In a fit of rage, I went out and did something I wouldn't have even remotely considered doing just a few moments before. I'm now the proud owner of the bsdly.se domain.
Does somebody out there really want to register bsdly.se? If they did, it's probably too late by now.
My friends all know that I'm not too fond of talking on the phone, and trying to sell me anything by cold-calling is just never going to work. So when somebody calling themselves "Nordic Domain Hosting", calling from +46 406660225 (a Swedish unlisted number as far as I can tell) did just that, it had to end badly.
The lady at the other end claimed that somebody was trying to register the bsdly.se domain, and seeing that I was the owner of doubleU-doubleU-doubleU-dot-bee-ess-dee-ell-why-dot-enn-ee-tee, would I be interested in blocking the attempt? It would just be a matter of 'trademark protection', and it would cost me the mere trifle of SEK 1995 (roughly USD 310 or EUR 218 at today's rate).
I told them right off that I wasn't terribly interested in owning a Swedish domain, but the lady they tried to talk me through a series of yes/no answers I assume were designed to set up a legal-sounding agreement, all the better to bill me afterwards. More likely than not, she was reading it all off the whois info for bsdly.net.
They had the act pretty well rehearsed, except for one detail that irritated me immensely: they insisted on getting an oral confirmation that I was interested in their service. Only after an oral confirmation was in place would they be sending me anything in writing.
The conversation never progressed much beyond beyond the initial "Is your name Peter [...]", "Are you duly authorized to act on $company_name's behalf", which is where I broke it off. For one thing the connection was terrible, and for another I was beginning to smell a rat. (Yes, I'm dense at times, I know.) At the end of too-many minutes, I thought I had finally got them to agree to send me their papers for me to review and hung up. Only to have the same lady call once more, continuing the script.
The second conversation did not progress much either, and for the third call a male claiming to be a supervisor had taken over. He didn't actually clinch a sale either.
So after three phone conversations, I used my regular registrar's web interface to register the bsdly.se domain myself, setting me back a whopping NOK 140 (roughly EUR 18 or USD 26). While I was writing this note, the "Registration complete" message from my registrar arrived here in my inbox.
So now I have another domain. I've expanded into Sweden.
Or as they say in the trade, get a geek really riled up, he'll go right off and buy a domain. In Sweden.
Field notes and occasional musings by Peter on Stuff that happens, from a free software perspective, mainly OpenBSD, FreeBSD.
Friday, July 8, 2011
4 comments:
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Riled up enough to register MykesBalls.com
ReplyDeleteNot sure what the laws are up there, and especially for international connections, if I tell a US company "Put me on your do-not-call list", they have to. In fact, under US law, the only thing they can do is say "yes sir, one minute while I update our records....we will not call you again."
ReplyDeletethanks for telling! they called me up this morning; luckily I did not answer that call !
ReplyDeleteI work for a domain registrar and have received a lot of calls from worried customers that has been contacted by this Nordic Domain Hosting company. the funny thing is that they often end up just registering the domain names from us instead. So Nordic Domain Hosting is actually helping other companies earn more money.
ReplyDelete