Sep 29

#IKEAfail Is The Only Hashtag You Need To Know About

Posted in: Today's Chili

IKEA is one of those stores that means something different to everyone. It might be the place that helped you furnish your first apartment; or perhaps you see it as a miserable maze to get trapped in on weekends. Despite all this, one thing’s for certain: the Swedish superstore does make for some great entertainment.

And if we ever needed proof, we’ve found it in the hashtag known as IKEAfail. Check out some of our favorite highlights below.

People on Instagram get it.

That awkward moment when the drawers don’t fit…

That terrible realization that one’s a bar stool and the other’s a kiddy chair…

That sinking feeling when the tool gives up before you do…

That painful awareness that even the directions confuse themselves…

That strong regret when the price just wasn’t worth it…

That miserable moment when the post-shopping ice cream you bought falls…

And the frustration on Twitter is so real.

That awkward moment when the register line knows you’re making a bad investment…

That terrible realization that something’s just a little off…

That sinking feeling when the shipping label is trying to warn you…

That painful awareness that even the screws aren’t on your side…

That strong regret when you ordered things separately…

That miserable moment when you’re not the only one who dropped their post-shopping trip ice cream…

Have something to say? Check out HuffPost Home on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram.

**

Are you an architect, designer or blogger and would like to get your work seen on HuffPost Home? Reach out to us at homesubmissions@huffingtonpost.com with the subject line “Project submission.” (All PR pitches sent to this address will be ignored.)

No Comments
Sep 29

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus third party bend testing performed

Posted in: Today's Chili

iphone6plus-bendOver the last several weeks there have been a rash of reports going around that the new big screen iPhone 6 Plus bends like taffy if you put it in a pocket. Apple finally responded to the rigmarole and announced that so far only nine iPhone 6 Plus smartphones had been bent that it knew of. While many might not … Continue reading

No Comments
Sep 29

In 'The News Sorority,' Sheila Weller Serves Up Substance & Dish About Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric & Christiane Amanpour

Posted in: Today's Chili

If you want to pay me $15 million a year, I promise never to say a bad word about you. I will work until I drop. I will be a saint to my staff. And if our project fails, I will take all the blame.

That’s not how it works in television news, which is why there’s enough backbiting, envy and ambition in “The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour — and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News” to fill almost 500 pages.

On one level, “The News Sorority” is a serious book, a valuable history of a transitional era in media that will be read and taught long after no one can remember why “anchor” doesn’t just apply to boats.

For now, though, it won’t be read that way, for “The News Sorority” is a dish fest — if you care what Katie and Diane and Christiane are really like, for God’s sake do not start reading on a Friday night, because you’ll miss Bill Maher and may just be finishing when John Oliver comes on.

How dishy? Like this:

When Diane scored an interview that Katie wanted, Katie asked, loudly: “I wonder who she blew this time.”

Diane, on wardrobe choices for women in broadcasting: “Always wear clothes in fabrics that men like to touch.”

Katie once told an executive she’d been fired — she hadn’t been — so could get a promotion to a job she wanted.

Diane’s such a slick politician that “she thinks she doesn’t leave fingerprints — but she leaves cat paw prints on people’s foreheads.”

Katie gave a Christmas party for her entourage that could be seen by lesser staffers at the lesser party.

Diane once had her then boyfriend Richard Holbrooke call a production assistant and reduce her to tears.

And Christiane? Where’s that dish? Scarce. Very scarce. She never said she went to Brown — although she was a housemate of John Kennedy Jr., she graduated from the University of Rhode Island — but if that was your misimpression, she wasn’t always quick to correct it. In the early days of CNN, she sometimes cleaned the foreign desk with Fantastik. And, much later, she wasn’t above saying, “Do you know I’m the world’s best known foreign correspondent?”

There’s not much dish on Amanpour because she’s the real deal, an old-fashioned correspondent who runs toward trouble and doesn’t neuter her reporting with the bullshit false equivalency of too many of her colleagues. Her reporting in Bosnia is probably the single biggest reason Bill Clinton and Tony Blair intervened in that humanitarian crisis. And her dispatches from the Middle East could be tough on Israel.

Because most readers will probably skip or skim the chapters about Amanpour, this book is, for practical purposes, about Katie and Diane and their footrace to be the first female anchor of the evening news. That gives the book the feel of instant nostalgia. As Weller writes, “The venerable six-thirty news broadcast has been a classy feature of American conversation almost since the beginning of television, but it was also a relic of another era: before 24-hour cable and the Internet, which gave the news in real time; before the complicated, constantly in flux schedules of modern life.” Translation: The 6:30 PM network news is as dead as disco. And that makes Katie and Diane’s careers seem like a fool’s errand, a waste of time and talent. Yes, they broke the glass ceiling, but no women will stand on their shoulders. They were the first — and the last.

I loved Weller’s last book, Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon — and the Journey of a Generation for its authoritative reporting and deep understanding. Like that book, “The News Sorority” is exhaustively reported. And unauthorized, which is a good thing — can you imagine if Katie and Diane and their handlers had final approval of the manuscript? This would have been the story of the Bobbsey Twins and their bookish friend Christy. And I wouldn’t have lost a weekend and you wouldn’t have read this.

[Cross-posted from HeadButler.com]

No Comments
Sep 29

It's Not Your Imagination, Your Health Insurance Has Gotten Worse

Posted in: Today's Chili

A quiet revolution happened to your job-based health benefits and you may not have noticed. It’s happened gradually, but insurance looks a lot different than it did just 15 years ago: Americans are paying more and getting less.

That trend is only getting worse.

Gone are the days of deluxe health plans that simply paid employees’ medical bills without questions or problems. Now, faced with their own rising health care expenses, employers are forcing more risk for big medical bills onto workers, and asking them to take a more active role in shopping for lower-cost health care than they have before.

Last year, when Amy Czerwinski learned she had breast cancer and would need a double mastectomy as well as seven months of chemotherapy, she was not in the best place to start bargain-hunting for care.

“This is a life-and-death thing,” said Czerwinski, a 38-year-old accountant who lives in Hendersonville, Tennessee. “You go to the specialist, and they tell you who they would suggest. I would be afraid to shop around and get a cheaper oncologist.”

And that highlights a key problem with putting the onus on patients to be smart shoppers for doctors: The spread of health insurance that makes us pay more money upfront has outpaced the spread of reliable, accessible information about prices and about the quality of medical services.

Health insurance companies and employers use buzzwords like “consumer-directed health plans” to describe these approaches to health benefits. Higher deductibles and other means of making patients pay more when they receive health care — like “coinsurance” that requires consumers to cover a percentage of their bills rather than charging a flat copayment — are a way for employers to save money.

The average annual cost of a single worker’s insurance plan more than doubled between 1999 and 2013, rising from about $2,200 to around $5,900, according to a survey of employers published by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust last month. Over that same time, the average share of that cost paid by single workers inched up from 14 percent to 18 percent — meaning employers are chipping in less, even as costs rise precipitously.

And in the past five years, another trend has rapidly spread: higher and higher deductibles, which require workers to pay cash upfront for their medical care before the insurance begins picking up a share of the bills. Between 2006 and 2013, the portion of single workers whose plans have deductibles of at least $1,000 jumped from 10 percent to 38 percent, according to the survey.

Deductibles are supposed to give patients a financial motivation — what insiders call “skin in the game” — to shop around for less expensive medical providers, and to reconsider treatments they may not need. When you’re responsible for paying more of the bill, you’re more likely to care about how much something costs.

In some key respects, these changes have been beneficial. In the old days, a patient had no reason to care how much a service or a drug might cost, because their health plan would cover almost all of it. This is one reason U.S. health care spending went up and up over the decades. And the switch to health insurance that requires patients to pay more of the total cost has contributed to a historic slowdown in national health spending and to slower growth in job-based insurance premiums in recent years.

That doesn’t mean a whole lot when you get sick, though. Health insurance designed to make workers more cost-conscious also exposes them to big expenses when they need lifesaving care, as Czerwinski learned. “Your insurance won’t even touch anything until you hit your deductible,” she said.

employee health benefits
Photo courtesy of Amy Czerwinski

Czerwinski racked up more than $15,000 in out-of-pocket costs as she struggled to meet the deductibles for her employer’s health insurance while undergoing a double mastectomy and seven months of chemotherapy.

“You pretty much ignore the cost, because you just do,” she said. “And then when you finally have to start opening the bills, it’s kind of too late because you’ve already incurred the expenses.” Her employer and the Patient Advocate Foundation, which referred HuffPost to Czerwinski, helped cover her expenses, she said.

A key element of the reasoning behind large deductibles and higher cost-sharing is that it will spur patients to become smarter consumers of health care who will do the research on which medical providers charge lower prices or have been proven to offer high-quality treatments.

But the facts that patients need in order to make informed choices are hard to find and complex to evaluate.

“I don’t even know how you would do that,” Czerwinski said. “I didn’t even know that was an option.”

And people facing high cost-sharing tend to skip not just expensive care they could do without, but also services they actually need, research shows.

There has been some improvement on this score, as health insurance companies, employers and other organizations are gathering and disseminating cost and quality information for patients to use. A growing number of health insurance companies, for example, are sharing these data with a nonprofit called the Health Care Cost Institute, which will publish them on its website next year.

Yet merely making the information available isn’t enough, said David Newman, the institute’s executive director. “Transparency in and of itself is not going to be the silver bullet. It can help,” he said.

Employers who are shifting more responsibility for managing health care costs to workers should do more to make sure their employees understand how their benefits work and get them invested in the new way of doing things, said Julie Stone, the North America health and group benefits leader at Towers Watson, a consulting firm.

“There is an employer role to keep that front and center, and give examples and illustrate [that] it’s in everybody’s best interests, it’s a win-win for the employer and the employee from a cost-management perspective,” Stone said.

Czerwinski is now cancer-free, but she still worries about paying for the doctor visits and drugs she’ll need to make sure the disease doesn’t come back. And she’s not confident her health benefits will keep up with her needs or stay on her family’s budget.

“Insurance companies don’t pay like they used to. And it’s only going to get worse, and that’s very scary because our salaries are not increasing at the same rate the insurance costs are increasing,” Czerwinski said. “It didn’t use to be this bad.”

No Comments
Sep 29

'Umbrella Revolution' Protests Spread In Hong Kong

Posted in: Today's Chili

HONG KONG (AP) — Pro-democracy protesters wearing masks and wielding umbrellas to protect against pepper spray and tear gas expanded their rallies throughout Hong Kong on Monday, defying calls to disperse in a major pushback against Beijing’s decision to limit democratic reforms in the Asian financial hub.

Riot police withdrew from the extraordinary scene of chaotic tear gas-fueled clashes that erupted the evening before and the government asked the student-led protesters to disperse peacefully. But the demonstrators, whose use of umbrellas, plastic wrap and other improvised defenses has led some to dub their movement the “Umbrella Revolution,” remained camped out on a normally busy highway near the Hong Kong government headquarters. Supporters were using the phrase on social media.

Police had tried earlier to negotiate, with an officer asking them through a bullhorn to clear the way for the commuters. A protester, using the group’s own speaker system, responded by saying that they wanted Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying to demand a genuine choice for the territory’s voters.

“Do something good for Hong Kong. We want real democracy!” he shouted.

China has called the protests illegal and endorsed the Hong Kong government’s crackdown. The clashes, images of which have been beamed around the world, are undermining the city’s image as a safe financial haven, and raised the stakes of the face-off against President Xi Jinping’s government. Beijing has taken a hard line against threats to the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, including clamping down on dissidents and Muslim Uighur separatists in the country’s far west.

The mass protests are the strongest challenge yet to Beijing’s decision last month to reject open nominations for candidates under proposed guidelines for the first-ever elections for Hong Kong’s leader, promised for 2017. Instead, candidates must continue to be hand-picked by a committee of mostly local pro-Beijing tycoons — a move that many residents viewed as reneging on promises to allow greater democracy in the semi-autonomous territory.

With rumors swirling, the Beijing-backed and deeply unpopular Leung reassured the public that speculation that the Chinese army might intervene was untrue.

“I hope the public will keep calm. Don’t be misled by the rumors. Police will strive to maintain social order, including ensuring smooth traffic and ensuring the public safety,” Leung said. “When they carry out their duties, they will use their maximum discretion.”

That came hours after police lobbed canisters of tear gas into the crowd on Sunday evening. The searing fumes sent demonstrators fleeing, though many came right back to continue their protest. The government said 26 people were taken to hospitals.

To ward off tear gas, demonstrators used homemade defenses such as plastic wrap, which they used to cover their face and arms, as well as goggles and surgical masks.

But umbrellas, used to deflect pepper spray, have become the movement’s most visible symbol. They were the main line of defense Sunday for a huge crowd demonstrators trying to push past barricades manned by police dousing the crowd with pepper spray from backpack sprayers.

As the crowd surged forward, officers tore umbrellas away one by one and threw them aside.

Demonstrator Rick Chan summed up the feelings of many on Monday when he shouted to police watching the encampment, “We’re only carrying umbrellas!”

“I came last night and saw police fire many rounds of tear gas at the crowd, who were mostly young students and even included some old people,” said Chan, a 32-year-old finance worker. “I feel it was extremely unnecessary. They could see protesters were not dangerous. Instead they made everyone very angry. I plan to stay here indefinitely.”

Supporters donated new umbrellas, which were distributed to those needing them at stations around the protest zone. They also did double duty, providing shade from the blazing sun.

The protest has been spearheaded largely by college and university-age activists but has gathered momentum among a broad range of people from high school students to the elderly.

Protesters also occupied streets in other parts of Hong Kong Island, including the upscale shopping area of Causeway Bay as well as across the harbor in densely populated Mong Kok on the Kowloon peninsula.

More than 200 bus routes have been canceled or diverted in a city dependent on public transport. Subway exits have also been closed or blocked near protest area.

After China took control of Hong Kong from the British in 1997, it agreed to a policy of “one country, two systems” that allowed the city a high degree of control over its own affairs and kept in place liberties unseen on the mainland. It also promised the city’s leader would eventually be chosen through “universal suffrage,” a pledge that Hong Kongers now say Beijing is failing to keep.

While it was under British rule, Hong Kong’s leader was chosen by London in an arrangement that faced virtually no opposition. But now, residents want a greater say in their own government and future.

Momentum for the protests started building after university and college students began a class boycott last Monday, which they said would continue until officials meet their demands for reforming the local legislature and withdrawing the proposal to screen election candidates.

Leaders of the broader Occupy Central civil disobedience movement joined them early Sunday, saying they wanted to kick-start a long-threatened mass sit-in demanding Hong Kong’s top leader be elected without Beijing’s interference.

Occupy Central issued a statement Monday calling on Leung to resign and saying his “non-response to the people’s demands has driven Hong Kong into a crisis of disorder.” The statement added that the protest was now “a spontaneous movement” of all Hong Kong people.

___

Associated Press writers Elaine Kurtenbach, Louise Watt and Joanna Chiu contributed to this report.

___

Follow Kelvin Chan at twitter.com/chanman

No Comments
Sep 29

Germany To Consider Ban On Late-Night Work Emails

Posted in: Today's Chili

A decade ago, Antje Schmid would have left her office in Germany’s financial hub of Frankfurt, gone out to drink a frothy pilsner or two with friends, and would have put her job out of mind until the next morning.

That was before smartphones. Today, the 25-year-old continues to get emails and calls from colleagues and bosses at the advertising agency long after she’s clocked out.

“The interruptions increased,” Schmid told The Huffington Post in an interview. “You are reachable always and everywhere.”

But that might not last forever. Last month, German Labor Minister Andrea Nahles commissioned a study to assess the psychological and economic effects of work-related stress. The findings, slated to be released in 2016, are expected to generate legislation that would ban employers from contacting workers after office hours. Such a law, currently being pushed by the powerful multi-service trade union Vereinte Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft, or ver.di, now seems more likely to reach fruition since it gained Nahles’ support.

“There is an undeniable relationship between constant availability and the increase of mental illness,” Nahles told the Rheinische Post. “We have commissioned the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health to work out whether it is possible to set load thresholds. We need universal and legally binding criteria.”

Dominik Ehrentraut, a spokesman for the Labor Ministry, told HuffPost a law won’t be formally proposed until the findings are released in 2016.

If passed, such a law could serve as a model for preserving workers’ privacy and curbing the culture of being constantly on-call for work. Though some workers in France earlier this year adopted a so-called ban on emails after 6 p.m., the labor agreement was not cemented into law.

Some large companies, such as Daimler and Volkswagen, have already adopted rules to limit work-related stress. Last month, Daimler allowed about 100,000 workers to delete emails they received while on vacation. In 2011, Volkswagen agreed to stop its BlackBerry servers from sending emails after working hours.

But for many, work still seeps into the home life. Germany is often lampooned as the punctual, industrious workhorse of Europe. But when the country ratified its constitution in 1990, it preserved for its citizens the right to develop one’s personality. And it’s difficult to work on your character and hobbies when your professional life looms constantly in the background.

“That sort of self-development needs time,” Thomas C. Kohler, a German legal expert and law professor at Boston College, told HuffPost, “and the idea that anybody could interrupt you on your own time to have you do work without a good excuse would be contrary to those sorts of attitudes.”

Americans may often conflate staying late at the office with having a strong work ethic, but Germans see it as a sign of poor time management, Kohler said.

“With Germans, while they’re at work, they only work — you’ll rarely hear a radio in the background,” Kohler said. “They consider it a sign of inefficiency if you cannot complete a day’s work in that day. So if you’re staying late at the office, it would often be regarded as a sign of your inability to get the work done.”

He said he expects the government in Berlin to pass legislation to curb off-hour emails and calls, but that drafting such a law to have a meaningful impact across a wide range of industries could be complicated. And then there are the challenges of enforcing it.

For Schmid, most of the after-hours emails she receives are from colleagues with whom she is working on group projects. She said legislation to free workers from the obligation to be always on-call would help rid her of the guilt she feels for not responding. But she doubts that a blanket rule could work.

“Maybe the government could help companies to make up unique rules for their firms, or put pressure on managers,” she said.

If a law doesn’t get enacted, Germany’s famously powerful labor unions could push more companies to adopt standards as to when employees have to be available, said Stephen Silvia, an American University professor and expert in German industrial relations.

“There is a long tradition of the German labor movement carving out free time and pushing for working time reduction,” he said.

He pointed out a famous poster from the 1950s, on which a grinning 5-year-old boy holds his hand up in the air, declaring: “On Saturdays, daddy belongs to me.“

But as technology makes more Germans reachable around the clock, every hour is increasingly up for grabs.

No Comments
Sep 29

When Hackers Steal A Web Address, Few Owners Ever Get It Back

Posted in: Today's Chili

hacker

For nearly two decades, Michael Lee owned a prized piece of Internet real estate: the website MLA.com. The three letters stood for his graphic design and advertising business, Michael Lee and Associates, but they also represented an unusual investment opportunity. A short or memorable Internet address can be worth thousands or even millions of dollars. Facebook reportedly paid $8.5 million to buy Fb.com in 2010, while Porn.com went for $9.5 million in 2007.

Lee, 58, bought his domain in 1997 for a modest $600. A domain name appraiser recently valued the website at $47,000. Lee planned to eventually sell MLA.com and use the money as part of his retirement.

That is, until May of last year, when he received shocking news: A hacker had stolen his website, and there was nothing GoDaddy, his domain registrar, could do to get it back.

“That’s when I freaked out,” he said in a recent interview.

michael lee domain theft

Michael Lee’s domain name, MLA.com, was stolen last
year. He still hasn’t got it back.

More than a year later, Lee still hasn’t recovered his website. He has filed a lawsuit against the site’s new owner, a man in Russia named Alexey Kremnev, hoping a judge will return the address to him. Meanwhile, Lee said the theft has damaged both his professional and personal life. He said his business has lost $200,000 in sales since MLA.com was stolen because customers still try to reach him at his old address. The lost revenue has forced him to lay off freelancers, eat fewer meals out and move his family into a less-expensive home. Lee, who has three grandchildren and lives in the Chicago suburbs with his wife of 34 years, said his retirement plans are now on hold.

“A lot of customers have said, ‘I tried to email you and it kept bouncing back, so I gave the job to someone else,” Lee said in an interview. “I’ve lost a ton of business. I’ve also lost a three-letter domain that I was counting on for my retirement.”

Lee is a victim of domain theft, a scheme in which hackers steal valuable Internet addresses and sell them in online forums or extort their rightful owners. At a time when cyber criminals are targeting banks, retailers and celebrities, domain theft victims suffer a uniquely devastating blow. Many are small business owners who rely on their websites to reach customers online and consider their unique URLs to be expensive property they can sell for a large profit.

Domain theft has been happening since the dawn of the Web. But while the Internet has created a place where small and large businesses can flourish, the law has not evolved to protect people from thieves who hijack their domains. When their websites are stolen, many business owners find they have nowhere to turn to recover them.

Several recent victims interviewed by The Huffington Post said they got little or no help from domain registrars like GoDaddy, Internet.bs or HostMonster. Victims also said they couldn’t get help from local law enforcement or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN, a California-based nonprofit responsible for managing the Internet address system.

jonathan askin domain

Jonathan Askin says domain theft victims have little
legal recourse.

In many cases, victims can’t even file a lawsuit to recover their stolen web addresses because most states don’t have laws that recognize domain names as property, said Jonathan Askin, a technology law professor at Brooklyn Law School.

“It’s a serious problem without any legitimate recourse,” Askin said.

As the value of domain names has grown, major companies are taking security more seriously, even hiring third-party firms to guard their web addresses from thieves. Perhaps as a result, reports of domain theft have become somewhat rare. The FBI received 26 reports of domain theft over the past year, according to an FBI spokesman.

But domain hijacking often goes unreported, Askin said. And it’s small businesses that are both more vulnerable and more likely to be financially destroyed by the theft. Hackers know small businesses make easy targets because they don’t have the resources or knowledge to secure their domain names, said Leo Taddeo, head of the FBI’s cyber division in New York.

Hackers typically go after websites that are not being used by their owners, who have either bought the domains to host websites or to sell them for profit later. So thefts often go unnoticed for months. When victims finally discover what happened, they feel it’s too late to do anything about it, Askin said.

Criminals typically steal domain names by hacking into a victim’s email account. From there, they gain control of a domain — often without its rightful owner knowing — by replying to an email sent by the registrar to approve the transfer of the website to the hacker’s account.

When that happens, most victims contact the company where they bought their domain name, assuming the registrar can quickly get it back. But that’s not always the case.

Known for its sexually charged Super Bowl ads, GoDaddy is the world’s largest registrar. It boasts of having the widest selection of domain names and mostly sells them for between $10 and $50 a year.

But in the fine print, GoDaddy’s terms of service state that customers are “solely responsible” for keeping their websites secure and the company is not liable for loss due to fraud.

When websites are stolen, GoDaddy spokesman Nick Fuller said the company “does everything in our power to help our customers recover their domain names.”

“GoDaddy has a knowledgeable and experienced team dedicated to handling these situations,” Fuller said in an email. “We employ every avenue available to us in order to return hijacked or disputed domain names.”

GoDaddy said the company’s policies — such as waiting two months before transferring a domain to someone else — have protected many customers from thieves who falsely claim their domains were stolen. “In reality, the supposed ‘victim’ in such cases is often really a thief attempting to socially engineer our staff,” Fuller said.

Fuller said the company also offers two-step authentication, which requires customers to enter a pin code sent to their phones when they log in to their accounts. The security feature is supposed to make it harder for hackers to steal domains because they must also have access to their victims’ phones.

Lee said he does not remember GoDaddy offering him the added security feature, and he assumed that he could trust the company to protect his website from hackers.

“The case is pretty clear,” Lee wrote in an email to GoDaddy after he lost MLA.com. “I’ve owned the domain since 1997. I parked [it] with GoDaddy for two years. Someone hacked my account and now it is gone. Your job is to bring it back to where it was.”

But Fuller, the GoDaddy spokesman, said the company can only go so far when a customer’s website is stolen because GoDaddy must follow rules created by ICANN. Fuller said GoDaddy could not return MLA.com to Lee because someone had transferred it to Internet.bs, a lesser-known registrar based in the Bahamas, and Internet.bs refused to transfer it back to GoDaddy.

“We have little recourse in this type of situation, and cannot ‘force’ a gaining registrar to return a domain,” Fuller said.

In an emailed statement, Patty Miller, an Internet.bs representative, said the company could not determine the rightful owner of MLA.com because it was allegedly stolen while managed by another registrar and was transferred legally to Internet.bs. Miller said the company was willing to cooperate with any investigation into the matter, but so far the alleged theft of MLA.com “remains unsubstantiated.”

“Our own investigations into the matter have been concluded,” Miller said. “We urge Mr. Lee to pursue his complaint through the proper legal channels.”

In April, Lee’s attorney, Stevan Lieberman, filed a lawsuit, asking a judge to return MLA.com to him. The case is still pending.

Lee’s graphic design and advertising company has four full-time employees and more than 20 clients, including the credit card company Discover. He said it took eight months to build his business back to where it was before his domain name was stolen. He now runs the company from michaellee.com, which he calls “a longer, less-attractive” domain. Visitors to MLA.com are greeted with a default web page that suggests the site’s new owner hasn’t decided what to do with it.

Lee said the episode has been a painful lesson in how easily someone can steal a domain and “totally upset your personal and business life.”

“You have to start over after having spent years building something up. It just kind of wipes you out.”

– Michael Lee, the former owner of MLA.com

“You have to start over after having spent years building something up,” he said. “It just kind of wipes you out.”

If a registrar like GoDaddy can’t help, domain theft victims have little other recourse. They rarely win lawsuits because courts in most states have ruled that website names are only contracts between customers and domain registrars and victims can’t sue to get them back. California and Nebraska are just two of a few states where the courts treat domain names as physical property and allow victims to file lawsuits to recover them, according to Askin, the professor at Brooklyn Law School.

albert angel domain

Albert Angel convinced prosecutors to charge the hacker
who stole his domain name, P2P.com.

Local police don’t provide much help either because they don’t know how to handle such cases, according to Albert Angel, a former Justice Department lawyer. Angel bought the website P2P.com for $160,000 in July 2005 as an investment, but it was stolen from him a year later. He reported the theft to Miami-Dade police, who sent an officer to his door.

“I told the officer that our domain had been stolen. He scratched his head and said, ‘OK, what’s a domain?’”

– Former Justice Department lawyer Albert Angel

“I told the officer that our domain had been stolen,” Angel said in an interview. “He scratched his head and said, ‘OK, what’s a domain?’”

Angel filed a lawsuit against the thief in New Jersey, where Angel believed that he was living, and gathered enough evidence to convince prosecutors there to pursue a criminal case. They charged Daniel Goncalves, a 25-year-old computer technician living in New Jersey, with stealing P2P.com by hacking Angel’s email account. Goncalves later sold the website for $111,000 to Mark Madsen, a professional basketball player who last played for the Los Angeles Clippers and has also bought and sold domain names.

Madsen was unaware the domain was stolen and later gave P2P.com back to Angel, who has since turned the address into a website that matches people in need of loans with lenders. In 2011, Goncalves pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison in what is believed to be the only criminal conviction for domain theft.

Legal experts and victims have offered several solutions that, if implemented, could help domain theft victims. They argue that Congress should pass legislation that creates a way for them to get their stolen websites back. ICANN could also change its policies to hold registrars like GoDaddy more accountable when domain names are stolen, they say.

For victims who struggle to reclaim their stolen websites, one blogger has emerged as an unlikely source of help. The blogger, who asked that his name not be used because he feared reprisal from hackers, works as a website designer by day and spends his free time publishing a blog about the domain industry called domaingang.com.

domaingang mla

DomainGang.com, run by an anonymous blogger, publishes news on the domain industry. The blogger reported that MLA.com appeared to have been stolen.

In an interview, he said he scours online forums for domain names that appear to be stolen because they are advertised for much less money than they are likely worth. He writes about such cases on his blog and notifies the rightful owners.

“I’ll call them up and say ‘Are you aware that your domain name is up for sale?’ They’ll say, ‘No, I had no idea,’” he said.

The blogger said he wants to help others navigate the confusing, stressful process of recovering a stolen domain because he was once a victim of domain theft himself. A decade ago, hackers found a security hole in the company where he registered a website and stole his domain “just because they could,” he said.

“I don’t want these people to lose their property,” he said. “It’s a big headache for a small business owner who has to go through all these hoops to figure out what’s going on, and then they get resistance from their registrars.”

jordan reid domain theft

Jordan Reid was forced to negotiate with a hacker to get
her domain name back.

Jordan Reid, a popular lifestyle blogger who writes under a pseudonym, said she was met with such resistance when her website, RamshackleGlam.com, was stolen. She took a less-traveled route to get it back: negotiating with the hacker.

In April, Reid learned that a hacker stole her blog name and tried to sell it for $30,000 on Flippa.com, a marketplace for buying and selling websites. The hacker promised the winning bidder all of Reid’s traffic, files, and data, and said she was available to continue writing posts “for hire.”

Reid said she spent 12 hours a day for the next three days on the phone with HostMonster, where she registered the website name, and GoDaddy, where the hacker had transferred it into a private account. Neither company could return her domain.

So Reid decided to deal with the hacker directly. After they agreed on a price, which she said was less than $30,000, Reid wired the money to the hacker through an account with Escrow.com, a third-party money-transfer website.

Three days after her domain had been stolen, her website was released back to her. But the hacker never got the money. Reid said she quickly placed a stop on the payment, and eventually got the money back in a check from Escrow.com five months later. She also filed a complaint with the FBI, which is still investigating. In a blog post about the ordeal, she said she was “absolutely blown away” by the FBI’s quick response.

But Reid is still surprised that she was forced to take matters into her own hands.

“I think it’s pretty extraordinary that the only recourse I had was to interact with a criminal and pay him off,” Reid said in an interview. “That was the only thing I could do.”

.articleBody div.feature-section, .entry div.feature-section{width:55%;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;} .articleBody span.feature-dropcap, .entry span.feature-dropcap{float:left;font-size:72px;line-height:59px;padding-top:4px;padding-right:8px;padding-left:3px;} div.feature-caption{font-size:90%;margin-top:0px;}

No Comments
Sep 29

Eric Frein Manhunt: Search Expands For Accused Cop-Killer

Posted in: Today's Chili

CANADENSIS, Pa. (AP) — The delicate search for a survivalist charged with killing a trooper more than two weeks ago shifted slightly over the weekend in the dense woods that authorities fear may be booby-trapped, state police said Sunday.

Trooper Adam Reed said the search area in the Pocono Mountains largely remains the same as the past two days but has moved slightly to the southeast.

Police are constantly following up on information they receive, Reed said. He declined to go into specifics about why the shift occurred or what new information police may have.

The search for 31-year-old Eric Frein entered its 16th day Sunday. Authorities believe they have Frein contained within a 5-square-mile perimeter around his parents’ home in Canadensis.

Frein is described by authorities as a survivalist, marksman and war re-enactment enthusiast who planned the attack for years, extensively researching how to avoid police manhunts and experimenting with explosives. Frein has held anti-law enforcement views for many years, police said.

Investigators believe he is armed with at least one high-powered rifle and might have booby-trapped the woods where authorities are looking for him.

Frein is charged with opening fire at the Blooming Grove barracks during a shift change on the night of Sept. 12, killing Cpl. Bryon Dickson and seriously injuring Trooper Alex Douglass. He has managed to elude hundreds of law enforcement officials looking for him in the difficult terrain.

Frein has been placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

No Comments
Sep 29

SAM Is A Wireless Electronics Kit That Wants To Make Coding Connected Objects Super Simple

Posted in: Today's Chili

Sam Meet SAM, a wireless electronics kits that’s aiming to make it easier for kids or indeed anyone with an idea for a connected project to get building — using a series of Bluetooth connected pieces and a drag and drop software interface for linking the hardware together. Read More

No Comments
Sep 29

The Cancer-Spotting Smartphone Camera Inspired By Shrimps

Posted in: Today's Chili

The Cancer-Spotting Smartphone Camera Inspired By Shrimps

The lengthy wait for a cancer diagnosis can be one of the most stressful periods of the illness. But what if you could diagnose yourself, without the need for a doctor, in an instant, with a smartphone camera? That’s what researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia are hoping to make possible, with the mantis shrimp acting as the team’s unlikely inspiration.

Read more…



No Comments