Whois Hijacking My Domain Research?

eWeek has an interesting article about a new development in domain squatting. A company called Chesterton Holdings is somehow finding out when unused domain names are being searched and is snapping them up before they can be registered by someone else. All the domains involved were submitted to a C|Net whois meta-search engine that checks a number of sources. There’s no answer as yet as to how Chesterton Holdings is doing this, but until it’s sorted out I would stay away from whois meta-search sites and do your research manually.

Over the weekend, I had a little bit of a scare. My wife and I were playing online and all of a sudden, the Coldplay album she was listening to stopped playing. When she tried again, iTunes said it could no longer locate the tracks for that album and a host of others. Fearing the worst I checked the hard drive on our server and sure enough, I could no longer access those files. In the end no data was lost. A single data block on the disk had gone bad, but was easily repaired. Thankfully I had just made a backup of our iTunes library the week before. What I had neglected to backup was the rest of the server, including this blog!! Circuit City just happened to be running a great deal this weekend on a 160GB ATA drive from Seagate for $39. (after rebates of course) I bought 2, one for the server and one as a backup. The server is back up and running on the new drive, and I have a complete copy of all the data on the other drive. Phew, I feel a little better now…

Lately I noticed that my machine was taking longer than normal to show the desktop when I log in. I suspected something was wrong, but dismissed those thoughts since I had added a few gigabytes of pictures to the My Pictures folder. (I thought perhaps the pics were slowing down the processing of my user profile) When my DVD drive started to refuse to eject discs, I knew something was up. In going through the list of recent updates I saw that Automatic Update had installed the Windows Genuine Advantage Notification Tool.

Having already experienced the side effects of this horrible piece of software at work, (it labeled all of our lab machines as non-genuine one day, which took me a large portion of the day to fix) I immediately suspected it to be the culprit and began looking for a way to remove it. Oddly enough, I found the directions on Microsoft’s own website. This solution worked perfectly and my system is back to normal. I have now prevented AU from automatically installing updates and have blocked the WGA notification tool entirely. If you haven’t done this, I would highly recommend it.

Clarification: I am in no way suggesting that using automatic update is bad. AU should be enabled. However, as long as MS continues to abuse the “Critical” updates section of AU, we should take the time to manually approve each update.