It’s been a fairly exciting week in the domain and website world. Some big names made the news and mostly not in a good way, including GoDaddy, LivingSocial, and Apple. Here are the highlights of the biggest stories we’ve seen from the past couple of days.
GoDaddy Attacked, Millions of Sites Affected
GoDaddy took a lot of heat this week as a member of the group Anonymous claimed responsibility for an attack that brought down millions of websites on September 10. A Twitter user calling himself ‘@AnonymousOwn3r’ alleges to be a security leader for the Anonymous hacker collective, although this has yet to be confirmed. While Twitter users previously linked with Anonymous did praise the hacker for his success, the main account for Anonymous tweeted that Twitter users should “… redirect [their] godaddy hate to @AnonymousOwn3r”.
Sites using GoDaddy nameservers were affected, not just sites hosted at GoDaddy. Millions of sites were down for at least a portion of the day Monday, with some sites being out for the entire 7 hours it took to get the situation resolved. GoDaddy has sent emails out to at least some of their customers today, offering them a free 1-month of service due to the inconvenience. The email, posted by an affected customer, did not mention the attack. Instead, the reason for the service outage was explained as “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables”.
Rumors and opinions were flying around the web through all the major social media sites. There is a segment of the market that feels GoDaddy is getting what it deserves after their stance for SOPA earlier this year, however the majority of views seem to be negative towards the hacker or even the group, Anonymous. Most of the sites that were down are owned by ordinary people who are just trying to earn a living and they feel as if the hacker attacked them personally. This entire fiasco could end up hurting GoDaddy financially as there were quite a few webmasters who have stated that they may move their sites from GoDaddy because of the outage.
On the Legal Side
LivingSocial, Inc. filed a UDRP claim with the National Arbitration Forum on August 1 against the owner of LivingSoCal.com, claiming the name violated the company’s trademarks and asking for the domain to be transferred to them. In a decision announced September 10, the one-man panel stated that LivingSocial.com had failed to establish any of the three elements required by ICANN Policy and therefore the complainant was denied any remedy.
The owner of LivingSoCal.com runs a real estate business in Southern California, so the panel determined that he had legitimate cause to use the domain and had not acted in bad faith towards the LivingSocial trademarks. Hon. Nelson A. Diaz, the single panelist, also determined that the domain consisted of commonly used terms. The decision has added fuel to the fire of the growing UDRP reform movement.
In other legal news, Apple has filed a suit for trademark infringement on a Polish grocery store that has a website at A.pl, claiming that since this sounds similar than it is riding on Apple’s reputation. Also part of the suit is due to the green apple logo found on a side service offered by the Polish retailer, called Fresh24.pl, which offers fresh produce. The grocery store’s CEO, Radoslaw Celinksi, states that “the accusation is ludicrous”, and some Apple detractors seem to agree.
Considering Apple’s vigorous defense of their trademarks, many are commenting that it’s odd after announcing a new iPhone5, the company has not redirected the iphone5.com domain to iphone.com – the domain just fails to resolve if you try to go there. Considering this domain was relinquished to Apple a week after the company filed a complaint back in May, it strikes some people’s funny bone that the company then failed to do anything with the domain.
Speaking of iPhone5
The launch of the newest iPhone incarnation, the iPhone5, brings some sweet features for domainers. First of all, the term domainer has actually been added to the spell-checker dictionary so will no longer come up as an error. Next, a pop-up asking if you’re sure that’s what you want when you type in a domain ending with anything but .com – this may be a feature those with other extensions will hate. Finally, there is an embedded domain evaluator that will show the worth of a domain next to the URL in the iPhone’s browser window. Just don’t go to iPhone5.com as there is nothing there yet.