One good apple

There have been about 849 million words written about Steve Jobs in the past five or six days, so why not add a few more, right?

It’s always sad to see a truly original character exit the scene, and Jobs was certainly that. A man who knew exactly what he wanted and never settled for less. That’s rare. It’s rare because it’s incredibly difficult to pull off. Perfectionists are difficult to work with or for, and there has been no shortage of stories about Jobs’ unrelenting drive and perfectionism.

But he was also a good salesman. In fact, that may have been his true gift and greatest contribution to the modern gadget scene. He wasn’t the nuts and bolts (or should I say soldering iron and resistor) guy after all, that was Wozniak. And when you think it about it, after they scrapped their original operating system and moved to a UNIX-based platform, all Apple was really selling was a different computer interface in a different box, and on the surface that’s a tough sell (ask Microsoft and IBM about O/S2).

You could get into an entire utilitarian-object-as-fetish-object thing when discussing Apple, but that discussion tends to make a lot of people who love Apple cranky. I’ll just say that it’s quite a feat to foster a club-like atmosphere for a consumer product and Jobs and Apple did that better than anyone else.

A great deal of that comes down to personality. If you gave Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer the first generation iPhone and told them to sell it to people, it wouldn’t have had the same impact. Because, let’s be honest, Gates and Ballmer are not cool. Larry Ellison is kind of cool, but I don’t necessarily think people would buy a phone from him either. He’s cool in a I’m-way-cooler-than-you-and-we-both-know-it kind of way, while Jobs had a knack for seeming like the coolest guy who could conceivably be your friend in the real world. You could probably find Ellison on an experimental Gulfstream G750 somewhere over a large ocean, drinking highballs with Hugh Hefner, Bill Clinton, Desmond Tutu and Alec Baldwin while Jobs was in the Apple offices pacing up and down the hallways demanding more, better, faster. Rocking the non-ironic turtleneck all the while.

Admittedly, I have never bought an Apple product, so it might not come as a shock that I’m not convinced that things would be much different today if there were never a Steve Jobs. We would still have smartphones, notebook and tablet computers. But things would have almost certainly been a lot more boring. And my hat is off to anyone who makes the world a less boring place.

Defending your domain

Your domain name is serious business; it represents you or your brand on the Internet, and you want to do all you can to protect it. Which is why we continue to see scams around domain names. Some of these have been going on for more than a decade, others are more recent. But just about every day someone asks us, “Is this real? Do I need to respond to this?” and the answer is always, ‘no.’

What is a typical domain registration scam?

One of the oldest scams started under the name of Domain Registry of America (or Domain Registry of Canada, or several other “Domain Registries of”), and it involves a form letter sent to the physical address listed as the admin contact for the domain in the whois record. The letter looks like a legitimate domain renewal notice—it contains your whois information, the domain expiration date, everything you might expect for a renewal.

The only problem is, it is not sent by your registrar, and if you respond to the letter and pay the fee (which is typically several times more than what you’re already paying), you are contractually agreeing to transfer your domain name to the new company. Once that happens, they make it very difficult to transfer it back out, and often in the fine print of the agreement you unknowingly entered into, they can charge you a “transfer out” fee! No legitimate registrar will ever charge you any fees outside of the domain registration fee itself.

This type of scam relies on victimizing people who are busy or just not paying attention and think, “Oh, another bill,” and throw it into a pile and write a check at the end of the week.

So be very wary of any regular postal mail that has anything to do with your domain name. It is unlikely to be from your registrar.

What’s new in the world of domain scams?
Another scam that has been circulating via email for a few years, and continues today, has to do with “trademarks” and Country Code TLDs. Country Code TLDs are the two letter domain extensions that were designated for use by specific countries, such as .us, .de, .uk, .jp, etc.

Large companies with brand names and trademarks to protect often register many of these domains in an effort to protect their primary domain. If you visit pepsi.de or pepsi.co.uk, for example, you’ll see very different sites than pepsi.com, but they are all legitimate sites run by PepsiCo.

The trademark domain registration scam attempts to get you to register a version of your domain name in different Country Code TLDs (most frequently seen these days using the .cn, .hk and .tw Country Code TLDs). There are dozens of variations of the email, but the gist of it is this:

We have been contacted by an individual or company to register the domain names:

yourdomain.cn
yourdomain.hk
yourdomain.tw

It has come to our attention that you currently hold the trademark to yourdomain. In order to protect your trademark, please respond to this email within five days. Failure to respond could result in loss of your trademark, etc., etc.

When you respond to such an email you are met with a convenient “offer” to “protect” your trademark or domain name by registering yourdomain.cn, yourdomain.hk and yourdomain.tw yourself. They prey on your fear of loss of control of your name or trademark in order to sell you domains that you don’t necessarily want and almost certainly don’t need.

In case you haven’t guessed, no one attempted to register yourdomain.cn, yourdomain.hk or yourdomain.tw. The scammers simply plug existing .com, .net or .org domains into their form letter and mass email them to millions of domain owners.

There are a couple of ways to avoid becoming a victim of one of these domain registration scammers. First, very carefully review any correspondence pertaining to your domain name. Second, enable whois protection, a service that removes your direct contact information from the domain’s whois record.

You can add whois protection to your Winhost domains in Control Panel. And always remember, if your domain is registered through Winhost, any legitimate email about the domain renewal will come from Winhost Domain Services <[email protected]>.

If you ever have any questions or concerns about your domains registered through Winhost, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Phishing for Tweets

A recent Twitter virus has re-surfaced, and we were sent the link via a direct message on Twitter:

Don’t let the bad guys hook you!

Clicking that link (which we’ve changed, of course) takes you to a Twitter login page that is really a phishing site. Once the bad guys have your Twitter login, they use it to phish in more of your friends and contacts and spam moneymaking schemes all over Twitter.

We’re all used to being cautious where email attachments and links are concerned, but these newer social media exploits rely on people being less suspicious of links that show up via Twitter or Facebook. But of course you should still be wary when clicking any link that comes to you out of the blue, especially when it’s been cloaked using a URL shortening service. One way to check on such links is to use a site like http://real-url.org, which shows you the real URL behind the shortened version.

Since we’re talking about Twitter, be sure to follow @Winhost. We’ll never steer you wrong!