The blog of Steve Root

  • The Last Templar (Raymond Khoury)

    I like to carry a book with me just in case I have some spare time between jobs. Unfortunately I forgot to take a book with me recently so was forced to buy one as I passed a supermarket. I mean, a whole 5.00 for a book, that’s like three times more than I normally pay! Still, the book I found was called “The Last Templar”. This book reminded me of “The Da Vinci Code” and was equally enjoyable. Instead of the blood line of Jesus Christ that the Da Vinci Code is based around, this was based around an order of knights and their treasure. Not treasure in the financial sense, treasure more as a political controlling factor over the Vatican and Catholic Church. I wont say much more, it may spoil the story if you read it. The story is pure fiction but uses a sprinkling of historical fact to make it seem believable. As much as anything, this was a detective story, some action scenes and a love story for the two main characters.

  • Interesting Statistics for the new .eu domain

    I just read some interesting statistics on the eurid web site about the .eu domain registrations. .eu is a new Top Level Domain (TLD) and basically allows more people to have short and specific domain names. If your “companyname” is already taken in .com, .co.uk, .net and so on, you may be able to register it as “companyname.eu”.

    Since Launch on the 7th April, almost 1.8 million names have been registered. There was also a breakdown of how many domains were registered by country of registration. Here’s a small extract:

    Country Number of Domains Registered Percentage of Total Domains registered
    DE 580,700

    		32
    GB 339,234 19
    NL 212,944 12
    IT 106,010 6
    FR 89,903 5

    There are around 60 million people in the UK, roughly the same as France and Italy, yet we bought notably more of the new domains than they have. In Germany there are roughly 85 million people and they seem more taken with the new domains than we have been. The thing I find particularly interesting is that the Netherlands has only 16 million people, so they’ve been buying the new domains at quite a rate!

    Let’s look at this another way. How many people in each country are there for each .eu domain:

    Country Number of Domains Registered Percentage of Total Domains registered People per .eu Domain
    DE 580,700 32 146
    GB 339,234 19 176
    NL 212,944 12 75
    IT 106,010 6 565
    FR 89,903 5 667

    The table shows that there is one new .eu domain for every 75 people in the Netherlands, wheras in France you’d have to find 667 people to find one with a .eu domain. I wonder what the reason is behind this big difference in buying domain names.

    (note: Population numbers checked on eurostat web site)

  • Spam Wars – on the trail of a serious spammer

    I think I’m going to have to start a new category for these spam wars posts – there are getting to be so many!

    Today I would like to report to you all a small success. Remember that domain mail-2204vf49.co.uk that had it’s address details hidden as it was registered to a non-trading individual who had opted out of displaying details in the registry? I spoke to nominet about that and they said if I could send them evidence that the domain was actually registered for a trading reason then they could ‘correct’ the opt out declaration and show the details (only non-trading individuals can opt out of the registry). I sent them a fax explaining the history of spam from this domain and extracts from my server log files and they agreed that the domain is really being used commercially. So here it
    is, the owner of the spam sending domain is: [begin fanfare]

    Domain name:
    mail-2204vf49.co.uk

    Registrant:
    Tony Slater

    Registrant type:
    UK Individual

    Registrant’s address:
    du-pont house
    Cranbrook
    GH56 9JH
    GB

    WAIT!!! STOP THE FANFARE!!! … there’s something fishy about that address. Like no street name… and I don’t live far from Cranbrook and I happen to know that Cranbrook is in the TN postcodes, not GH. The Royal Mail website doesn’t even recognise the GH postcode.

    What next? Well, I’ve sent Nominet an email asking what to do when an address is false in the registry. I think I’ll give company “T” another phone call as well. The man there admited sending us the spam though this domain, so perhaps he’ll tell me who owns it (perhaps I’m giving the benefit of doubt to often, but hey, perhaps they could have accidentally registered the name with completely incorrect details……)

    (more…)

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