The following is an amazing
first-hand account of someone who reports that the "computer" filled in bogus trademark
information when they were filling out a Sunrise registration. I appreciate
the courage of the person who posted this message and gave permission to have it
distributed to ICANN and others. Thus, this post.It boggles my mind that
there was not sufficient programming skill and/or forethought to perform rudimentary
checks on data fields for Sunrise registrations (e.g. date, trademark number as a
number, no blanks, etc.), but that there was sufficient programming skill to provide
computer-assisted fraud.
Can you imagine if people went to a CPA to have their
taxes done and the "computer" started filling in bogus numbers for deductions?
Can
you imagine how the IRS would react if it found that 15% of taxpayers reported an
identical amount of property taxes and charitable deductions (say $99,999)?
Can you imagine what would happen to the person who invented the software that filled
in these blanks?
I am absolutely dumbfounded why key parties involved have not
chosen to act on constructive solutions that would remedy this mess. Do they want
to see where these "less-constructive" investigations lead? I guess so.
P.S.
I don't mind Slicer and Paul Gill and others. I appeciate their challenging
my facts and logic. I do not want to get sloppy. Also, it is well
within their rights to encourage me and others to give up, or even to laugh at how
miniscule my efforts are. They may be right. Or not. We shall see.
There are examples in the past where people laughed prematurely at someone who appeared
to be going down for good... only to find out that the person came back up :).
We shall see.
-------------------(post from Afternic Forum-------------------
8/21/01
01:41 PM EST
I have a "secret" (now revealed) involving the dot-info order
form
which I was reluctant to share as I thought it may hurt
getting my hoped for
.info name if it were made public.
However, in the interest of helping fight the
.info fraud I am
revealing it now as to how [...] aided and abetted my false
TM registration of my one dot-info registration attempt!
I wanted to register
my flagship dot-com name as a dot-info.
It has not been trademarked but I went
to the .info order-form
to see if there was a way I could at least pre-reg it
for the
time period after the TM's are done.
I started to fill out the order-form,
hoping to see somewhere
in the order process that I could at least somehow reserve
the
name for later registration.
First it asked for the date of the Trademark.
Since I did not
have one I tried to skip over the date request and suddenly
it
inserted a date all by itself which was the Oct 2000 cutoff
date for an existing
TM to qualify. The order-form did this
false date insertion on its own!
Next,
as I went thru the order-form it inserted a made-up
trademark number, even though
not intended by me. That was
done by their computer automatically and amazingly
inserting
on my behalf a US Trademark Number (assumed to be a false
number)
on the line where they ask for the actual TM Number.
Again, I did not do that,
the computer did it by itself!
Finally I decided that since their computer inserted
this
false info, in particular a made-up TM Number all by itself
they must
be openly inviting false registration or perhaps
they had changed the rules,
therefore I went ahead and
submitted the registration.
That is something in
retrospect I probably should not have
done, though I believe most everyone would
have submitted it
under those circumstances, what with the made-up automatic
TM
data entries done by the [...] computer.
With their computer programmed
to actually aid the user in
reging a false trademark is it any wonder all this
fraud
happened? I am sure the false insertions done by the [...]
computer
also happened to many others, though many users
submitted false TM information
on their own.
....
As a side note, today I checked the Afilias Whois
(www.afilias.info)
and my name did in fact somehow go thru
though it is marked as being on-locked
status, with no
explanation given as to why or what it means.
P.S. If anyone
wants to send this AN Post to Mr. Lynn the Pres
of ICANN, or The US Dept of Commerce
for investigation of the
huge [...] fraud they are invited to do so.