Last week I was helping my aunt buy a domain name for her first web page, and I idly did a whois search for “sheilafox.com” using a page that I picked randomly out of some search results. That was a mistake. The search woke up a mysterious entity with a PO box in the British West Indies and a phone number in the Netherlands. It bought up the name that instant. Dreamhost confirms that this is a common scam.

I imagine these things must have some rules for evaluating the desirability–and therefore the ransom value–of a domain, right? Otherwise, wouldn’t they lose money buying up random losers like this?

Update: Turns out that many of these domain-purchasing bots take advantage of “free tryout” periods to evaluate a name for ad-revenue potential. Underperformers are tossed back into the sea…so if you lose a name to this kind of scam, keep whois-ing (from your own trusty terminal, of course). I recovered sheilafox.com a month later.

And then the flooding began in earnest.

What surprises me most is how disorganized the official response seems to have been so far—JWZ has a good roundup. I hope there are serious political repercussions from this—this is what governments are supposed to be good for, after all.

I used to think that J. G. Ballard’s High Rise was merely a vicious satire, but then I read “Trapped in the Superdome”. (Fortunately, it does sound like they’re working on getting people out of there now.)

And once again, we see struggles over ice.

It’s unnerving to watch the fabric of civilization unravel at the edge of our country.

The dates, times and locations of these deployments are kept secret until the moment a mobilization is called over division radio frequencies. … Once all units have responded they are given specific instructions to create a presence on the street.

The purpose is to basically intimidate those individuals who would even contemplate any kind of criminal activity and to send a message to potential terrorists that the NYPD can rapidly respond to virtually any situation.

At some point in the past few weeks, instead of logging into my existing Amazon.com account, I somehow accidentally created a new account with the same email address, and probably the same password. I first noticed that something was up when the site stopped chummily calling me “Joe Hughes” and started using my email address. Furthermore, when I tried to add something to my wish list, I discovered that it was now empty. (I can still view, but not alter, my proper wish list by searching for myself.) In fact, this new account contains almost nothing besides my email address and password. After my first exchange with their customer service, I asked:

Why is it possible to have two accounts on one email address? In any case, could you delete the account which doesn’t have a wish list?

Unfortunately, at this time, we will not be able to close the duplicate accounts under your email address because this extra account has no verifiable information on it.

In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying my recent purchases from CD Baby immensely.