Lately I’ve noticed a lot more bloggers wrestling with comment spam, trackback spam and recently both Irene Q and I had a bit of difficulty with domain name registrations.
Mine was because it lapsed and I was unaware, Irene because the hosting company wouldn’t give up the domain name to the rightful owner.
It is not uncommon that a blogger may find their site design stolen.

Inbetween that I’ve been helping a friend whose Outlook vanished into cyber space. Fortunately he has corporate technicans who have recovery tools they’ll bring with them this evening. Another friend who runs a consulting firm was not so lucky and a social advocate lost his emailing capability through Outlook recently also. This are not stupid people, they put protection in place, don’t play in their OS and have virus and spyware and firewalls.
I can completely identify with any blogger flooded with garbage (I spend about 1/2 hour daily taking out the trash) and I find the story below about a domain name disturbing but not surprising.

This latest nefarious hijacking of a domain name is weird. Panix had it’s domain name taken and moved over the weekend. It was stolen, even though it is properly registered and operational.

It’s not supposed to be possible to transfer a domain name from one registrar to another without notifying both the current registrar and the current domain owner, and yet it happened anyway.

As the hijacking occurred over the weekend, we had great trouble reaching responsible parties at the other companies involved. The domain was not returned to us until the beginning of the business day in Australia. None of the companies involved had support numbers that were available over the weekend, or even emergency contact numbers.

This hijacking involved multiple felonies here and abroad. Many members of law enforcement agencies in the US and at least three other countries have already been involved, and we hope that the perpetrator(s) will be caught.

Not only did that happen, the thieves used the opportunity to put up information of their chosing.
I wish this owner well. Getting Canadian cyberpolice to do their job will be difficult. There are too few of them, swamped by the legal, criminal and the all to human aspects of pr0n.