[lbo-talk] Panix.net

Jim Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Sun Jan 16 09:13:47 PST 2005


On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 11:46:23 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes:
> Something odd happened to Panix yesterday - it disappeared from
> namespace. Most ateempts to send mail to Panix addresses bounce as
> undeliverable. No one seems to know what happened yet. As an interim
>
> fix, they set up a "Panix.net" domain, so mail addressed to that
> destination will get there. But I've been offline and haven't been
> getting list messages. I'm now sub'd at the Panix.net address. Hope
> we're all being fiercely intelligent, in a civil way, with generous
> helpings of libido and wit.
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

Apparently, the domain name for Panix.com has been hijacked by parties unknown, and the company has been having a lot of trouble getting it back. Over at Marxmail there have been several posts concerning this matter.

------------------------------------------------------ (The following article has been automatically mirrored from MOTD)

(Posted by Alexis Rosen) Sat, Jan 15 2005 -- 6:03 AM ------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- We are currently looking into a very serious error involving our main domain name, "panix.com". It has either been stolen, or been the victim of a very bizarre technical failure on the part of one or more domain registrars or some part or the global DNS system. Some of the entities involved in this failure appear to be in Canada, Great Britain, and Australia, and it's proving challenging to untangle so far. We are of course working on resolving this as soon as possible, since this failure impacts *all* services that use the panix.com name.

Since the errors (or theft) are controlled by domain registrars, and not by us, this is not a simple technical failure that we can resolve on our own by working hard enough. This is a failure of the underlying fabric of the Internet. Since we are reliant on registrars to fix this problem in their databases, we can't provide a definite estimated time to fix this problem. We will however provide updates as soon as we know anything else.

--- Public Access Internet & UNIX [panix.com] - To unsubscribe from motd-system, send email to majordomo at panix.com and in the body of the message put "unsubscribe motd-system" no quotes.


>From a quick web search, it looks like the current page is being served
out of Britain but the domain change was registered in Australia, which will make it harder to get it reversed. Also, it seems pretty clear the name registration hadn't expired, as it is set to do so in April 2006, and nobody as far as I know sells fractional year (and month!) domain name registrations.

The real interesting thing would be to find out who did it and why; the owner is supposed to be in Las Vegas but the contact numbers are all in Britain.

Joaquín

more info on the panix.com hijacking at slashdot:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/16/0027213&tid=95&tid=172&tid =17

pretty scary if you are a domain administrator. marxmail.org is registered seperately so is ok for now. but someone on slashdot raised the possibility of panix folding if they can't resolve this quickly. the relevant domain registrars do not seem to be helpful so far.

it wouldnt surprise me if we see more of this happen now, until the domain registrar system is fixed..

les schaffer



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