting (with their wallet) against the Apple Computer company. - If direct links only work via IP addresses, well, the average consumer wouldn't be delighted with that; nor would print advertisers trying to share a human-memorable address

It's a tempting idea, for certain, but I can't see a way of implementing this that doesn't immediately give rise to the same problems one layer deeper. You've clearly thought about this more than I have, though, so I look forward to hearing more about it!

* though to an extent, they are; since there can not practically be multiple items of a given name within a category - if every man was named John, then we would need some other way to distinguish them, and so "John<-identifier>" would _become_ their name

** where, here, the "name" is a search term rather than a specific one-to-one address - and, yes, I recognize that that's not _quite_ the same thing

Ugh, I apparently can't edit this to reformat. Apologies - the `-`s in the paragraph beginning "If that's the case" were, clearly, meant to be bullets or sub-bullets.

> names are not a scarcity and can be shared

Domain names cannot be effectively shared between non-cooperating entities. Someone has to own the DNS A/AAAA/CNAME/etc records, and be able to change them at will. They have to point to someone's server. It doesn't matter what technological implementation underpins name resolution, it's a fundamentally important property that it must be possible to have exclusive ownership of a domain name.

If I'm trying to reach my bank, I need to know that I'm talking to my bank, and we have a whole technological stack designed to ensure that, including cryptographic authentication and public logs (Certificate Transparency) to make sure nobody can secretly tamper with that authentication.

Any system that cannot provide such authentication is not a viable naming scheme.

There's a long-standing concept that has been discussed many times that naming could be based entirely on that cryptographic authentication, without having any kind of "human-readable" name at all. However, such a system would not solve the full problem that needs solving; it would just mean there would then need to be a separate directory system to help people find the server they actually want and then talk securely to that server.

.com is shared, and .apple.com can be shared across multiple subdomains in the same way. We already have that eg. co, gov etc. The registrar would have to maintain the link lists and host them on apple.com for you to choose. You would get a subdomain which you can manage.

com isn't "shared"; it points exclusively to the .com registrar, who determine the ownership of names under .com.

It would certainly be possible to treat "apple.com" the same way, but then, who decides who gets "records.apple.com" and who gets "computer.apple.com"? Does "records.apple.com" go to Apple Records, the music label, or to Apple Records, a hypothetical bookkeeping ("record-keeping") company, as one of many possible conflicts?

Isn't that kind of the function of search engines?

I kind of like the new world of more TLDs to solve this. I really wish they weren't privately owned though.

apple.grocery apple.song/radio/fm apple.computer

I think what you're looking for is a search engine.

Hell, even if you happen to figure out the how, the prices some of those people want is just ridiculous.

I'm also curious how people actually go about purchasing domains immediately after expiring. Like for example when Trump bought jebbush.com during primary season because it happened to expire then (and he temporarily re-routed it to his own site lol)...They must have done something more technical to lock it in, does anyone know?

Some registrars do offer the ability to "pre-order", waiting until a domain has expired and then snapping it up.

I own steve.org.uk, and after moving to Finland I noticed steve.fi was going to expire in the near-future. So I setup a cron-job that would text me the moment it became free.

First of all it went from registered to being in the redemption state, then it became generally available. I managed to register it once I'd woken up - though competition was less than I'd otherwise expect because at the time you needed to have a Finnish identity-number to register Finnish domains. I suspect that is no longer true.

Would you mind sharing your the script of your cron-job?

This was a couple of years ago, but it was something like:

    whois steve.fi  | ( grep "Domain not found" && echo "DOMAIN IS NOT REGISTERED - GET IT NOW!" )

There is a domain name I wanted and the minimum offer price is 140k. I don't know even know who will pay for it, it's not like it can be used for a company name.

In my case, I can't even find prices or how to contact someone who might be willing to sell the domain, and I'd be happy to pay a few thousand dollars, though not 140k.

Domain squatting is scummy if you do it to should be ashamed of yourself imo

The domain google.gi is still for sale, because it can only be purchased by people who live in Gibraltar.

Wouldn't someone from Gibraltar be able to buy and lease it to Google?

Yeah, but Google wouldn’t want any part of that type of arrangement. Better to let it go un-associated with the country than to depend on some other party that can extort at renewal time.

Can’t Domain name providers do pretty much the same thing? You’re only leasing a domain after all...

They generally have a reputation to uphold so others don't just get up and leave.

Some rando leasing it to you can do whatever they want without worrying about any of that.

There are 30k people in Gibraltar and probably most of them use the .com or .uk domain.

.co.uk

They own https://www.google.com.gi/ though.

If they really wanted it, presumably they could setup a shell company in Gibraltar using a local agent?

google.ar is also parked.

Google has also failed to buy their Soviet domain name: http://google.su/

And they even forgot about http://google.xn--vermgensberatung-pwb/

Can you even buy .su domains anymore? I was under the impression that Russia was just sitting on it.

EDIT: answered my own question. It is apparently actively used.

for the longest time, i thought .su meant sudan.

There are many more TLD that Google have not got.

If you're looking for domains potentially getting 'dropped' by Google, look no further: https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_Google_domains

Took a quick glance and noticed that this article is claiming "duck.com" is owned by Google, even though it redirects to DuckDuckGo.

That domain has Namecheap's Whois Guard enabled, so there's no registrant information. However, I'm still inclined to think that it isn't Google's domain since the NS records for "duck.com" point to "nsXX.quack-dns.com"...

iirc this was originally owned by Google and then given to DDG.

This is correct. It used to redirect to Google.

duck.com was owned by google from an acquisition in 2010.

It was sold to DDG in 2018 https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/12/18137369/duckduckgo-duck...

In December 2018, it was reported that Google transferred ownership of the domain name Duck.com to DuckDuckGo. It is not known what price, if any, DuckDuckGo paid for the domain name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

Being a "competitor" that a monopolist can point to as faux evidence of their not-monopoly status is far beyond any simple integer price.

Especially since we need BigNumber to represent the real dollar value at stake

Wouldn't it be funny if DDG was actually Google.

It is using Bing engine and data.

That would make it even funnier!

It is not a joke. There is a partnership with Microsoft. Search engines are hard.

Whoosh. The joke is that Google owns DDG despite it being backed by Bing.

...among other sources. "Over four hundred" [1] of them.

[1] https://help.duckduckgo.com/results/sources/

Those apply only to non-organic results (instant answers, zero-click info). Organic results are proxied from Bing (or sometimes Yandex) verbatim.

DuckDuckGo's crawlers only fetch icons and scrape data for some of their instant answers.

They aren’t really used for the actual index. Bing represents 95% of their actual index.

Even more funny, what about google financing a competiting browser ? wait ...

Hilarious even, but I wouldn’t be mad though

And if Signal was actually the NSA.

Does anyone know what cobrasearch.com was?

It’s like Find My iPhone but much scarier

I wonder how long it would have taken to be noticed if he replicated DNS and sat on it for a while. Better yet, how long if he had redirected or cloned the site.

Google gets enough DNS traffic that I doubt you could just sit on it for very long. Not without an expensive bill.

Wouldn't most of it get cached downstream tho?

But what if you just point to original Google DNS servers?

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. Setting the NS records to their original values would make the whole thing transparent unless you dug into the domain ownership.

How was he able to register the domain months before it was supposed to expire? Did he hack the registrar itself?

Either the registrar or the registry - the registry seems more likely as there are no requirements to running a country code TLD’s registry on account of ICANN not wanting to anger any government or seem like they have power over ‘government property’.

There are also very little requirements to running a registrar...

Among other exploits, you could generate an SSL cert and harvest cookies. All visitors would have to do is load your site in their browser. Right?

Google is pretty good about pinning their certificates so it's unlikely this would work, especially in Chrome where it's locked down even further.

Certificate pinning has already been deprecated as a standard, and no browser supports it anymore. Google may be doing something else for their own properties on Chrome, but that is unlikely and definitely not widely known.

Edit: After a few minutes of internet searching it turns out that while HPKP is deprecated Google does statically pin a set of certs into the Chrome build itself, their own sites presumably included.

Actually, it turns out http://google.ar/ might still be owned by someone else?

The article talks about google.com.ar, not google.ar. Secondary .ar domains are generaly not available.

.ar domains have been available to the public since last year.

I love this line from the article "but when everyone suspected that the server had crashed, as is often the case..."

That must be a pretty big server!

somebody actually posted it as an 'ask hn' last night! I'm actually physically hurting right now. I wonder how much google will pay to get their precious domain back.

Can't they forcefully take it? [0]

[0]: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/cybersquatting-2013-05...

what is this then? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907303

ccTLDs are special as they are entirely delegated to the countries that they're assigned to. WIPO offers UDRP servicing for ccTLDs, but they need to opt-in to it [1].

Notably .ar (and .su as the other responder to your comment notes) is not part of that. Therefore the process is going to depend upon the specific country/agency overseeing the ccTLD.

[1]: https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/cctld/

How did Google reclaim it ? What is the mechanism in DNS that allows someone to take ownership of someone else's domain and so quickly ?

Is it just because it's Google ? or is there something that allows anyone who previously owned a domain to claim it back ?

This is still happening? It used to be very annoying decade or so ago, but I thought it was already solved/fixed/improved.

Are there really no option to make a domain registration without expiration?

There's lot of different TLDs each with their own rules, fees, and registrars. It's hard to unify that landscape, particularly when a bunch of ccTLDs have very little infrastructure behind them.

The closest you can really get is hiring a mark protection firm like MarkMonitor which themselves are registrars for a handful of TLDs (namely .com) and can basically indefinitely extend registrations for everything they have contracts for.

It's not quite google.ar, but I'm still trying to figure out what to do with https://gnu.gl/

If GNU Project ever wanted to run a free Google alternative, GNUgl at gnu.gl would be a great fit.

Once they become a community project, rather than the rms fan club, I'll talk to them.

Until a year or two ago (can't remember exactly) it wasn't possible to register a "naked" .ar domain and they were reserved for very special cases (government mostly). It had to be a .com.ar or .org.ar etc.

Out of curiosity, I queried about 100 DoH servers (open resolvers) for "google.com.ar". Every A record returned contained an IP address registered to Google.

Once I told my friend ja.red was available for $9, and after he bought it they told him it was a mistake and reversed the transaction.

Fun article, but they will get it back with relative ease. Happens all the time. Trademark domain.

Just like that? A court order $4 dollar refund and have a nice day? That's a bit anticlimatic.

Not everything ends up turning into a Michael Bay movie when being resolved.

an important rule in life.

Is it still a trademark violation if they use the domain to sell something completely unrelated, e.g. shoes?

The problem with this is that Google isn't some generic term for something else. A lot of case law around this kind of stuff. Will get transferred back to Google in a heartbeat.

It was wrong, not so wrong, since it could have been worse, like a scammer who could had setup a fake page. Instead, the person didn't even park the DNS, just left it without resolution. This helped everybody realize there was a problem.

> The technical term for this type of manoeuvre is called “Cybersquatting” in English.

Yah. This gives him some bragging rights at most. If he hacked something, it'll be a different story though.

No, that's buying a domain in the hopes someone will want it in the future. This was "domain sniping".

I see this kind of stuff happening all the time; some of them being high-profile sites too (e.g. "Keep America Great" got taken from Trump). Is there some website that monitors domain expiration and sends out alerts or is this mostly lone-actors? I'm always surprised by how quickly they move in on the domain

It's called Domain drop catching or Domain sniping. There are tools available that do just that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching

There are many such services, which will not only alert you but automatically try to buy the domain for you. Search for “domain backorders”.

Oh wow even GoDaddy provides the service. Interesting. Thanks!

Keeping it classy as always.

I would assume that would just give them more information for their domain broker services to raise the price of the domain.

Sure, but so does doing a whois or an NS check. Plenty of registrars and registries are known to have abused such data in the past.

yeah but all the good ones are automatically reregistered way faster than you could click the Buy button.

I once bought .org.it after some newspapaer misspelled our .it domain name as .org.it (which is a non-existant TLD) and I tried to regain the exposure.

They didn’t let me through though… :(

I'd just make it redirect to duck.com or remake the site (Google.com) and change all the icons / buttons to ones drawn with paint.

https://archive.is/7nkiR

Wait, didn't our version of Google also fall into the wrong hands?

How much does Google pay MarkMonitor for this to happen?

It sounds like it might be a screw up at the registry end. Hard to say from the limited info available.

MarkMonitor is surprisingly affordable (at scale). Their minimum buy is not cheap, but within that individual domains are, well, not retail price, but not far off either.

They "make it up in volume" by giving you an incentive to keep your entire domain portfolio together, even when you really only care about MarkMonitor levels of care for a subset of them.

Advanced features like registry lock and local presence are also affordable-but-not-cheap.

(A lot of their more proactive brand and trademark management has been spun off to other divisions of Clarivate who acquired them some years ago.)

check this out https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26907303

Sounds like a little-used TLD that ICANN has been trying to phase out for decades. Google has individual sites for most of countries that would have initially been under the umbrella of the .su (USSR) TLD, and .su apparently has 2% of the usage of .ru where Google already has a site.

Maybe they'll try to snap it up now that it's attracting a little attention but they probably just don't really care about it...

he's running a website under the name of google. You can play it down, but that's pretty cool.

However, minutes later after the manoeuvre, it was confirmed that Google has already recovered the domain.

I'm confused. It seems to me that this article just through some lines in it without further explanation.

Nobody knows what happened. Last night someone posted on twitter that google.com.ar was not working, then another one posted a screenshot from the Argentinean domain provider highlighting that the domain was registered by a random guy. Few hours later google.com.ar started working again, probably a single phone call from Google resolved the issue.

Google probably threatened to abuse poor guy with legal action.

Similar to what MSFT did to the guy who totally legally registered mikerowesoft.com

That is not how Google works.

> In the end, Microsoft and Mike Rowe came to an agreement. In exchange for transferring control of his domain name, the software maker has promised to help Rowe set up a new Web site; pay for a Microsoft certification course and subscription to the Microsoft Developer Network Web site; and pay for his family to visit Microsoft Research Tech Fest in Redmond, Wash., in March. To top it all off, he will get an Xbox with some games.

From cnet: https://www.cnet.com/news/mikerowesoft-settles-for-an-xbox/

He did an AMA on reddit 11 years ago; he's apparently a full time poker player now. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ajsih/i_am_the_guy_wh...

Google will sell you domains that it doesn't own. I've purchased .MX and .CO.UK domains from them just recently. I've purchased Thoth.zone, Thoth.mx and Thoth.pw from them. From networkingsolutions.com I've bought thoth.domains. It's a crazy turf war situation right now, given the broad international legal overlaps and so on and so forth.

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