Before I had some issues with someone trying to walk off with all my domains, I was getting ready to sell a bunch of my sites and domains. Well, now that the dust has settled, I’ve listed what I’m selling in two auctions. The first is 11 sites for only $1 (or whatever the bidding get up to).

And how about 39 domains for only a buck?

http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/listings/35553

There you go.

Why?
I just need to focus more on my main sites and I just don’t have the time for all my sites.

On Sunday, April 20, 2008, I arrived at my office to get a little work done and checked my email. Noticing that there were an unusual amount of new emails in my GoDaddy folder, I opened it up first to see what happened. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw that the 60 or so domains I had in my GoDaddy account had been transferred away to someone named Moses Francis. Luckily, the web sites, data, and any emails sent to any of my domains were never compromised, as I immediately began working with GoDaddy to recover my domain names. As you remember, I played a little trick on my readers on April first, and the result included a little bit of freaking out by people who were concerned that this affected widgets and other things served by JoeTech.com. The sites and all their data have always been secure. The real risk was in losing my domain names.

Who is Moses Francis?
Moses Francis, it seems, is someone like me, who lost his domains to a hacker. The difference is that I’ve recovered all but two of mine (still pending), while it seems he has been less fortunate (or is unaware that he’s lost his domains). Below is what the registration on many of my domains changed to:

Registrant:
Moses Francis
471 Taman Silibin
Ipoh, 30100
Malaysia

Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: JOETECH.COM
Created on: 28-Mar-97
Expires on: 28-Mar-09
Last Updated on: 19-Apr-08

Administrative Contact:
Francis, Moses mosesfrancis7@yahoo.com
471 Taman Silibin
Ipoh, 30100
Malaysia
3566754673

Technical Contact:
Francis, Moses mosesfrancis7@yahoo.com
471 Taman Silibin
Ipoh, 30100
Malaysia
3566754673

Domain servers in listed order:
DNS1.INEXO.COM
NS1.DERU.NET

You may note that the hacker left the DNS in tact. This is a blessing, but could have been a curse.

How this scam works
The hacker, who is from Indonesia in my case, steals your domains and then tries to sell them. His goal is to keep the site live and gain full control of it where possible. In my case, he was able to transfer the domains to a shell account and managed to move two of them to NameCheap, but the data and the sites themselves have not been compromised. Once the hacker has control of the sites, he tries to sell them. For example, here’s my hacker trying to sell other people’s sites on DNForum.com, and it looks like he’s making out like, well, a bandit. Buyers, unaware that they’re bidding on stolen web sites and domain names bid, thinking that they’re getting a pretty good deal. I tried several avenues of their site to contact DNForum admins, but every avenue requires me to purchase a membership upgrade with the exception of the support link, which would not let me log in. If you have an account there and have better luck than me, let them know.

How I got hacked
Technically, he just managed to get into my email via a web-based email system and a password I used in more than one place (I should know better). Once in my email, he quickly headed to GoDaddy, requested my password, and transferred the names out of my account. The whole process was pretty quick, and it was clear that he hacked my email just to get to my domains. I noticed the breech pretty quickly and changed my passwords, shut off webmail, and started investigating. Because I had become relaxed about the security of my password and accounts, this guy got in pretty easily and walked away with some great domain names.

The next step
After spending a large amount time researching and contacting registrars, I finally have all but two of my domains moved into my new account and back in my name. Besides getting the last two domains moved back to my account, I still have some work ahead of me. Because GoDaddy is an international company, they tell me that they will go after the hacker regardless of where he resides. I’d love to find out that he wound up in jail somewhere. To that end, I am gathering up my relevant server logs to send to GoDaddy’s security department, ic3 and whoever else needs to be aware of this guy. I also need to unify all my domain registration under my newly-registered company name. This makes it a little easier for me to prove ownership of my domains.

Sites for sale
What frustrated me quite a bit was the timing. I had been in the middle of preparing statistics and revenue information for a couple of my sites. I have been planning to sell most of my web sites so that I can focus on JoeTech.com and a few others. This definitely put that on hold for a couple weeks. However, I will be listing those sites for sale this week, and I will be taking what I can get for them, so look for good deals. More than the money, I just need to free up resources, so I’ll start the bidding very low for all sites and domains.

UPDATE: I was finally able to log into the support site and notify DNForum of the fraud. I also noticed that it seems they removed the seller.

Our March hundred dollar contest was a little delayed, but we can now finally announce our winner. This month, the winning entry came in the form of a comment posted on GorillaSushi.com.

After gathering up all 1,740 entries, we drew our seed numbers and averaged them to find the winning entry, which was entry #606. That entry belongs to diggnfordiamonds.com. Who will be getting $100 cold, hard PayPal from me as soon as he or she replies to my email.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering where your hundred bucks is, right? Keep entering and we’ll keep handing out money. April is already half over, so we’re gonna give out another wad of cash in just a few weeks.

TIP: The posts people make about the contest usually make up around half of the entries. Write a post about the contest and drastically increase your odds of winning.

This prize was provided by:
- JoeTech.com
- Link Bait
- Gorilla Sushi
- CK Marketing
- The Big Bald Blog
- Jason Boom
- Mr Javo

Sponsored Post:

I have been slacking on site reviews for a couple reasons. Primarily, a lot of the reviews people want me to do for free aren’t related to technology or the web at all. Then there’s the paid reviews. $100 sounds nice, but not to review something you don’t care about. It’s not fair to you or to the person paying for the review. StylishDesign.com, on the other hand, is about what I have a passion for, so I present to you my first site review in a while.
(added note for clarification: $100 was not the price of this review. $100 was the amount offered by another company that I turned down.)

What is Stylish Design?
In this context, it’s a web site about the many ingredients that go into making web content. The About page still contains WordPress’ default example page content, but here’s the gist of the site, according to the homepage:

Stylishdesign.com is a blog about web designing and other stuff related to web design. On this blog you’ll find a lot of information about search engine optimization, web directories, different tools/softwares, CSS, website templates and so on.

Usability and Aesthetics
One thing I don’t like about a site is when it’s way too cluttered up and too hard to read the content. At the end of the day, the quality of your content is just barely more important than the usability of your site. SytlishDesign doesn’t have a super fancy site design. Instead, they have a very clean and still aesthetically pleasing design that makes reading SD articles what it should be: easy. The latest article is prominently featured at the top of the page and additional articles with preview snippets are below it. For a new site, it looks very professional, and that can make all the difference between success and failure.

Content is King
That is the saying, isn’t it? Stylish Design is still a pretty new blog, but they have already formed a content pattern. It seems that Robert is much more in tune with the server side of the web equation, writing articles about serving up static web pages, HTTP Request headers (very important to know about when developing dynamic sites), and my personal favorite, functions and codes.

While I still see a CSS article void that I imagine will be filled soon enough, there is at least one article that touches on SEO, as well. It talks about how submitting content to article directories can be good for traffic. Design is pretty negotiable and programming is straight-forward, but SEO is a tricky beast and I am anxious to see more articles from them in that arena.

Mrs. Tech and I have been busy, trying to get our house into shape before the next round of house guests fly in Wednesday. It’s tiring, but we’ve been meaning to get some things done around here. We decided to sand the ceiling to remove the textured look. We tarped off the kitchen, and had been taking turns sanding yesterday when our Black & Decker MS500 Mouse Sander just wouldn’t come on again. Figuring it may have overheated, we stopped for the night and threw in a DVD. I snapped a photo for you guys in case you need something to laugh at.

This morning, the MS500 still wouldn’t work so we decided to do a combined techie project for you (and to try an recover our sander). Michelle took it all apart and cleaned it out and I checked the connectors and put it back together. This was all done outside, this time, due to the large amounts of ceiling/paint dust in the sander.

Take it apart
Did you unplug it first? I hope you always unplug anything before you start taking it apart. It’s a rule to literally live by.

	Remove the bottom screw…. Or not. It’s there, wanting you to remove it, and we did, but it appears it’s better to leave it there. We removed it just in case. All you really need for this project is a single screw driver.
	Those four holes there… They each have a screw you need to remove. User a slotted (”flat-head”) screw driver. Get all four and then pull the two halves apart.
	There it is all opened up.

Clean it out
We decided to try cleaning it out really well, first because we thought dust and dirt in the wrong place could be a problem, but you should be in the habit of cleaning your power tools regularly, anyway.

	If you don’t have any compressed air, go get some. This stuff is handy very often around my house.
	Get in there and blow the dust out of all the crevices.

Check plugs and connections
Often, when a piece of electronics stops working out of the blue, it can be something as simple as a loose connection. This possibility increases exponentially when the use of your toy or tool involves a lot of jarring or other movement. The very nature of a sander’s operation breeds possibility for loose connections. Black & Decker designed it pretty well so that this would not be a problem, but someone has to be that one percent and I think we just got lucky. Check your connections before throwing something away.

	Start with the power switch. Make sure there’s not any room for it to be any tighter than it is. It should be nice and tight and completely plugged in. If not, plug it in the rest of the way.
	Next, check the power to the motor. It’s the same deal here. Check that both connectors are snug. In my case, the bottom looked a little loose, so I tightened it up and that did the trick.

If none of the above gets your sander back into working shape, you should weigh the cost and effort of buying a new motor and trying to put it in against simply buying a new sander. We were happy to not have to make that choice, and were able to finish sanding (and painting) our kitchen ceiling. Next up is the track lighting. I’ll document the process and probably share it tomorrow.