The domain registry of America are scammers. With that bold statement out of the way, here’s why. They send out advertising that is deceptive and complicated. They prey on new users who have stepped into the world of domain names and webhosting in the hope that people fall into their little trap and pay them money. Here’s what one of their “letters” look like (click for bigger).
I’m not the only one who has a complaint with their deceptive letters. There’s plenty of examples by searching in Google.
Why I’d want to move away from my current registrar is beyond me. I pay about £8 a year for the domain they’re trying to get me to move, when they’d charge £18. Then there’s the five year deal they offer, which is double the price of the ten year offer I can get from my current registrar!
The other worrying aspect is that they don’t appear to be a registered limited company in the UK. Searching companies house brings back no results and there’s no UK contact information apart from an address that could turn out to be a PO box in London (I might check it out next time I’m near south Kensington). They appear to be a company in the USA as their telephone numbers all go back to New York. This means any details you give them are subject to US data protection, not the UK’s, which are far more stringent.
My suggestion to anyone who gets one of these letters is to bin it. You can try contacting them, but I wouldn’t waste your time as they’ve never replied to any of my complaints. Unfortunately, another of those scams operating outside of this countries remit.
One of the websites I host and operate ran into some problems today with the image upload facility. For some reason it wouldn’t resize any images with an error showing that too much memory was being used. Uploading the same image via a different website I host worked fine, which I found a little strange.
To cut a long story short I managed to get things working again by switching from the inbuilt GD library to Imagick, the PHP extension to ImageMagick. Here’s the code I used to make a thumnail based on the image uploaded.
function create_thumbnail($file, $new_name, $max_side) {
$image = new Imagick($file);
// Providing 0 forces thumbnailImage to
// maintain aspect ratio
$image->thumbnailImage($max_side,0);
$thumbnail = $image->writeImage($new_name);
$image->destroy(); // Free resources
if($thumbnail == true) {
return true;
} else {
return "Imagick Error!";
}
}It went from about 50 lines of code, to just 13. A pretty good improvement considering it does the same thing!
Looks like UKReg were intruded a little while back. I got this email earlier asking me to change my passwords just in case.
Anyone else with them should also do the same by visiting their website.
We are writing to inform you that we have recently discovered evidence of a network intrusion involving a Fasthosts server. We have reason to believe that the intruder has gained access to our internal systems, and that this may have in turn given them access to your username and some service passwords.
We have since closed the vulnerability through which access was gained, and have taken steps to ensure that this cannot happen again.
We therefore recommend, as a precaution, that you now change the control panel login password on your account.
Anyone who knows of Abercrombie & Fitch may know that they often have shirtless men greetings shoppers as they enter their stores. Pretty much the whole store has images of shirtless men around the place too.
ImprovEverywhere.com decided to get together a bunch of people to go shopping at the A&F store in New York, shirtless.
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