Misleading unsolicited emails from Asian domain name companies

30/Apr/2009

auDA is aware that at least two companies apparently based in China and Hong Kong have been sending unsolicited emails to people with .au domain names, attempting to mislead them into registering their name in a number of Asian domain spaces.

Examples include:

We are a domain name registration service company in Asia,

Last week we received a formal application submited by Yadu Investment Co Ltd which wanted to use the keyword “***” to register the Internet Brand and with suffix such as .cn /.com.cn /.net.cn/.hk/ .asia/ domain names.

After our initial examination, we found that these domain names to be applied for registration are same as your domain name and trademark. We aren’t sure whether you have any relation with this company. Because these domain names would produce possible dispute, now we have hold down this registration, but if we do not get your company’s an reply in the next 5 working days, we will approve this company’s application

In order to handle this issue better, Please contact us by Fax ,Telephone or Email as soon as possible.

and

We are a professional domain name registration center in asia, mainly dealing with the domain name registration and internet intellectual property rights protection.

We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “***” as their domain name and Internet keyword on Apr 2th, 2009. Because this involves your company name or trade mark so we inform you in no time. we would like to confirm if this company is your partner, subsection or some one you authorized, if it is not, pls inform us if these domain names and internet keyword are important to you and it is necessary to protect them by registering them first or not, thanks for your cooperation, looking forward to your reply.

auDA does not have jurisdiction to handle complaints about these emails, as they do not involve the registration of .au domain names. We have been advised that authorities in Hong Kong are investigating at least one of the companies sending these emails.

In auDA’s view the claims made in these emails are most likely false and misleading, and we advise people to disregard them.

Kind Regards,
Adam King
Technical Administrative Officer
.au Domain Administration

During the next two days we will be making a slight change to our servers.

If experience any problems after we make the change we can toggle settings in your php.ini EZConfig located under the Software / Services section of your cPanel. It’s strongly recommended that after this upgrade you advise me if you’re having any problems with your site.

Most major software platforms will have no issue but some older scripts may require that magic_quotes_gpc be set to on.

As you are aware, we have two servers - acswebservices and acs-webhosting.  For those of you hosted at acs-webhosting there will be scheduled maintenance at 5pm Thursday 20th November AEST.

This is the message I’ve received:

We will be performing scheduled maintenance on your server on November 19th @ 10:00 PM CST (20th @5pm AEST). During this time we will be upgrading our Apache web server to version 2.2.10 (from 1.3.4x). We will also be upgrading the operating system from CentOS 4.7 to CentOS 5.2.

This upgrade will allow us to provide you with a higher level of performance and security. During the upgrade we will also be installing a new set of mod_security rules which will add to the overall protection our clients websites. We will also be upgrading our firewall software which help deflect distributed denial of service attacks and ensure that your sites are kept functioning at optimal levels.

The server will stay online during this time however while the Apache service is recompiled your websites and your client websites will be unavailable for an estimated 30-45 minutes. During this time an unbranded, generic “Under Maintenance” page will be displayed instead of your normal content.

Please take note of this time so you are aware that your site might be temporarily disabled for a short time.

Some sites hosted on acs-webhosting.com may have discovered their front page missing off their blogsite.  Don’t worry - your blog hasn’t gone missing and you can still log in via the wp-admin page.  I’ve notified the web server support and they are investigating it and hopefully should be resolved soon.  My apologies for the inconvenience.

Addendum:  I’ve had a response and it appears that the apache is incorrectly serving the index.htm page for viewing rather than the index.php so I’m manually removing the .htm page off the affected sites while they investigate the cause.

If you have your blog hosted with acswebservices and recently had your site shifted to our new server you might find some odd characters showing up - it does depend on what version of Wordpress you are using.  The characters I mean show up like this: Week’s

This has something to do with a clash between the newer software on the server and that version of Wordpress.  But there is a fix.  You can download the wp-utf8-sanitize plugin which I’ve found to be very useful.  It’s worked about 95% of the time for these strange character sets that show up.  Just download the plugin, unzip the file, copy it to your plugins folder in your blog and then activate it in the plugins section in your Wordpress dashboard.