Okay.. so where do I start?
About ten years ago, give or take whatever, I had a chat "friend" named Kathleen, who lived near Bremmerton, Washington. Kathleen was divorced with 2 or 3 young boys, in an apartment on social security disability. She dabbled with graphic design and she hosted a free site, probably at Geocities, if I remember right, with free personal web graphic sets.
I have and had no problem with the above statistical information of this "friend". Life hands us all different cards and we do what we can, in most circumstances.
Kathleen quickly became one of those friend's who would offer to help you with something, or give you something she could design or had knowledge about, "for a fee". On the other hand, she also seemed to breathe to drill me with questions to fill her own empty knowledge bank. The scales were very uneven in this arena, but I felt that it was tiny, in the grand perspective of life, and I could push through this and just try to open up to her.
Fast forward slightly..
Kathleen decides that she wants to venture into web design and sell her graphic sets, keeping her sets related to "kids" free for personal use. Her domain was something with kats or katz and kids or kidz in it, if I recall correctly. I'm big on using "z" for "s" so I'm not sure if she did or not, now. It doesn't really matter for this story.
Kathleen and I shared each other's dreams of our businesses that we were building, among the hustle and bustle of being young, single mom's. My dream was a little wider than hers, but she had the skills of graphic design on her side and that was much more than I could say for my own designing that I was doing.
My business plan had some web design, with hired graphic designer's, as a side note to a much larger picture that included everything that the small or home-based business could/would need to function in everyday, virtual becoming America.
As time passed, Kathleen started web designing. I don't remember on what scale that she did this. She seemed to never need to sleep and had a brain that could absorb orange juice fed in very large quantities. My brain fog life just could not keep up with the knowledge base that she was acquiring. At the same time, we still were on a give/take relationship, at this point. I gave. She took and offered a joking "for a fee" response to anything I asked about.
My frustrations and worries for Kathleen and her boys only grew larger, as she would talk about eviction notices for her apartment, then her mother bailing her out, with rent money, or taking her to a local food bank. Let me not forget to inform you that her money was leaving her pocket's, left and right to domain name registration and web hosting fees. Every day she had either a new discovery or a huge dilemma. She exhausted me and I became very busy planning a wedding.. my own.
In a rather short period of time, we drifted apart, got caught up into our own "new" lives and found each other, again, about two years, or so, later.
Kathleen was doing very well, for herself and her little family. She had stopped playing with graphics, staying up all night, and was also not designing web pages anymore.
Her business focused on domain name registrations and web hosting. Sound familiar to anyone that knows me? *smile*
Kathleen had moved out of her little apartment, had a house built for her family and her business, and had several employees that came to her home business, each day, who pretty much ran the show for her, while she was very busy with being a mom to busy and challenging children. I'm not sure how her mother fit into all of this, but she was an every day part of conversation, as well.
At the time, I was still living in Jacksonville, Florida. She hooked me up to chat with her ex-husband and well, he was a really nice guy. I'm not quite sure how to put the puzzle together for each of them, because I knew them well enough to wonder why they had divorced, not much unlike my circumstance, then, with my ex-husband.
He even had a hosting account for his personal domain, with her business, too!
Okay, so here I was, two year's later, in pretty much the same financial boat I was in before, as I shared my dreams of what I wanted my business to become.. and here she was, someone I couldn't quite communicate with.. someone above me and out of my social league, so to speak.
I looked into Kathleen's business because she had set up a very simple, easy to modify and personalize, knowledge base of files, forms, legalities, etc for the base business model I desired. I could feed off some of her knowledge and accomplishments, the way she wanted it done.. "for a fee". I never really considered that I was paying her to be my friend, and for the most part, I adapted her models to help my own business start where I wanted it to go.
I was adding web hosting and internet resources to my virtual assisting business, to further some income models for me, while I could increase what I could offer to my established and growing business circle. It seemed win/win and I was very pleased that she was willing to help me, too.
For about two years, I registered all my domains through Kathleen's business. I paid her monthly for web hosting and suffered tremendously with a huge lack of customer service or care on the part of her tech support. I had too much knowledge for them, and when I had finally given up trying to help myself, I was insulted with their lack of listening skills and the constant merry-g0-round of emails that really didn't help me, at all, and only seemed to really waste my time.
So, one day I emailed Kathleen directly and explained to her my serious issues. She was very kind and fixed my problems right away. I felt as if her tech support wanted to teach me how to double-click when my problems were about broken links in a system that was their side supported! She also told me to only contact her, in the future and that she would take care of me. I felt this great sense of relief. I finally felt that I could take back some that I had spent year's giving. Not that I want any friendship equally balanced.. but there is a point where fair needs to play ball, too.
In October 2001, I finally found my niche. I registered my domain name: FromMyOwnOffice.com. It was my central nervous system to my home and business life. My children and I all had our web based email at that domain and it was quite a catchy phrase that fit well on my business cards, too. Life was good.
About a year, or so, later, Kathleen's business had expanded to some different arena's. She was quite secretive about her changes and I wasn't quite sure where her business was based and what she actually did anymore.. but she was doing well and I was proud of how far she had come.
As part of her expansion, she contracted with a different company for better virtual dedicated server's. She offered her current client's the option to move to the new server's or to wait it out for the complete transition.. that I don't think ever fully happened, the way we thought it was going to happen. I moved to the new server's immediately and expanded my business avenue greatly.
Before the complete transfer to the new system.. something happened that devastated her business, or so it appeared, over night. From what I could understand, whichever group of server's that I was not hosting on, were "spammed" or hit in some fashion, and the domains she had (for herself and her clients) on those servers were frozen. This would not have been an overwhelming damaging situation for her, because she was split on two different companies and could move them over, if time was in her favor.. which its not in a virtual demanding world.
At the same time that her clients were pulling out, because their domains were frozen and inaccessible, her own automated billing domains were also hosted on the frozen server's. She quickly went into litigation and fell into a growing tornado of nightmares. She couldn't bill her clients, so she couldn't pay her own bills. Her client files were just as inaccessible on the server's, too. Overnight, we were given "bankruptcy" notices and a final closing date to move our domains to our own new hosting server's.
I had a little cushion, because my domains were transferable and not part of the litigation with the other parent company. My credit cards weren't being billed for the hosting that I was receiving, but I was immediately threatened.
Two days before the final date, I emailed notices of name server changes. I had moved my domains, temporarily to a horrible hosting option, that later came back to bite me, but not as hard as what Kathleen did to me and my business.
None of my domains were transferred. NONE! I had my client base on paper and my own hard drive's, so I didn't lose that, but all my client's lost their domains, too. My children and I immediately had no email, too.
Kathleen's business vanished, or so it appeared. Within a few weeks, my domain name registrations had a new admin business name contact on them. I contacted her, briefly, and was pitched sales info for how to register with the new business. I had already paid to renew them and host them for a year somewhere else!
What I didn't know, was that she had continued her endless idea's of future domain names and had set up a new niche, for herself, and as is part of the American dream, not a whole lot changed for her business model, it just got a face lift and a new name. She had learned some hard lessons. Or so I thought.
For the last 3-4 years, after I had moved away from Florida, moving my business and home addresses.. I waited for the anniversary dates of the domain name registrations.. or rather their expiration dates. Every year, she renewed my domain names.
The whois database showed the two I needed the most, registered with two different registrars. They still showed my name as the registered owner. One had my previous address and the other had my address prior to that, on it. They were only being renewed for one year, at a time, so I just "kept keepin' on" as my step-momma would say.
I had contacted one of the registrar's for information about the legalities of this issue. It is technically "hijacking" in the modern of times we live in. The registrar told me that I had to prove I was the information on the registrations. I couldn't do that. My phone and address were no longer in Florida. Neither was she, for that matter.
So, last week, as I'm on hold with tech support for some domain issues, I plug in those old domains into the whois database that I'm staring at. "And what to my wandering eyes should appear?"
A new registrar name!
About this time, the blasting music stops and on the line is a tech, and I had to refocus.
The next day, I get back and do a more thorough whois "investigation" and I simply can't believe what I found. First, to my surprise, all of my domains have been released, now, except frommyownoffice.com!
In February, it was placed under private registration. Now, this is where I must tell all of you that this could easily happen to you, extremely differently than it happened to me, too. Let me continue explaining what appears to be "known" now, first.
When a domain name is registered "private", the name, address, and phone number of the person registering it, is hidden from public view. So it appears that I'm not on the registration information anymore.
At the bottom of the page there is a link to report false data connected to the whois report. I thought long and hard about this. Basically, what this means, is that if I can prove that an address is invalid, because postal mail was returned, or an email is invalid because email has bounced, then I can report false information. However, none of this information is available in a private registration.
There was ONLY one minor clue that I'm still connected to this site in the registration. There is a "last updated" date, an expiration date, and a creation date. The creation date is 11 October 2001. I registered that domain on that date.
Now, it appears that she has changed her business name on the registration, which I forgot to mention earlier, in my prior whois database research. And I also had seen a different registrar name, so she was able to change that, too. She was my admin. contact, as part of her previous business, for the domain name registrations. She has an open door to them.
So, here's my serious quandary right now. I have no problem, and I fully support private domain name registrations. I think the world is crazy and I don't think addresses and phone numbers should be available in public databases, like this. Its rather inexpensive to register them private.
But, do you think, that we, as citizen's and human beings with rights, should be able to also safeguard against our own information being erroneously used in these same private databases? So, don't let me search for the owner of a domain, but let me search your database for my own NAME!
I want to know when someone is doing something illegally, on the internet, and my name, address, and phone number are attached to the domain name registrations, but are not public knowledge, so I'm unaware of it!
What is wrong with this picture?
To make my matter worse. Some crap is being built on the domain name now. Its basically not so much "operational", but "there". It appears to be organized affiliate, or fed links. There is no contact information, no email addresses, nothing.. no service name of who is hosting the account, who is building the site, etc.
So, what did I do? Well, I registered frommyownoffice.net and I'm going to find a legal way to tell my story!
I know Kathleen's name. I know her business mailing address and phone number. I know one of the registrar's that she is affiliated with. I know her business name. I know her current domain. I don't have to disclose those things to tell my story. But I own the registration of that domain name, so am I wrong to exploit its story?
Her name is not associated on her "new" domain/website, but IS connected to her own registered domain, in a whois directory. I have not disclosed any specific information here that would link anyone to know who she is, unless they KNOW her.
Ironically, you might find it a great chuckle to know that her old domain and her current domain are both still registered to HER and are not privately registered. One was updated last month and one is expiring next month. There are two addresses and the same phone number.
MY domain is privately registered but her domain's are not?? Yeah, it seems legit to me, too! NOT!
