12/20/02
A Time for Rebuilding

It was a dreary day today in NY, and not a good day to work on the Ferrari. The nose shield needs to be fitted to the car, but the thought of driving the Ferrari through the rain and muck to get it to François garage was not appealing, so I decided to stay home and work on the web site.

Most of the truly dedicated fans of this site have found me by now at http://www.tomyang.net, but I still need to get the word out to the rest of the world. Many of you have been a great help in this time of transition, offering help, and support. It’s been great getting all the e-mail, and I am trying to reply to all of it, but please accept my thanks if I don’t get a chance to reply to you personally.

I’ve been busy trying to let other web masters that have posted links to my site of the new URL, and if any of you see the old URL posted in links on other site, please help let them know of the change to the *.net home page. I’m also trying to fix some of the issues internally with my web site, so bear with me as I try to catch up.

A lot of you have asked for me to explain what exactly happened, and now that the story has kind of run its course, I can give you the whole picture:

On the morning of December 13th (Friday the 13th, for the superstitious), Yale ( a fellow Ferrari owner) contacted me to ask what was going on with my site. He said that a gambling site with the name tomyang.com was in place of my Ferrari site. I checked my computer, and everything seemed normal, so I figured Yale’s AOL account was playing tricks. It was my “Ferrari Friday,” so I left the city to work on my car.

I returned Friday evening to a maelstrom of e-mails phone messages. As signs of what was to come, I was getting some of my e-mail, and access to my site was disappearing from viewers all over the world. Oddly enough, I was still able to get on my site, but a lot of people were not.

After some checking about, I discovered that my Domain name “tomyang.com” was no longer registered to me, but now a company in Hong Kong called “Ultsearch.com!” I immediately tried contacting my Registrar OZNIC.COM to see what had happened, but now that it was the weekend, there was no response. Obviously, my domain had expired, and ultsearch registered my name the second it was dropped by my former Registrar.

Explaining simply how the world wide web works might help you understand what happened. (I apologize to the truly Internet Savvy for taking some liberties with my simple explanation, but I make no claims on being an expert on this topic! If you want a better explanation, go to: http://www.howstuffworks.com/web-server.htm)   Servers are the computers that hold the information you see on a web site. They number in the millions, maybe billions, and are all connected to Internet. You can access these servers with IP (Internet Protocol) addresses like this one: http://66.216.12.16, but people don’t do well remembering IP address, so a system of associating names to IP addresses is managed by DNS (Domain Name Servers) machines. These machines work with a company called Verisign to manage all the associated names. Smaller companies also help register these names, and when my registration expired, another company took my domain before I could renew. The Server and the Registrar are two parts of the process of getting your name on the Internet, and not necessarily the same company. Since my web site as grown, I’ve changed servers three times to save money, and get more bandwidth, but the Registrar remained the same. Oznic let my domain expire with very little if no warning at all.

As the DNS machines around the world switched over to the new IP address assigned to tomyang.com my server disappeared from the Internet! Eventually my registrar replied and claimed that they tried to contact me, but I know I didn’t receive any such e-mails. They also didn’t try very hard because I read almost every e-mail sent to my site. Reading the fine print of OZNIC’s contract shows they are not liable for losing a registered domain. Since another company now registered the name for ultserve.com, the name was lost.

I figured there was only two reasons why this company would hijack my name. First, it would be to sell it back to me, making a quick profit if I wanted it back badly enough, and the second reason would be to benefit from the amount of traffic tomyang.com generates to send it to their gambling site. Since no one has responded to my e-mail request to even discuss the future of tomyang.com, I’m assuming they did this simply for the traffic. I guess they’re lucky ultsearch.com is in Hong Kong, because if they were close to NY, they’d hear a little more from me than a simple e-mail!

Taking the passive resistive route, I’ve registered http://www.tomyang.net and http://www.tomyang.org so I could get my web site back to the fans. Four days after the horrible take over, my site started coming back. It will be a slow re-building process to get my viewership back up, but with your help, and dedication, I hope to continue building a great place for Vintage Ferrari Fans.

Again, I’d like to thank everyone who helped in the past week. Kerry’s web site has been great in posting the news and IP address to my site so those who were looking, would eventually find me through him. Ferrarilist.com, Ferrarichat.com, and Ferrariforum.net have also helped tremendously in informing all the Ferrari fans of my whereabouts, and I want to thank all three webmasters for helping me out. Thanks also needs to go out to all the webmasters, and computer people who created temporary subdomains for my IP address until I could register another Domain, and let’s not forget Simon, a fellow Ferrari owner, who helped me register through his Internet company to get me back on the net!

Besides learning about the jerks that exist on the Internet, I learned that there is a great community of enthusiasts that come to my website, and that knowledge makes the bad parts bearable. Any adversity can be overcome, especially with the help from your fellow man! Thank you all!

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