My Domain Was Poached by a Cambodian

I decided I'm going to get back blogging and started by updating my photo. I went to do that and discovered my site down and dead to the world for the first time in over 10 years.

That's not a flex, it's true because my site's setup is deliberately absurdly simple such that its going down means one of two things: the internet and world economy is on fire, or, our old friend DNS is culpable.

Of course, it was the latter. But in a roundabout way. What happened it that I'm an idiot and let my payment card expire, ignored my emails, and had the renewal of davnicwil.com lapse and be poached by a person with registered details in Cambodia. On inspection, it appears this person is the owner of 100s of other poached domains and they use them to forward traffic to an online casino they're running. Also in Cambodia.

It's upsetting that there are people out there who do this kind of thing, mercilessly exploiting the system in a way that simultaneously marks the opposing termini of the Randian virtue spectrum. It induces an emotional state based in disgust, but with a sprig of inspiration and, almost, a peverse respect. Almost. Mostly it's just upsetting. It sucks to do this to people, my Cambodian friend.

Anyway! Good things come of this!

One: A reminder of the Tao of today's internet: you own nothing, you rent. Finders keepers baby. But, information is free, and by extension you as its custodian are too. Or mobile, at least.

Two: more practically, I did have a longstanding dilemma about sticking with my internet handle as my domain. As a domain it's objectively bad. Unreadable, unsayable, and unrecognisable as a token outside of the handle context. But you know, I have latent traffic going there from 10 years of links around the web. I know redirects exist, but I'm a purist who is lazy with admin.

Well fuck all that, my Cambodian Kaiser Soze pulled the trigger for me and the decision is made. davnicwil.com is dead. Viva la expanción! davidnicholaswilliams.com is born.

More than a mere pointer swap, it's a green and fertile field, loose from the links of the past, ready to host an updated photo and a new energy for blogging and other miscellanea to come. Let's go!