ohashi

Joined 17 years ago

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Dec 25
Kevin Ohashi I created a review site based on what people say in social media (Review Signal) focused web hosting reviews. http://www.KevinOhashi.com (Personal) http://ReviewSignal.com (Company) @kevinohashi reach me at kevin at reviewsignal
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Recent submissions

Comment · 2 months ago
That presentation is... weird.

For example, claiming 4 registry families having over a million blocker domains. But there aren't that many registries... and the domains under management by registry is... skewed. .com (verisign) is 37% of all domain registrations. Not to mention .net and other TLDs they manage. So the fact they come in below that number seems meaningless and skewed? I say this as someone who hates Verisign because they're a terrible monopolist.

Then the registrar families with highest domains blocked.

NameCheap registered 14m and had 1.1m abuse domains (~8%) gname had 3.1m with 1m abuse (~32%), dynadot (~20%), namesilo (~20%), godaddy (~5%). That feels pretty unfair calling out NameCheap and GoDaddy who have a fraction of the abuse the other 3 have but show up simply because of their scale?

The registrars with 50%+ of domains blacklisted and top one being 87% screams for an investigation though.

It seems to highlight some potentially suspect actors but also throwing some large companies under the bus simply because they're big?

Comment · 2 months ago
full disclaimer, I have worked on https://udrp.tools for something like a decade now as the developer. We're working on an AI chatbot to help answer these types of questions based on our dataset and other data sources (actual wipo guidelines, udrpperspectives.org). The short answer is no, the answer our AI gave with citations/explanation is below if youre curious:

Does publicly listing a domain for sale mean you'd automatically lose a UDRP arbitration if someone has a trademark for it?

No. A public sale listing is not an automatic loss. Here's how panels actually decide these cases.

The controlling rule

Bad faith based on a sale offer requires that the domain was registered primarily for the purpose of selling to the trademark owner (or a competitor) for more than out-of-pocket costs. Two things must be true at once: (1) the primary purpose of registration was to sell, and (2) the target was that specific trademark holder. A generic public listing on Sedo or Afternic doesn't automatically satisfy either requirement. (WIPO Overview 3.1; UDRP Perspectives 3.5)

What panels actually look at

No single factor decides it. Panels weigh all of these:

How distinctive is the trademark? A coined word like KODAK is treated very differently from a generic term like CLOUD.

Did the registrant plausibly know about the mark when registering? Famous marks raise this inference; obscure marks don't.

Was the offer directed at the trademark owner specifically, or listed publicly for any buyer?

Does the asking price only make sense if the trademark owner is the buyer, or is it consistent with general market prices?

Does the registrant hold a broader portfolio of generic/descriptive domains, or a collection of brand-matching ones?

Was the domain registered after the mark became well-known, or before?

Is there a credible non-trademark reason to want the domain?

Things that do NOT automatically mean bad faith

Listing a domain publicly for sale (UDRP Perspectives 3.5)

Asking a high price (UDRP Perspectives 3.5; WIPO Overview 3.1.1)

Even reaching out to the trademark owner directly — panels look at whether multiple parties were approached and whether the registration was brand-specific (UDRP Perspectives 3.5)

Wanting to profit — legitimate domain investing is a recognized lawful activity under UDRP (UDRP Perspectives 2.6)

When the calculus shifts against you

The harder cases are where the domain is identical to a highly distinctive coined brand, there's no plausible use for the domain other than trading on the trademark, and the asking price is only realistic for the trademark owner itself. In those cases panels have found bad faith even without a direct approach to the owner. A notable example is the three-member panel majority in WIPO case D2022-1570, which found that the asking price implied the complainant was the only conceivable buyer — though a dissent disagreed, illustrating that even these edge cases are not automatic.

Bottom line

The outcome depends on: how famous and distinctive the mark is, whether you had it in your sights at registration, whether there's a credible independent reason to want the domain, and who you're actually marketing it to. Generic terms with multiple plausible buyers, listed publicly, have repeatedly survived UDRP challenges. (UDRP Perspectives 3.5) Coined-brand matches with sky-high asking prices and no other credible use have not.

Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 7 months ago
Maybe someone should start an auditing company for YC... oh
Comment · 9 months ago
That's why I found this interesting, a variety of sources provides different viewpoints on risk. I may not personally agree, but it does help give many perspectives.
Comment · 9 months ago
Yeah that scraper is... not fully ready yet, why I put BETA label on it.

Room for improvement. Thanks :)

Comment · 9 months ago
I've been working on a similar idea for travelers, https://travelsafetydata.com/

It's pulling the travel advisories from US/CA/UK/IE/AU/NZ and aggregating the results/information to help you understand the risks of different countries. It also pulls from other sources for basic country info/risks (eg. women, lgbtq).

Yours is way lighter weight and focused, very cool!

Comment · 10 months ago
Thank you! The idea of trending/historical data is definitely on the radar. As it runs and updates over time, I might actually have this data and be able to add it in the future. I agree with you seeing if things are trending up or down could be really insightful.
Comment · 1 year ago
Isn't having the power to get everyone to do things that favor your service... a monopoly?
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Because they are mostly software developers who think it's different because it impacts them.
Comment · 1 year ago
We just use a slack. The overwhelming single channel? nope. channels for all the hobbies, shitposting, news, games, etc. We even have a discord notification for gaming channel when people get on the gaming channel. Separate notification for the chat channel if someone wants to just chill.
Comment · 1 year ago
"People close to X said the platform pressed vendors that were supplying it with goods or services to spend money on advertising. X is a customer of Amazon Web Services, its cloud-computing unit, and had past-due bills for that. X used those unpaid bills as leverage during negotiations, according to people familiar with the matter."

So Elon doesn't pay his bills either. Not surprising. I wish Amazon just cut services until bills paid, see who actually has leverage in that situation when nothing operates to run ads on and the cesspool can't spread.

Comment · 1 year ago
Hi HN,

I'm super excited to share the open source project I've been working on for the past year because it is finally ready for general use (I hope!).

The project is called Orderly Ape, it's an open source (MIT) distributed, scalable load testing platform that uses k6, grafana, influxdb and kubernetes. It lets you run k6 load tests on your infrastructure and gives you complete control/ownership of the execution and data.

I was motivated to create Orderly Ape because I work a lot with hosting companies and testing them (I run WPHostingBenchmarks.com). It wasn't financially viable to run many large scale tests to benchmark all these companies, so I built Orderly Ape. It allows me to run tests at a fraction of the cost now, no VUser pricing, just the hardware needed to run the tests - scaled/spun up when I need it.

I finally finished documenting (and creating video tutorials) on how to setup/install/run everything. So now people can hopefully actually give it a try.

I would appreciate any feedback/bugs/suggestions/pull requests :)

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