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Nominet say can have as many TAGs as like.

Discussion in 'Drop catching Domain Names' started by inshallah, Jan 9, 2006.

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  1. aqls

    aqls Well-Known Member

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    Say for example there are 1200 tags and for example they all make a request in order at 1 ms intervals (ok, its just an example).

    When the domain drops between the time your script hears about it and sends a reply which is:
    Time taken for Nominet to process email to you +
    Time taken for email to get to you +
    Your script time (100ms) +
    Time taken for your email to get back to Nominet and add a timestamp.

    Which for sake of argument let's say is 200ms.

    Upto 200 other tags will have heard about the free domain (ok quite alot less even in this example).

    If their script is running at 10ms compared to your 100ms and their email is optimised to be much quicker than yours then they will have 80ms plus email optimisation time in which to get their request in before yours.

    So even if they hear about it 79 ms after you did they will still beat you.

    Corrections please?

    -aqls-
     
  2. Domain Forum

    Acorn Domains Elite Member

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    IWA Meetup
     
  3. FC Domains

    FC Domains Well-Known Member

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    No corrections, but that is an extreme example.

    However even with fairly long delays the fastest only stands a slightly better chance and the results should be more distributed.

    A lot of people are reporting 30mS responce. So somebody with 0mS should only be less than 10% better off.
     
  4. bb99 United Kingdom

    bb99 Well-Known Member

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    Cheating V Good systems

    Just to poke my nose into the trough...

    It strikes me that those who think there's foul play won't rest until they're actually told precisely how the top catchers are able to do so well. This isn't going to happen because, for most, their code, their optimisations and their system are all commercially sensitive.

    I have found myself wanting to comment on a lot of the posts in this thread but have decided against it on the basis that it would give away optimisations that required a lot of very hard work to research and implement.

    Nominet have many policies relating to "abuse", whether that be abuse of WHOIS data or abuse of DAC or Automaton limits. Nominet also have a very strict "don't f*ck with us" policy [1] when it comes to this stuff. There are recent court cases to back this up. Not on the DAC, but on WHOIS etc.

    Nominet closely monitor the usage of the DAC etc and they do investigate complaints when they're made.

    If you're a Nominet member and you don't like "the system" as it stands then the best course of action is to take it up with one of the elected PAB Members as they are best placed to review the relevant policies and, ultimately, push through any change.

    I find it annoying when names I go for get caught by someone else. Really annoying. But I trust Nominet to police the system and instead of busting everyone's balls about it I channel my energy into improving my chances of catching the next time.


    [1] This may not be the correct legal terminology.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 10, 2006
  5. inshallah

    inshallah Member

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    Perhaps Jay you could advise me roughly what percentage of the .co.uk names are held by speculators and what percentage by "real" end users ?. From my research I would guess about 75% by speculators and 25% by real end users ?.

    Any ideas ?

    Inshallah
     
  6. Edwin

    Edwin Well-Known Member

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    I may be barking up the wrong tree here, but if people aren't firing off ANY speculative registrations but are waiting until the DAC reports the domain as available, they don't have to limit themselves to one registration email? For instance, they could fire off a batch of 100 and hope that one of them gets there quicker than anyone else's do... that still leaves them with 900 in-hand for the 24 hours in question.
     
  7. aqls

    aqls Well-Known Member

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    None* of my domains are speculative.

    They may be parked but they are all planned for development at some stage.

    Buy domain now whilst they are till available even if in short supply, develop later.

    And what is to say that parking i.e. offering a type-in browser the opportunity to find people offering what they are looking for, closely matched to the exact term they typed in, is in any way speculative?

    *even the typos are there to gain traffic for the developed or advertising sites.

    -aqls-
     
  8. aqls

    aqls Well-Known Member

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    If they wait then the good names will go to the top name catchers whose script is certainly faster than your efforts.

    There is no choice for the normal dropcatcher but to fire off speculative emails.

    In my view speculative emails are a fairer system and I don't know why they are so restricted.

    Buy hey!

    -aqls-
     
  9. jonno United Kingdom

    jonno Active Member

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    hmm what good would this do?

    surely they will all arrive at nominet in the same order?
     
  10. Jay Daley New Zealand

    Jay Daley Active Member

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    The reason (which is at http://www.nominet.org.uk/tag/auto/aup/) is basically that it takes significant extra resources to support.
     
  11. Edwin

    Edwin Well-Known Member

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    Nope. Unless they're literally fired from a server inside Nominet's own hosting facility, you can anticipate that they may get routed differently during intermediate steps between the originating email software and the destination.
     
  12. aqls

    aqls Well-Known Member

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    OK - though for technical reasons rather than for fairness.

    And why such a low limit vis-a-vis the DAC?

    Tags can still be threatened with extinction for misuse if they choose to abuse it.

    -aqls-
     
  13. aqls

    aqls Well-Known Member

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    Can I have some of what you are taking?

    -aqls-
     
  14. Jay Daley New Zealand

    Jay Daley Active Member

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    Just a bit more on the Automaton side:
    - PGP is very computationally expensive and signatures need to be checked on every message. (see www.nominet.org.uk/tech/pgp for what we are trying to do about this).
    - we store every single message sent to the Automaton for ever.
    - a high percentage of Automaton messages are specs (we will publish stats on this later this year).

    On the DAC: I don't agree that 216k lookups per day is low, in fact I think it is quite high. However we are looking at increasing it when we are confident that it will still perform just as well.
     
  15. aqls

    aqls Well-Known Member

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    Sorry, I didn't mean to say that 216k lookups was low, I meant that it was high relative to what I can do with speculative emails.

    Thanks for pointing me in the right direction on that issue.

    -aqls-
     
  16. Edwin

    Edwin Well-Known Member

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    Not sure what you mean. AFAIK the internet uses store-and-forward to deliver emails, whereby intermediate servers between the origin and destination mailservers receive the email then pass it on.

    If there's momentary congestion during one such pass-on phase, it's quite likely that a different route (using different servers) would be chosen, one which might work out quicker.

    The routing is worked out for each email sent, so ultimately emails may take very different routes to reach the same goal.

    Easy enough to check, btw. Send yourself 100 emails in very quick succession to a remote host, then see if all 100 arrive in the order they were sent out.
     
  17. aqls

    aqls Well-Known Member

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    Sorry Edwin, I misread your earlier post - I thought you were suggesting that we use Nominets own servers - oops!

    There is merit in this suggestion.

    Especially if we bung up the main DAC route with rubbish untraceable spam from zombie computers.

    Take away the advantage all these intelligence oriented programmers have.

    Then we're all in the same boat and dealing with the same speculative limits = fair.

    I feel as though I shouldn't joke about these things in public in case some moron decides its a good idea!

    -aqls-
     
  18. philipp United Kingdom

    philipp Active Member

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    Inshallah,

    When can we expect this amusingly inaccurate piece to be published, and what paper should we be keeping an eye on?

    Yours in anticipation,

    P.
     
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