Trust · 24 July 2002
Very good news that smug.com has now been returned to its owner, the redoubtable Leslie Harpold. The domain name of Leslie’s on-hiatus web magazine was pinched – adding assault to insult to injury – shortly after someone else stole hoopla.com from her, of which more in a moment.
Say, did you know that Michael Wasylik, the lawyer working on Leslie’s behalf through all this domain filching, has been doing so pro bono? And that he deserves your respect and more for doing this? You do now.
As to hoopla.com. It is perhaps worthwhile to revisit what happened, after the loathsome disregard and putrid greed of Verisign (who, it bears repeating, profited twice from the registry of a single domain name, broke a contractual obligation to a customer, and, once informed of their blunder, did nothing to fix it), in the wake of all the protest, and after Michael’s efforts with Verisign and AITDomains (the third party registrar who resold the domain).
What happened was this. AITDomains learned they had brokered an illegal domain transfer. Instead of returning it to its original owner, they released it, making the domain available to anyone. And that’s how this came to be.
A babysitter is hired to watch over a child. While the parents are out, the child is shipped to a babysitter in another country, who then sells her to new parents. Upon learning this is wrong, the foreign babysitter kills the new parents and walks calmly away, leaving the child to play in traffic.
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