There's a lot of poetic justice in GoDaddy putting the big target on its own back, and the users taking aim, and shooting well enough to make the point. SOPA is the result of the entertainment industry figuring out what DNS is and how it works. Learning if they snip a few wires here and there they can control everything. It was always this way, but they didn't know.

DNS is the front-line of SOPA, and GoDaddy is probably the largest commercial entity in the DNS world these days. And they were so stupid they screwed it up. Shows how bad bankers and lawyers are at managing technology. Just imagine if they had some respect for people who do the plumbing.

The only problem is that by trying to hijack DNS in such a public way, with legislation, the entertainment lawyers and lobbyists educated the users of DNS. People who own domains with GoDaddy. And now they're figuring out how to move their assets. Overnight Namecheap has a name (and is just as fast ruining it). It would have been a lot smarter for the MPAA to buy their way in. Didn't Verisign just sell itself really cheap. But then ICANN probably isn't as easy to push over as the US Congress. Or is it? (Honestly don't know, but some of the people who read this blog are involved in the ICANN process.)

I love this little demo because it proves the Internet hasn't all been sucked into Facebook, Google, Twitter and Apple. We're not 100 percent silofied. All those domains that are moving away from GoDaddy point to places outside the BigCo silos. How about that people who say the Internet is dead. You're seeing new life. And eventually this power will show up inside the silos too.

 12/26/2011; 11:05:58 PM.   .

Transferred ten more domains from GoDaddy to Hover this evening, without a hitch.

Namecheap has a post kicking GoDaddy pretty hard. Too hard, really. Please be more careful. It could be that their customers don't have a lot of experience tranferring domains. It is tricky. Or it could be a bug or a glitch. We all know servers screw up sometimes, esp under heavy load.

Further, Namecheap is reaping a windfall. All the extra business they're getting isn't because they're good, rather because a competitor is bad. It doesn't look good to be kicking GoDaddy when they're already losing. They wouldn't like it if the tables were turned. There's plenty of anger for GoDaddy. No need for Namecheap to remind us we don't like them.

And it's good to see a shitty company getting taken out. This should be a message for all other companies who don't treat their users with respect.

I think the Registrar business has a lot of growing up to do. Even Hover, which is doing an excellent job, seems a bit over-eager, and unaware that their customers are very busy, and when they need help from a registrar it's often because we're fighting some kind of outage, and don't have a lot of cycles to spare. That said, it's better to have a registrar who goes out of their way to make sure things are working. But it'll be nice when they smooth out some of the rough edges.

I plan to do a lot more work with DNS in the future, already have done a bunch. So it'll be good to see this industry shake out some of the weak players.

 12/26/2011; 5:43:53 PM.   .

We go to the movies knowing that it's not real. If you want proof, next time you're watching a movie, or a preview -- focus on how the actors move their mouths and eyes while they talk, and then try to imagine someone in real life talking that way. Real people don't talk like that. And that's cool. We go to the movies to escape our real lives, to see things from another person's point of view, or from a different context. We ask to be deceived that it's real. Or just for a rush.

But sometimes it goes too far and the illusion breaks. Like an airplane stalling in midflight. They're running along great, you're in the plot, and all of a sudden something happens that doesn't make sense in the context of the story, and the trance is gone. All of a sudden you find yourself in a movie theater wondering how you got there, when you were in the movie just a few instants before.

And some movies never get you into the zone at all. You never even get liftoff.

Badly Written and Extraordinarily Stupid (I refuse to learn the actual name of this movie) never gets started. You never feel anything for the characters, yet how hard would that be, given the circumstances. They jerk you around, with cheap pictures of airplanes that might be flying into buildings. Blown up photos that don't look like people who fell or jumped to their death from the WTC. A kid's scrapbook that looks like it was produced by an ad agency working for Coca Cola or Land's End. A kid who might be feeling real emotions, or might be suffering from a disease. They won't commit. They won't actually give you a story to hang the scenes on. No takeoff.

I get disturbed just thinking about the events of 9/11, yet this movie that had two-plus hours never got my emotional meter to budge. It's amazing that this picture made it out of the movie factory, much less debuted on Christmas Day.

 12/26/2011; 12:49:39 PM.   .