Tag: domain names
-
Vanity Nameservers (White-Label DNS) in 2026
Back in 2006, adding vanity nameservers to my personal domains was just something I did as a matter of course, but - like most of the Internet - I don't bother any more. Until today, when I switched danq.me's nameservers to four subdomains of danq.me. For the sake of nostalgia!
-
![Screengrab from a YouTube video showing a white woman with brown-and-red hair saying "please see the FAQs for any questions you have have around deed polls[sic] and the rules." alongside a logo for "Change Names".](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2026/06/changenames-youtube-video-978x480.jpg#29349)
The "ChangeNames.co.uk" Scam
Today, somebody who's running a scammy personal information collection campaign hidden beneath the veneer of a buggy free deed poll service that competes with my better, ethical free deed poll service... emailed me to ask if I'd advertise theirs for them. Wow.
-
I find a lot of these "this company is tried to usurp your brand with Chinese domain name purchases" emails in my spam folder, corresponding to my (many) domains. They're a scam, of course: the scammer is trying to goad me into saying "No, please help protect my brand identity, I'll pay you over the odds for these .cn domains!"
Alt
Screenshot of scam email which begins "Dear CEO, This is a formal email. We are the Domain Registration Service company in Shanghai, China. I have something to confirm with you. Baokang Ltd sent a request on December 3, 2025. They desire to register "danq" as their internet keyword and Chinese domain names..." and goes on to try to bait the recipient into replying and expressing an interest in the domain names mentioned.
But I've always wondered - what happens if you reply and say "Yes, Baokang Ltd DO represent my business interests in China, please go ahead and let them register these domains." I'd know that was a lie, and the scammer would know that was a lie (the company, if it even exists, is under their control in the first place)... but they can't admit that they know that.
Anybody tried baiting this kind of scammer in that way before? (With the usual scambaiting precautions, of course!)
-
I've just enumerated my personal domain names. There's a lot fewer of them than there used to be!1
Anyway: here's the list -
- danq.me and a variety of aliases (danq.uk, danq.dev, danq.link, danq.blog, scatmania.org); there's also like a billion subdomains in use of course, like things.danq.me and find.danq.me
- freedeedpoll.org.uk, which I really ought to update at some point but which still clearly helps many people
- dndle.app, a D&D-inspired Wordle-clone which I still get bug reports and pull requests for so clearly somebody's using it
- geohashing.site, the central hub of Geohashing activity worldwide
- egxchange.org, which hosts the most environmentally-friendly cryptocurrency wallet you'll ever see
- abnib.co.uk, a community of friends (also with about a billion subdomains)
- q-t-a.uk, my family website, which exists mostly to facilitate addressing for a stack of internal/selfhosted services
- rockmonkey.org.uk, which doesn't do much nowadays
- fleeblewidget.co.uk, my partner's blog, but I look after the domain registration
- textplain.blog, my plain-text blog
- levellers.blog, the blog of my D&D group
- theimprobable.blog, which I look after on behalf of my partner's brother after using it to GPS-track his adventures
I think that's all of them, but it's hard to be sure...
Footnotes
1 Maybe I've finally shaken off my habit of buying a domain name for everything. Or maybe it's just that I've embraced subdomains for more stuff. Probably the latter.
-
Non Stop Hammer Ti.me
Dan launches NonStopHammerTi.me, the latest pointless thing he's put on the Web.
-
Use a .dev domain? Not anymore.
Use a .dev domain? Not anymore. (medium.engineering) For years, programmers used .dev domains for testing their code. Those days are over.
...
Daryl Koopersmith -
For the love of god, not everything is about cats
Earlier this week, the Spanish government raided the Barcelona office of the PuntCat Foundation, the company that administers the .cat domain, and arrested one of its senior executives.
PuntCat means “dot cat” in Catalan, the language spoken in the Catalonian region of Spain as well as places in France, Andorra, and Italy. The office was raided … -
bad.horse. You were all thinking it.
-
Domain Name Hacks of 2013
With a plethora of new top-level domains planned to hit the Internet in 2013, Dan proposes a handful of new domain names, then feels sad that this new era might spell the end of "domain hacks", by making them too easy.
-
Sian wrote:
Going to be registering a website thingy tonight to mess around with. Any hints/tips/advice from all you people who know about this stuff would be gratefully received. I am, after all, officially computer illiterate.
Register your domain name with somebody respectable (won't rip you off or otherwise fuck up) like Easily, who'll give … -
Dan Breaks The Internet… Again
Whoops. You'd have thought I'd have learnt my lesson when I fucked around with BIND last year, and 'broke' a small portion of the internet, but no. I managed to 'break the internet' again while playing with the Domain Name System settings on big. That's why Scatmania was inaccessible for the last day or so …
-
SiteFinder: Mark Two
[this post was damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has not been possible to recover it]
[further fragments of this post were recovered on 12 October 2018]
If you've been reading this blog since September-ish, you'll remember when I had about a week of ranting about the VeriSign/SiteFinder lark: this was … -
Cool Thing Of The Day
Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #21:
Desperatley try to find a reason not to get a 'professional' domain name (e.g. www.avapoet.com), and fail. Panic, and write to your current service provider, asking questions which you're sure they'll answer unfavourabley, to save yourself from the urge to …