http://www.itbusiness.ca/it/client/en/Home/News.asp?id=59307

DROC – Domain registry of Canada. How many of you have recieved a letter in the mail that looks like this?

Copy of renewal letter sent by mail each year to website owners urging them to renew.

I get a few dozen every year as the technical or admin contact for close to 70 domain names. Waste of paper and postage if you ask me but it obviously works to drive sufficient business to DROC each year.
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Lets look at what DROC is doing that has led to this lawsuit. The term “domain slammer” was coined from “phone slamming,” the illegal practice conducted by long distance companies to scam consumers into switching their long distance services. It is nothing new and not unique to DROC or the Internet or phone industry. Network Solutions (Verisign) has been sued in the past for doing this exact same thing. According to CIRA the issue is the poor reputation of DROC in the industry as a result of unethical marketing practices that mislead consumers.

From day one CIRA and our Canadian domain .CA regulatory body has been confusing at best and opened the door to DROC’s ability to exploit such confusion in the marketplace. Imagine if every person who bought a .COM or .NET or .ORG name got separate emails from Internic as well as the registrar with login and account details. Consumers are confused who they should deal with in the first place. DROC send out official looking letters with Canadian flag and an official looking form close to renewal time and people feel they must take action out of fear that they do not want to lose ownership of their name.

Many say this is due to the misleading intent of the letter shown above and while the letter is stating it is a transfer request and it is a solicitation for services, people can and do misinterpret it and do not understand the implications of transferring their domain name to DROC. People are in a hurry and may fail to read or interpret the wording on the letter. They see something that resembles an invoice so they pay it. It is interesting how people and companies pay bills without even reading them or verifying what they are for.

It is all very clever and deceptive. The form being mailed in and of itself is not illegal and uses publicly available information to generate their mailing list. The fine and even not so fine print states this is an offer to transfer your domain name. Is the intent of the letter to get people to switch registrars regardless of the implications of doing so and regardless of the risks and costs of doing so. YOU BET!

I hope that CIRA has done it’s homework and they are basing their decision on clearly documented consumer complaints. If it is documented that DROC has been successfully gaining business by tricking people into switching domain providers and those people have lodged formal complaints to CIRA and the consumer and competitive bureau of Canada, AND it has been proven that these complaints continue to come in year after year in spite of past warnings, then yes, DROC should lose their right to be an official registrar. To simply state that DROC is not playing ethically does not hold water at all which is why DROC is suing.

If DROC has a record of poor reputation in the industry that is backed up with actual and ongoing consumer and legitimate business complaints then go ahead and deal with them as you would with any company with poor consumer reputation. CIRA is within it’s rights to deny a reseller who is creating problems within the .CA domain registry. DROC is within it’s rights to sue and obviously is exercising that right. We do NOT want this to become a lawsuit focused on what the letter says or should say. It is about deceptive marketing techniques.

This lawsuit will be precedent setting no matter which side wins. The one thing I urge consumers and the Canadian public to beware in the weeks and months ahead is how we would approach legislation aimed at sales and marketing letters. There is a lot of change happening in the US with laws governing what we can say on websites, what we can write in marketing letters, and say in emails. I applaud anything that can put a dent in crime and scamming but it is a fine line we tread between legislation and censorship. Once we go down a path to regulate what we can say we cannot go back.

For the rest of us all I can say is read the fine print, make sure you know what you are paying for, and make a point of knowing who you currently do business with. To the existing registrars, ISP’s, website designers and so on who reserve domain names. Be sure you educate your clients so it is explicitly clear what they need to know regarding their website domain names. My clients know to contact me for any questions they have on domain letters or issues. If you have a client who loses their domain to DROC from one you reserved for them then it is your own fault for not educating that client.

You can blame as much as you want but if we all pay attention to what really matters and ignore the foolishness, the fools eventually will go away on their own

I setup firefox latest build 3.6.9 on a new computer today and as I was testing it I noticed new tabs would open immediately next to my current tab instead of at the far right. When I am searching for something on eBay or Craigs list or researching I will pull up each possible item in a new tab and close the ones I am not interested in and leave the prospective items open. As I continue searching I want the new items to open in tab on the far right so I know the tabs closest to the left are ones I have already short listed. OK so I have my own way of doing things … but it works for me and I wanted Firefox to work for me as well.

I scoured the Firefox options and saw nothing of the sort in there. This was obviously a change in the new version of Firefox and I knew there was a way to fix this but I was not sure where. I have used Firefox a lot in the past few years but I never spent time learning how to customize it … until now.

Enter about:config

Putting about:config in your address bar in firefox will allow you to customize virtually everything about Firefox properties and behaviors. It is a very powerful tool, somewhat overwhelming at first when you are not sure what you are looking for but powerful nonetheless. I looked through the long list of items looking for anything that had tab in the name. I found many items with tab but only one that had the words tab and insert in the name.

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent = True is the default setting and causes tabs to show immediately to the right of the current tab. When I changed this to browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent = False (clicking on the item in the list toggles the value) my problem was solved.

Anyone who wants to dabble in changing Firefox settings in the about:config file is duly warned that you risk screwing Firfox up if you make bad choices. Hey, you can edit the windows registry files with Regedit too if you like, but be forewarned that you can royally mess up your computer if you edit the registry without a clue what you are changing. Same here with about:config but at least in Firefox if things go bad you can uninstall and re-install Firefox to fix it

Nicknames are the emails that show in the To box automatically as you type in email addresses or names on your messages.

Nicknames are not related to email contacts in any way but rather, they build up as you send email messages out to people. Over time this list builds and makes it easier to send emails to people you commonly contact.

What happens when you move to a new computer or need to create a new login profile on your computer and lose these nicknames? In older versions of outlook 2000-2007 you could locate the NK2 file under your user profile> local settings> Application Data> Microsoft> Outlook folder on the old computer or profile and copy it over to the new computer or new profile folder.

In outlook 2010 this no longer works because nicknames are no longer referencing this NK2 file. You need to import the NK2 file but there is a trick to making it work and so the old process of copying the NK2 from the old location is still required.

To import .nk2 files into Outlook 2010, follow these steps:

1. Make sure that the .nk2 file is in the following folder: %appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook

Note The .nk2 file must have the same name as your current Outlook 2010 profile. By default, the profile name is “Outlook.” To check the profile name, follow these steps:
a. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
b. Double-click Mail.
c. In the Mail Setup dialog box, click Show Profiles.

2. Click Start, and then click Run.

3. In the Open box, type outlook.exe /importnk2, and then click OK. This should import the .nk2 file into the Outlook 2010 profile.

Note After you import the .nk2 file, the contents of the file are merged into the existing nickname cache that is currently stored in your mailbox.
Note The .nk2 file is renamed with a .old file name extension on the first start of Outlook 2010. Therefore, if you try to re-import the .nk2 file, remove the .old file name extension.