While trying to renew a few domain names recently, I found that cancelling the Privacy service that GoDaddy offers (via Domains By Proxy) is much more difficult than I had expected. The $8.99/year service conceals your name, address, and phone number from the public WHOIS listing.
Being concerned about privacy as most people are (or at least should be) it seemed a reasonable option but when multiplied by quite a few domains, it gets rather expensive. So during this last round of renewals I decided to cancel the service; figuring it would be no harder than removing the item from the shopping cart. To my surprise, it wasn’t nearly so easy.
Turns out that you have to sign into the DomainsByProxy web site with a Customer ID and password to cancel the service; so I tried the obvious and used my GoDaddy ID and password, though no such luck. I searched my email archives and didn’t find a single email from DomainsByProxy, at this point I was pretty sure whatever email address they had on file wasn’t valid, which is bad news for me. While there is an option to recover your customer ID, if their records aren’t accurate then it’s of no real use.
But there is hope.
It took a fair bit of reading and testing, but I finally found a method to get to your account IDs, and it’s fairly simple:
- Go to the Private Registration Page on GoDaddy’s site (make sure you’re logged in to your GoDaddy account)
- Type in some random characters into the search box
- On the results page, click “Continue to Registration”
- Click “No Thanks” on the ad page
- Scroll down to the section labeled “3. Select Your Domains By Proxy® Account”
You should now see your customer IDs for the DomainsByProxy web site. The web site only shows the first four account IDs, if you have more than that you can contact DomainsByProxy and have them merge the account IDs you know. Just continue the process until you have all of your accounts merged into one.
Unless you’ve changed your password on the DomainsByProxy web site, your GoDaddy password should work. From there, you can update your information – or like me, cancel the service completely. Now you are free to renew the domain without paying the extra annual fee or transfer to another registrar.
Back in March, I switched from The Bat! to Outlook as a result of being annoyed with using two different clients (work & home)*. So today, I’m running The Bat again, thanks to Gmail.
Moving to Gmail I had been thinking about moving to Gmail for a while, the other day I decided to bite the bullet and do it. There was some pain involved, but not as bad as I expected.
Does your business model thrive as your customer thrives, or does it drain the life from your customers? After a recent1 conversation on the impact of improved privacy tools (i.e., the eventual elimination of third-party tracking cookies), I realized that the most significant effect of these improvements would be to companies with a parasitic business model. A business model which I see no problem in disrupting.
For many years, the web has existed as an advertiser’s dream2 — minimal privacy limitations, technical controls that had little impact, and a strong lobbying arm that has been able to derail many efforts to improve the situation.
Today is a red letter day in the history of Twitter, though not in a good way. Twitter has a long reputation of free speech, providing a platform for all that wanted it, easily connecting to the powerful, building communities, and organising against tyranny. This didn’t come without controversy of course; in the effort to keep the platform safe, more and more moderation was implemented - sometimes the got it right, sometimes they got it wrong.
In early December, about a month ago, I had the to perform one of the hardest tasks I’ve ever faced as a leader, letting my team know that a colleague had passed away. She was a friend to us all, and the glue that held the team together; telling them that she was gone was, without question, the hardest thing I’ve had to do in a work setting.
What made this so hard was not just what I was telling them, but my own feelings for her as a friend, and the opportunity I had missed.
Systems fail; it doesn’t matter what the system is. Something will fail sooner or later. When you design a system, are you focused on the happy path, or are you building with the possibility of failure in mind?
If you suffered a data breach tomorrow, what would the impact be? Does the system prevent loss by design, or does it just fall apart? Can you easily minimize loss and damage, or would an attacker have free rein once they get in?
