Am I wrong to guess that this domain is worth more than a million dollars?
Rejecting that kind of money for making a point is… I don’t know, but it’s definitely something.
Edit: not just rejecting money, but defending it in court!
Gail.com FAQ
151–160 of 224 posts
Re: Gail.com FAQ
#152This reminds me of the old purple.com FAQ: https://web.archive.org/web/20020611055145/http://www.purple... Sadly I just checked the live site and it appears they did sell out in the end.
Re: Gail.com FAQ
#153I have a two-character .org. I've never, in the 25 years I've owned it, gotten a non-scam offer for it. (Not that I'd sell for less than change-your-life money.)
Re: Gail.com FAQ
#154Reading this felt like a trip through a portal into the nascent Internet in late 90s. I hope this never goes down.
Yes, this reminds me of 190 Bowery, a building in NYC that some photographer bought for $102k back in the 70s. He finally caved in though selling it for $55m in 2014. https://ny.curbed.com/2019/7/31/20732103/jay-myself-document...
According to wikipedia, maintenance cost was $300k per year. Quite a feat, owning it for so many years.
Re: Gail.com FAQ
#155Reading this felt like a trip through a portal into the nascent Internet in late 90s. I hope this never goes down.
> I hope this never goes down. I'm afraid it just has. Perhaps it'll go up again eventually. In the meantime, the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20230106230031/https://gail.com/
Cool to see the archive history for it! 6,520 captures, back to December 1998, which just has a parking page on it: https://web.archive.org/web/19981206131432/http://www.gail.c...
EDIT: Oh neat, the FAQ's changed over the years too.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120119204931/http://gail.com/
Q: Gail, your website contains some pretty controversial stuff; aren't you worried about laws like SOPA being passed?
A: Yes, if SOPA passes, my little piece of the 'net could be blacklisted. This is why I urge you to please support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who will fight to protect your rights from the corporations who seem to have Congress in their pocket. Here’s a link to the EFF’s website where you can learn more: http://eff.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20130102160945/http://gail.com/
Q: Why isn't there any content here?
A: All personal web content is hidden on back pages to conserve bandwidth.
Q: Wow, you have a great website, can you suggest others like yours?
A: Yes, here's one of my favorites: http://purple.com
Q: Gail, what is your take on the CISPA bill?
A: Like SOPA and PIPA before it, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) attempts to further errode our rights on the 'net. Also like SOPA and PIPA, we should do our best to inform ourselves and others, and kick this bit of evil to the curb before it can even come to a vote in Congress.
In short, CISPA is a very broad and loosly written law that allows any private company to give any and all data it has collected on you and give it to the government without any kind of judicial oversight. This is some seriously scary Orwellian stuff our own government is trying to implement, and it needs to be stopped.
To start educating yourself about what's going on, please read this great Wired article about the massive data center the NSA is building in Utah to house and data mine your personal data (e.g., telephone calls, e-mail, credit card charges, etc.) This article was written by James Bamford, who literally wrote the book about the NSA back in the early eighties. Once you've read the article, head over to the Democracy Now website and watch the interview with William Binney, who worked for the NSA for almost forty years and provided Mr. Bamford with some of the information for his article. Want to help do something about this knuckle-headedness? Head over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation website and learn how to help.
(Both the CISPA and SOPA questions are gone by 2014 and replaced with the EFF "ad".)
The current state aside from traffic numbers seems to have come in around 2018-19: https://web.archive.org/web/20190127034732/https://gail.com/
Re: Gail.com FAQ
#156I owned a domain name similar to a popular email hosting service at one time and setup wildcard acceptance of all emails sent to it. The influx of typod emails was hilarious but overwhelming.
Re: Gail.com FAQ
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the page layout is likely designed to be readable on anything that speaks HTTP. Including text-based browsers, mobile devices with low bandwidth and performance, screen readers, etc. All you have to do to get the text width you want is resize your browser window.
None of those things are harmed by putting a maxwidth that limits the line length to something reasonable for the viewport size.
Have you ever met rms?
http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...
Re: Gail.com FAQ
#158Respect.
F
Re: Gail.com FAQ
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope this never goes down. I'm afraid it just has. Perhaps it'll go up again eventually. In the meantime, the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20230106230031/https://gail.com/
Cool to see the archive history for it! 6,520 captures, back to December 1998, which just has a parking page on it: https://web.archive.org/web/19981206131432/http://www.gail.c... EDIT: Oh neat, the FAQ's changed over the years too. https://web.archive.org/web/20120119204931/http://gail.com/ Q: Gail, your website contains some pretty controversial stuff; aren't you worried about laws like SOPA being passed? A: Yes, i…
> A: Yes, here's one of my favorites: http://purple.com
purple.com has since caved.
Re: Gail.com FAQ
#160Fun story. Back in day when bitflip domain research was released, I immediately offered it as a service to our customers. Register all available likely typos and bitflips. Computers flip dns lookip bits /surprisingly/ often. Run email, web, and other collectors. See what you get. We got so much legit data. The real good was owning those domains, but it was amazing to see how much compromising and sensitive data we co…
> Computers flip dns lookip bits /surprisingly/ often.
Thought 1: is this because of the source/destination computer; or is this because network middleboxes, as embedded devices, are budget-optimized, and so are maybe running their CPUs at funny voltages, with low-quality RAM, etc; and DNS, as a UDP protocol, does little to prevent packets from mutating on the wire?
Thought 2: Presumably this would imply that DNS results would get bit-flipped just as often as DNS queries, no? So you'd just as often be receiving A records for bit-flipped IPs. Which you can't really do much about.