Over at DrunkenBlog, drunkenbatman has posted pictures of a family wearing The Cow masks. [For those of you who don't read DB, this article gives the history of The Cow.]
And the latest post, with the — both cute and scary — pictures of the family wearing the cow mask, forces me to ask the question that so many posts bring to mind: what are we doing to these poor children, blogging about them and spreading them about the ‘net before they can truly comprehend it? In some ways I ask that question in jest, in other ways I’m not so sure. We already see cases of cyber-stalking and cyber-bullying amongst young people — kids will be kids, I guess. I can see the situation amplifying in 10 years, though, today’s five year olds are fifteen and searching the web to find out childhood gossip about their enemies to use against them. I can just see it now. “OMG your mom blogged about you catching your dick in your zipper when you were four! I bet you have a deformed dick! Everyone, Bobby has a deformed dick!”
I guess the solution would be not to blog, but that would be boring.
It sounds cool — like a hip-hop star, or maybe a sci-fi space cruiser — but really, DROC, the “Domain Registry of Canada”, is a giant crock. They sent me a letter today; not for the first time, but I don’t remember getting one last year. The letter looks like a standard invoice, designed to fool the casual person into thinking it’s for an extension of an already existing agreement. For the princely sum of $40CAD, they’ll renew one of my domain names for a year — and for only $160CAD, they’ll renew it for a wonderful five years!
A quick google search reveals that they’ve been running this scam — I mean, uh, “offer” — for awhile now, under the name the “Domain Registry of America” in the USA, although apparently the company is based in Canada. Their business practices have previously been spanked by the FTC, but they’re still sending out these “renewal” notices, and I assume making good money preying on people who don’t read these sort of things closely, or on the tech-phobic people who simply don’t understand how that crazy internet works, and simply pay up.
I pay a little more than average for my domains because html.com has been totally awesome supporting dumpshock.com for years now — why would I want to spend more money and support a company that uses such deceptive business practices? Simple answer: I wouldn’t.