from Hacker News

How Wedgies.com Sidestepped a Domain Squatting Felon to buy their dotcom

by porterhaney on 7/16/12, 5:01 PM with 21 comments

• by richardv on 7/16/12, 5:14 PM

  Isn't the title misleading?

  - The guy wasn't domain squatting at all.

  - They weren't Wedgies.com (they were Wedgi.es)

  - They didn't sidestep him at all. They negotiated fairly.

  If you like domain stories, check out Klouts.. (Which I actually prefered to this story). I kind of felt mislead after reading this artciel (albeit it was an enjoyable story).

  http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/29/how-klout-got-klout-com/

• by mistercow on 7/16/12, 5:30 PM

  >In a final twist, the rental fee on his ankle tracking bracelet was up, and he needed money in a hurry to avoid being sent back to jail — hence the frantic request for $500. This was getting weirder and weirder.

  So let me get this straight: the government requires ankle tracking bracelets for parolees, outsources these bracelets to the private sector, and then requires the parolees themselves to pay the rental fees out of pocket. And since the parolees themselves have virtually no bargaining power, this is a privatization scenario where market forces are almost entirely absent.

  Just brilliant.

• by talmand on 7/16/12, 5:50 PM

  Is anyone else disturbed by the idea that the host provider offered to "turn off the DNS to the site" for some person just because they contacted him? Then passed along the domain owner's personal info to that person? Hopefully they asked for permission before handing out personal info. But how did they explain the outage to their customer?

  "Oh, we shut you down because somebody we don't know wants to talk to you. Do you mind if we give him your current email address? By the way, what is your current email address?"

  Seems it might be of service to several people to know who this provider is.

• by jawns on 7/16/12, 5:11 PM

  “We’ve already found that people who don’t know each other ask the same questions,” says Jacobson. “Tupac vs Biggie, East Coast vs. West Coast… What’s more interesting though, are the answers to the question, ‘Of people who prefer Tupac, do they prefer skiing or snowboarding?’ These are the nuggets that marketers dream of.”

  That's basically what http://www.correlated.org does.

  But I don't think they'll find that marketers are clamoring for this type of data. And I think Correlated does a good job of showing why.

• by joshstrange on 7/16/12, 5:11 PM

  Between "Unfortunately, the domain was harder to come by than a tequila shot at an AA meeting" and "This is the digital version of “smoking him out” (like you would a rabbit in a hole, not a pothead in a dorm room)." I couldn't stop laughing.

• by theyCallMeSwift on 7/16/12, 5:17 PM

  Online surveys need to be "less boxer and more brief". Wedgies is doing a damn good job of solving that if you ask me.

• by ludicast on 7/16/12, 5:11 PM

  Good time meeting these guys on the doer bus. Wedgies has some legs to it.

• by lnanek2 on 7/16/12, 5:42 PM

  explanation of their service reminds me of thumb: http://thumb.it/

  although I guess thumb is targeted at everyone, wedgies more business/marketers

• by jjacobson on 7/16/12, 5:10 PM

  Is what we did terrible?