240: Domain Squatting For Fun and Profit

Brett

Christina: [00:00:00] [00:00:00]Too overtired. I’m Christina Warren. He’s Brett. Brett, how are you?

[00:00:10] Brett: [00:00:10] I am it’s. It’s free. We’re recording on Friday. We usually record a day or two early, but we went all the way to Friday this time. So I am in the Friday mood. I have no idea what’s going on. I’ve let go of everything. I’m an empty void.

[00:00:26]Christina: [00:00:26] Uh, I, I bad, like, it’s been a crazy week for me because as I was telling you before, like I, as I mentioned last week on our episode, I, um, Microsoft build this week. And so. That means that even though, like, my shift was like the final hosting ships was like the final shift, the, of the, um, events. So I was, I like, my call time was 9:30 PM.

[00:00:50] And then I left the studio at like 8:00 AM, um, the following day. So that was Wednesday night to Thursday morning. The whole week was still taking up with, [00:01:00] with doing pre stuff, doing some pre-records and doing some other things. And so I’ve been hands down with that. And then as soon as build ended, I got like an hour and a half of sleep.

[00:01:09] And then I jumped on an airplane and, um, flew to Atlanta and drive last night, got a rental car. And so grant and I are in Atlanta, uh, hopefully to visit with the baby. The baby is not here right now. And my sister’s being incommunicado, which is typical of her. Uh, so, um, I, I hope I, I mean, we’re going to see the baby because if I have to drive to her house, like just unilaterally make the decision.

[00:01:32] Like after we finished recording our podcast, because I didn’t fly all this way to not see a baby, but anyway,

[00:01:38] Brett: [00:01:38] you in Atlanta? Just like two weeks ago.

[00:01:40] Christina: [00:01:40] I was, I was, and she really didn’t want me to leave. And so I’m here and now she’s being like incommunicado. So not that I’m

[00:01:48] Brett: [00:01:48] like either babies or your sister.

[00:01:52] Christina: [00:01:52] I don’t like either is the thing like, uh, but I do like this baby, but I, I just felt like she needed me here.

[00:01:59] Grant [00:02:00] wanted to meet the baby. We had, you know, long weekend. So I booked a flight. She really didn’t want me to leave when, when I left. And so I felt like bad. And so I immediately like booked a flight, like to be as good as possible for that stuff. And

[00:02:16] Brett: [00:02:16] sister.

[00:02:17] Christina: [00:02:17] I try, I try, but anyway, so

[00:02:21] Brett: [00:02:21] I’ve never been there in that regard for either of my siblings. We don’t have close relationships. It’s very, very surface level. I’m better friends with some of my like friends than I am with my own siblings.

[00:02:35]Christina: [00:02:35] Oh, I mean, that’s 100% true for me. Like that’s completely accurate, but, uh, and the same would be true for her, right? Like I should absolutely better friends with some of her, um, you know, people in her life then with me, but I don’t know this is different. Um, this is, this is a more unique situation and I don’t know, I just felt like I needed to be there and it was the right thing to do.

[00:02:57] So I’m here. So I’m [00:03:00] a little bit frazzled as well. So I apologize to the listeners for that. I’m actually recording this on my mom’s laptop because I was trying to help get her password situation under control. We’ll talk about that. When we talk about tech things, she has a system where she has a notes file that is very long where she’s basically recreated the one password app where she has like her username and password and a unique password for each thing.

[00:03:21] And I’m like, mom, I got you with one password account. Like. A year and a half ago, she’s never used it. So I’m just going to have to go through and manually move everything over and then convince her, okay, you use this app now. This is where you enter your passwords and look, it’ll auto-fill things for you when you’re in the web or an app.

[00:03:38] Anyway.

[00:03:39] Brett: [00:03:39] So I got, I got one password. I think I, all I know is I, I H I strongly recommended that she use one password and then she tried to get started and she got confused. I don’t, but it is like I’ve been using one password since like the [00:04:00] arts and. I don’t remember how to get started with one password. So I was like zero help with like, oh, here’s, here’s how you get going with it.

[00:04:10] Um, I kept meaning to it, like I’m sure the documentation is great. Uh, agile does wonderful with agile bits now does wonderful with that stuff. I just never found the, uh, the, the getting started tutorial to get her on board.

[00:04:26]Christina: [00:04:26] Yeah, I think that that is the hard thing at this point for people. Um, one of the problems too, is that at least from my perspective, and I could be wrong on this, but I think that at this point, like when we started using it, um, you might’ve had passwords saved in your web browser that it could import, and you might’ve had, um, passwords, like, like app, like apple had a version of key chain then, but it wasn’t, it was different, you know, than it is now.

[00:04:53] Like it didn’t sync things quite the same way. And so like you [00:05:00] had stuff like that and. Now so many people use like iCloud key chain that doesn’t let you export your passwords. Like you can’t just import it easily. Whereas like, I like, if you, if you use like last pass, right? Like if that’s what you were using and you started using one password, like there’s a very easy way where you could import your old last pass files and they would walk you through that process and then all your passwords would be there.

[00:05:23] But if you’re using iCloud key chain or you’re using a mix of that, there’s not a way to do that, which. I on the one hand, I understand cognitively that apple would want to make that difficult. On the other hand, I absolutely don’t understand why I can’t get a CSV file or even a password protected file that I have to enter a password for, for the application, even access.

[00:05:44] You know what I mean? Like, they’re my files, it’s my passwords. I can view it when I enter in my password and I’m going manually through my key chain, at least on a Mac on iOS. I have no access to any of the contents of certain things in my key chain, like my SSI IDs on [00:06:00] wireless networks or some other things, right.

[00:06:01] Like I have no access to that, which is beyond frustrating. Um, and, and, uh, completely kills the whole like idea of oh yeah, you can totally use an iPad as your only computer. Yeah, sure. If you don’t. Want to, if you want to use third-party tools for a lot of other things, including a password manager so that you know what your, you know, um, wireless ID passwords are when you go someplace, if you need to access it from a different device, which Hey, shocker people do sometimes.

[00:06:29] Um, but yeah, but they don’t like, I understand not wanting to make it super easy to export your key chain, but at the same time, I feel like it’s an advanced user features. Like you should make it possible. It should be something that, you know, other applications given permission, if you enter in the password around the password project file can have access to like data portability.

[00:06:50] I don’t know, call me, call me a freak, but I kind of feel like that’s an important thing, especially with something like your password.

[00:06:56] Brett: [00:06:56] Absolutely. Well, I mean, I think the, [00:07:00] the idea is if you can export a CSV of your passwords, so can someone else. And so

[00:07:07] Christina: [00:07:07] Yes. And I, and I get that. And I understand that, I guess my point is you should still be able to export a CSV that is encrypted or have some sort of other encrypted format where applications like a password manager that you draw you trust and allow in your store. And you know that your employees use another stuff like one password.

[00:07:26] If again, given the authentication and using the password that it needs to decrypt, it could have access to. So it could import that information. Like, there’ll be a way around that as all my point is like, I understand cognitively why you would want to make, that difficult. I don’t understand why it’s not even a possibility, like even through a command line thing.

[00:07:45] Like, I, I understand again, maybe like, even if you made it a command line flag feature fine, but because you don’t want people to do that, but I don’t know. Sometimes this is one of those things that is, and it happens. It’s been [00:08:00] happening more and more, uh, frequently over, I would say the last five or six years, but apple goes into, I feel like the mode of where they.

[00:08:07] You know, they’re, they’re being parental in a way that I don’t think is helpful to users.

[00:08:11] Brett: [00:08:11] So

[00:08:12] Christina: [00:08:12] making, you’re making decisions for me. That might be good for, let’s say 75% of the audience, because at this point, I don’t know if we think the decisions are good for like 95% of the audience. I really do feel like for certain things, for certain edge cases, it’s like a 75% thing.

[00:08:26] I think some things aren’t, you can’t just run off as a power user thing. You, it literally becomes like a, um, like a, uh, a paper cut for normal people who don’t know any better. And they’re like, why can’t I do this? And that to me is a paper cut, but you’re making these decisions. You have good intentions, but by locking stuff down So

[00:08:43] much and being like arbitrary about it, you are really preventing people from using their devices the way that they should be able to use them.

[00:08:53] Brett: [00:08:53] did you do, do you know about the security command?

[00:08:56]Christina: [00:08:56] No, I don’t.

[00:08:57] Brett: [00:08:57] And, and apples, [00:09:00] BSD Unix. There’s a, uh, security command that gives you command line access to the key chain.

[00:09:07] Christina: [00:09:07] Oh, yeah. That I didn’t know about. Yes, yes.

[00:09:09] Brett: [00:09:09] once you’ll have to unlock your key chain one time, but you can use it in scripts too. Like I use it to get my pseudo password. Like I stored the pseudo password in key chain.

[00:09:21] And then from the command line, when the script runs, once I have to unlock the key chain and then anytime it runs after that I can run scripts with, uh, with pseudo capabilities and it has export features as well.

[00:09:35]Christina: [00:09:35] Okay. So there could conceivably be a way to copy all of your IDs or whatever, to something scripted and then export it. Okay. So, so that seems like that’s the solution and that’s all I would want. Right. It just seems weird to me that you could potentially do that. There could potentially be a way where you could write that even.

[00:09:54] But there isn’t using, you know, the security feature or even using like the way that you would access [00:10:00] key chain from the command line, where you could just export a CSV of all of your data like that. Just

[00:10:07] Brett: [00:10:07] there is a security export command, but I don’t know in what format it exports, um, pass for. Anyway, I won’t try to figure it out right now, but, uh, but yeah, we, we should do an episode on password managers. Oh, wait. I think we just did.

[00:10:24] Christina: [00:10:24] I think we just did.

[00:10:25] I mean, one password is still my choice, but yeah. Anyway, so anyway, I’m on my mom’s computer. That was my long, sorry, your segue. And so like 10 minutes later, that’s what we’re talking about. Uh, Brett, how are you? Let’s get a mental health corner update and a job update.

[00:10:38] Brett: [00:10:38] Sure I can do that. Um, we have a new listener, uh, maybe only one, but, uh, my coworker Aaron has started listening to overtired. Uh,

[00:10:51] Christina: [00:10:51] Hi, Aaron,

[00:10:52] Brett: [00:10:52] she has, only heard the most recent episode, so she has no idea what your Wikipedia like [00:11:00] knowledge of nine oh two one. Oh, sounds like yet.

[00:11:02]Christina: [00:11:02] Aaron, you were in for a treat, especially if you love nineties era teen soaps. It’s it’s. It’s good.

[00:11:11] Brett: [00:11:11] Yeah. I don’t know where she stands on the teen soap stuff. I’m going to guess. Um, she is more on my side of that than yours, but I think everyone, everyone can enjoy like the absolute insanity of your depth of knowledge, of those things.

[00:11:30]Christina: [00:11:30] Yeah, I think I honestly, I feel like it’s one of those things that like, people you hear it and you’re like, okay, I didn’t care anything about any of these shows or any of these actors or any of this stuff. However, the fact that one person does know all this stuff for whatever reason is interesting.

[00:11:45]Brett: [00:11:45] So

[00:11:46] Christina: [00:11:46] I hope.

[00:11:47] Brett: [00:11:47] regarding my mental health, I, I had, uh, like my bipolar, I hit like a depression without going manic first, which is, I can’t remember that ever [00:12:00] happening before. Like the mania always precedes the depression and this time I just had like four days of not deep depression, just like. I didn’t want to be in my office.

[00:12:12] It felt like a real chore to get down there. I just wanted to sit on the couch and watch TV, which I know to some people just sounds like laziness, but like it’s it’s clinical. Um, but like immediately following that, I had one day of like hypomanic and then back to normal, it was weird. Uh, it’s a little unsettling that, that my patterns would change.

[00:12:36] Right. As I’m trying to hold down a day job, but it also worked out fine because I can do my job when I’m mildly depressed and I happen to be, I think I’m really good at my new job.

[00:12:48] Christina: [00:12:48] Yay. That’s really awesome to hear. I’m really happy about that.

[00:12:53] Brett: [00:12:53] uh, I’m writing, I’m writing out those 90 services that I’ve been working on for the last couple of [00:13:00] weeks and have like a whole system, my own, like markdown syntax for keeping notes and writing out, uh, blurbs and rocking and rolling on that and starting to work on, uh, get hub, uh, action-based Jekyll workflow pipeline.

[00:13:19] It’s yeah, we’re having, we’re having fun. I feel like, I feel like I can, I can do this

[00:13:23]Christina: [00:13:23] Awesome. I’m very excited about that. And I’m also, I’m actually excited. I, think you’re going to, I don’t know how much you’ve played with GitHub actions. They’re totally your shit though.

[00:13:31] Brett: [00:13:31] I, I actually have not like I’ve worked with Travis and Jenkins, but I’ve never tried to, like, what I basically need to do is replicate some Travis workflows in GitHub actions. And I haven’t explored it enough to know if that’s entirely feasible or not.

[00:13:50] Christina: [00:13:50] for most of the stuff you’re going to want to do. Yes. There might be some edge cases where you’re not in that case. I can definitely put you in contact with the right people who would love your feedback on ways they can make actions better [00:14:00] because I know the actions team. Um, and, uh, but yeah, I think you’re gonna like it, like the way that it’s been thought about and the way that they are done.

[00:14:10] The setup with GitHub actions, I think has been actually really nice and clever. And what’s nice too, is that people publish their other, their, their actions. You don’t have to, you can keep them private, of course, but people have collections and have actions on a get hub. And so sometimes if you find things like you can like look through and be like, oh, okay, I see how they did this.

[00:14:28] And I want to replicate this myself, which is nice.

[00:14:31] Brett: [00:14:31] Yeah. Yeah. I, I think, I think I’ll have fun with it also. It’s not entirely on my shoulders, which is like, uh, every it’s I I’ve been working solo for so long. It’s weird to have. A team, um, like a, it’s weird that everything goes slower because you have to get agreement from multiple people. But B it’s nice to have like a fallback.

[00:14:57] If you can’t figure something out, there’s someone to [00:15:00] step in and help you out, which is the plus side of having a team.

[00:15:05]Christina: [00:15:05] Yeah, it really is. It’s nice when you realizing, oh, I’m not the only person who has to do this. Yeah, it doesn’t live and die by me. It will get done regardless. And as I’d mentioned to you before, and I don’t know how much you’ve been able to pick up on this. Cause it sounds like you’ve been working really hard, which is awesome.

[00:15:21] But things do like, not to say you don’t have deadlines, not to say that there aren’t sprints and there aren’t periods, but like you’re in crunch time, but in general, it’s, it’s interesting to me that especially working in like a big corporations, like how much slower things

[00:15:33] Brett: [00:15:33] So slow.

[00:15:35] Christina: [00:15:35] Right, right. Like that’s the thing, like a project that in your mind, you’d be like, oh, okay, I’ve got to get this done.

[00:15:41] And you know, a couple of days and it’s like, it could be a month. Yeah,

[00:15:45] Brett: [00:15:45] it’ll be a couple of days before it even shows up as a JIRA ticket.

[00:15:49] Christina: [00:15:49] exactly. Exactly.

[00:15:51] Brett: [00:15:51] then you have to make your confluence page to track it. Yeah. Yeah. Confluence and JIRA are there. [00:16:00] I don’t think they are amazing, uh, systems to begin with, but I also have to use them over the VPN, which is super slow for me right now.

[00:16:10] Uh, yeah, the VPN is still, uh,

[00:16:13] Christina: [00:16:13] An issue.

[00:16:14] Brett: [00:16:14] Yeah. Like I, I tried to completely remove Cisco any connect from my machine and just use Shimo, but that messed up routing tables, something, it like, uh, any connect overwrites routing tables. And I don’t know enough about this shit to figure out how to undo it. So I had to reinstall any connect and then you Shimo instead of any connect, but with any connects, um, uh, global daemons running.

[00:16:43] So it it’s weird. And I don’t understand what I’m doing. And I’m sh I’m taking shots in the dark trying to figure out split tunneling, and there’s gotta be a way to make this work, but I haven’t found it yet.

[00:16:54]Christina: [00:16:54] Hi, I trust that you will, and maybe, uh, Aaron or any other, your other coworkers who listened, maybe like [00:17:00] more people can come through, like, uh, uh, the guy, uh, last week who gave you the insight?

[00:17:04] Brett: [00:17:04] is still helping me. We, we have a slack going. I

[00:17:07] Christina: [00:17:07] SI love it.

[00:17:08] Brett: [00:17:08] I think he underestimates my lack of networking knowledge. Um, I have to look up, I have to look up what he says means I have to look up what, what he says means, and then go back to him and say, I need to understand how to implement this. And he’s been very patient.

[00:17:30] Uh, but I have not been, I, I feel like I’m not been able to implement the advice he’s given me in the way he expected to at this point.

[00:17:42]Christina: [00:17:42] you’ll get there. You’ll get there. I mean, th and this stuff is all like, Yeah, Um, I haven’t had to do VPN tunnels in a really long time, but I don’t know for me. And maybe you’re different on this. Maybe you retain it better for networking. For whatever reason, I will [00:18:00] go really nerdy and really deep and totally understand what I’m doing at the moment I’m doing it.

[00:18:05] And then it like totally leaves my mind except for little snippets, bits and pieces later on, like, is this one of those things that for whatever reason I can’t hang on to.

[00:18:12] Brett: [00:18:12] Yeah, no, I’ve never, I’ve never gone deep. Like I just don’t have the interest. Like you start talking about network masks and I’m already gone. Like I just, I don’t care. I just want to turn on my computer and use the internet and I don’t, I just don’t want to have to care about that stuff.

[00:18:30] Christina: [00:18:30] no, I, I totally, I understand that. I, um, one of the, I mentioned this in our last episode, we were talking about stuff. Like one of the reasons that I, when I was getting into having to learn about different Azure stuff, like we had this big tour that we did Microsoft ignite the tour, and I ended up traveling all over the world for it, which was great.

[00:18:48] And we were coming to crunch time. And this was one of those genuine CrunchTime things where we really could have used another couple of weeks, but we didn’t have it. And we needed to create content for the first leg of the tour. But the way that [00:19:00] the content was designed is it wasn’t just like I’m giving a Presentation I was like, I was writing a presentation that other people also had to be able to give. So it had to be more, uh, generic. Isn’t the right word, but I guess more adaptable. Like it was definitely one of those.

[00:19:14] Brett: [00:19:14] in a box is how Oracle refers to it.

[00:19:16] Christina: [00:19:16] Yeah, basically. Yeah. That’s kind of what our situation was too. And so, you know, w which changes the way you’re writing it, because if I know that if I’m the one who’s giving it, and it’s only going to be me, then I can go super dense on something and do other things.

[00:19:30] But instead I’m having to write it in a different way, because it needs to be adaptable for other people and especially people in other languages. Right. Cause it.

[00:19:36] might be translated, but, um, and I was volunteering to help out and I took, you know, one of the talks, which was easy to do. And then there was another one I could’ve taken, which would have been really easy for me to, to pick up on and do as well.

[00:19:48] But instead, like they really needed somebody to do the Azure networking thing. And I was like, I have no clue. I don’t even know where to start. And I somehow became the content lead and the lead presenter and had to just. [00:20:00] Like go deep into the fundamentals of Azure networking. And there was just a bunch of stuff that I really didn’t understand.

[00:20:07] And even after I wrote the talk and the talk was correct, but it was like, people would ask me follow-up questions and I wouldn’t know. And I didn’t know at first I then did get to know, but it was one of those things where I was like, just totally out of my band, like at burst, but it was a really good learning experience.

[00:20:21] And I did it on purpose because I knew that I had no interest and that there was no way that I would ever learn anything about Azure networking if I weren’t forced to. And I’m glad I did though, to be honest,

[00:20:34] Brett: [00:20:34] yeah, it sounds like educational

[00:20:37] Christina: [00:20:37] Well, I mean, it’s useful in context that you might not even know. I don’t know. It’s just sometimes learning a skill when you don’t want to. I don’t know. There’s there’s value in that, not to say you will get additional value of knowing how to be able to tunnel through things and, and make stuff work.

[00:20:50] Having said that once you figure it out and you document it for yourself in whatever way, you will, there will become a time. I guarantee you where you’ll be helping someone else [00:21:00] do this same thing, which will then you will then be like, okay, well this was worth it because I helped someone else go through what I was going through.

[00:21:09] Brett: [00:21:09] that sounds very true. That has the ring of truth to it. Okay. Um, I need to clear the air about something.

[00:21:17] Christina: [00:21:17] Was that

[00:21:18] Brett: [00:21:18] Our sponsor today is an air purifier.

[00:21:21]You’re welcome here all week. Um, so we’re all spending.

[00:21:26] Christina: [00:21:26] The fish,

[00:21:27] Brett: [00:21:27] Wait, what? Oh, try the

[00:21:29] Christina: [00:21:29] the fish.

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[00:23:53]Christina: [00:23:53] fantastic.

[00:23:54] Brett: [00:23:54] Even shorten that rate. It felt like a, it felt like a bit of a long road.

[00:23:58]Christina: [00:23:58] A little bit, a little [00:24:00] bit, but not, not too bad.

[00:24:02] Brett: [00:24:02] Horrible. I’ve done worse. We, we spent 10 minutes on a sponsor once

[00:24:07] Christina: [00:24:07] Yeah, that’s true. And they were not happy about that at the, as I recall,

[00:24:11] Brett: [00:24:11] or very upset if I had, if I had known I would have saved the time we would have just done the read. I really thought they were going to like that.

[00:24:19] Christina: [00:24:19] you’re an overachiever. What can I say? We’re trying too much.

[00:24:24]Brett: [00:24:24] Yeah. So you, uh, you had a thing on last week’s list. So we didn’t get to that. I have no idea where this goes, but, uh, my note, my note just says shit, post demand.

[00:24:36] Christina: [00:24:36] Yes. This is actually a fun story. All right. So about 18 months ago when the WIWORK fiasco was happening, how, how up-to-date are you? Do you remember the WIWORK scandal?

[00:24:46] Brett: [00:24:46] Uh, I remembered that I remembered it last week and I’ve already forgotten. So fill me in.

[00:24:51] Christina: [00:24:51] Okay, so we work is, well, it still is, um, you know, it’s a co-working facility and it’s founder and long time [00:25:00] CEO is this guy, Adam Newman, who is, um, He’s interesting. Okay. So let me put this in perspective. So his wife’s cousin is Gwyneth Paltrow, and let’s just say that they share a lot of the same kind of new age sort of stuff, except that Newman and his wife, Rebecca Newman, good to like a whole other crazy ass level. Like it makes goop kind of look like, like child’s play to be completely honest with you.

[00:25:23] Right. It kind of is. And so, um, he was, uh, ousted from the company because it was trying to go public for a long time. It wasn’t able to, for a variety of reasons, which are both interesting, but that I can’t remember. There is a documentary I believe on hula with that you could watch that goes into some of the rise and fall of this.

[00:25:43] They raised like billions of dollars at this massive valuation. He was personally, you know, like stake in the company was, was worth. I don’t remember how many billions, but it was a lot. Um, and. But he would do some bananas, things like he was held [00:26:00] once. Like he insisted on flying with a bunch of weed to Israel and, uh, getting high on the plane.

[00:26:07] And then there was like an arrest that happened. There was some other crazy stuff. Uh, he, uh, their mission statement for their S one started out by saying like, we are the energy of we or whatever. Like there was this just ridiculous mission statement for the aborted S one that didn’t have happen. And it was just like genuinely bonkers.

[00:26:28] And so when I was recording an episode of rocket and we were recounting this for a scam town segment, uh, we have a sponsor, a domain registrar sponsored us. And so I registered the domain energy if we.com because I thought it was hilarious. And. Fast forward 18 months and somebody from domain agents, let me make sure I got that right, because I do actually want to give them props.

[00:26:54] This is not sponsored in any way. I will point out, but I did work with them and I’d never worked with him before. And it was a complete, like [00:27:00] they came through my registrars, um, cloaking service and sent me a thing that said, Hey, we have somebody who’s interested in buying this domain. And the initial offer was like 300 bucks or something.

[00:27:10] And I was going to negotiate that just to see if I could get it to 500. Not that I would’ve been mad at 300, but I was just curious. I forgot to do that. And then like a few days later, they automatically up their offer to five 25, which means I probably could have even asked for more. But at that point I was just like, no, I’m done. that’s fine. That’s cool. So, uh, something that I bought and then renewed because I forgot, I just had it on auto renew. So it renewed once. Um, but I just totally was total shit post thing. And I actually had it where I had the domain redirect to that episode of the podcast. And, um, I, um, just like forgot about it.

[00:27:50] And, uh, it was a very nice little serendipity thing where, oh yeah, here we go. Our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness. [00:28:00] That was like how the, how the, uh, started. But, um, it, it was just like the most ridiculous thing. Uh, like the, like their, their S one was just literally like one of the most bananas things.

[00:28:11] Like our mission is to elevate the world’s consciousness. Philosophically. We believe, we believe in bringing comfort and happiness to the workplace. Um, It’s just crazy, but they call these things the energy of we, and I have no idea who bought it, what their purpose was, but somebody wanted to energy if we.com. So I sold it and I used escrow.com, which I’d never used before to sell something. And, uh, I was very impressed with the whole process. Like it went through very quickly. I got paid very quickly and happy with that.

[00:28:41] Brett: [00:28:41] So you’re saying there’s a future in domain squatting.

[00:28:44]Christina: [00:28:44] Well, clearly there is a as we’ve known, but I’ve never been on the other side of this. Like I’ve, I’ve never been able to, to, to take advantage of the domain um, squatting.

[00:28:55] before. So I was, I was very happy about that.

[00:28:59] Brett: [00:28:59] Like it’s, uh, [00:29:00] it’s kind of a futures, uh, market where if you are paying attention to pop culture and you catch

[00:29:07] Christina: [00:29:07] Oh yeah.

[00:29:08] Brett: [00:29:08] and you have the money to put down on the domains, especially the, the non.com TLDs, you could probably, you could probably make it like a whole investment kind of thing.

[00:29:21] Christina: [00:29:21] Oh, yeah. And I think people do. Um, I think we’d actually talked about this a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about some of the DNS ways that people have been able to, um, get over things with internal networks, like Microsoft had to buy domain, um, uh, or Corp Corp com. That’s what they had to buy.

[00:29:36] They had to buy the Corp com domain because people were the guy who, who owned it, wanted to sell it and was because it was such a big, you know, honeypot potentially for people to take over and do bad things for people. Who’ve had, you know, misconfigured, uh, exchange servers and SharePoint servers that Microsoft who, I don’t know how much they had to pay.

[00:29:55] I don’t think they paid what the guy wanted, but I’m sure they paid no more than [00:30:00] they wanted to pay. I have no insight into that incidentally, but they did the right thing.

[00:30:04] anyway. Yeah.

[00:30:05] I’m sure that if squatting on it, you can. I do well there, it’s weird. I know I can work some weird ways when it comes to like trademark enforcement and other stuff.

[00:30:14] And there are certain people who can get domains taken away. And if you have more money to fight things, then you can do it better. And, and there have been, um, especially for, uh, more generic terms like that can be a difficult thing to do. There’ve been interesting lawsuits about that, but Yeah,

[00:30:29] I mean, this was just literally just cause I buy shit post domains all the time and, and sometimes I renew them sometimes they don’t, but I would say I actually did not make any money.

[00:30:37] If you counted all the money, I’ve wasted on domains over the years, the five 25, I paid, like I may be broke even maybe, but probably not, but it was still fun for me because I totally forgotten that I even had it. And I was like, okay, cool.

[00:30:51] Brett: [00:30:51] I own markdown.rocks

[00:30:54] Christina: [00:30:54] Oh, that’s good.

[00:30:55] Brett: [00:30:55] one has ever asked me for it.

[00:30:57] Christina: [00:30:57] I also owned [00:31:00] failed.dev, which I think is good. Right.

[00:31:02] Brett: [00:31:02] I see a lot of potential for that.

[00:31:04] Christina: [00:31:04] I see, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet. Uh, listeners, please give me your suggestions because I do want to do something fun with that.

[00:31:10] but I have failed.dev. Uh, I have some other fun ones, but that’s probably the most fun one that I have. Um,

[00:31:16]Brett: [00:31:16] There’s a Twitter account called shit user stories. Have you ever read those

[00:31:21] Christina: [00:31:21] yeah, I have, yeah.

[00:31:23] Brett: [00:31:23] I’ll link that for anyone who’s looking for a good time? Um, yeah, like I have a whole bunch of domains that no one will ever ask for, but I had like at some point clever ideas for, and then like, you know, the year the renewal comes up and you’re like, well, I could let it go because I’ve never done a damn thing with it.

[00:31:43] Or I could just give myself another year for, you know, 15 bucks, 20 bucks I’ll. And so I’ve just hung onto this. Maybe. I think I have maybe at 50, 50 domains, that’s not excessive by some standards, but it’s, that’s, that’s [00:32:00] easily a hundred bucks. I’m paying just to keep the ideas alive.

[00:32:04] Christina: [00:32:04] No, I have the same problem and okay, actually, this, this is a good segue because this is an idea that I’ve had for years, an app used to already exist that did this, and it doesn’t anymore. It was sold. And then it was kind of abandoned and there are some other people who have done some things, but it should be relatively simple.

[00:32:19] And it’s, it’s a project I’ve wanted to kind of do for a while. Now, where do you remember the, the app domain? Um, uh, domain brain.

[00:32:27] Brett: [00:32:27] all right. That’s ringing a bell. Yes.

[00:32:30] Christina: [00:32:30] Okay. So one of the

[00:32:31] Brett: [00:32:31] yeah. I do remember that. Totally.

[00:32:33] Christina: [00:32:33] yeah, so one of the guys from icon factory did it originally and it was like this it’s very simple. It’s just a database app that has all of your domain names, your passwords when the things expire web server details, if that was associated, which was really nice. Cause the thing is, is that my domains are spread across three different registrars.

[00:32:52] Well, four, technically most of them are with Namecheap, but a few of them are with Yeah.

[00:32:57] a couple oh five then hover Google domains, [00:33:00] because for things like.dev, you had to. Um, I have a few with pork blend because some of theirs were just cheaper. Um, and then my christina.is, which is a domain that I, I very much use.

[00:33:12] I had to register that with an Icelandic. Um, uh, I, uh, the registrar, like, like that’s who I have to do to us through. So sometimes I forget like what domains I own and like, which one is on, like I, in a perfect world, I would have them all with one registrar, but sometimes the price variances are not minor.

[00:33:31] And when you were talking about, you know, 50 to 70 domains, like that can add up over time, right.

[00:33:38] Like it just, it, especially if you are sitting on project ideas and even if you’re doing nothing with them, it’s just one of those things. So I’ve wanted for a long time to just kind of. Basically steal the idea of what, you know, domain brain was, but, but maybe not even have all the features, but maybe have more, maybe have less whatever, but just have like a nice like database of just where I can [00:34:00] just keep track of all the domains that I buy and, and an ideal world, the way it would work is that I could sign in with registrars and it would support other registrars, you know, uh, for, for other people and automatically use those API keys or whatever to suck in what you have.

[00:34:13] So you wouldn’t even have to go through the manual process of entering them in each time, although you could, but like, if you, you know, it’d be, to me, it’d be like better if I could just like do it a sync process, because most of the registrars do have APIs so that you could, you know, get access to see, you know, what you have.

[00:34:31] Um, so there, you know, in theory you could, you could do all this. And the only reason I I’m, I’m feeling like I have to do this myself is that I’ve like looked and there just isn’t anything that does really what I want that to do. Um, and th that doesn’t have a user interface out of like

[00:34:49]Brett: [00:34:49] windows XP.

[00:34:51] Christina: [00:34:51] Right, right.

[00:34:52] Right. Or like 2006 or whatever. And, you know, and I, it could be a web app. It doesn’t really need to be, this would honestly, I was thinking about it when I was [00:35:00] kind of like drawing out, like what I would want. I’ve wanted to kind of build an electronic a