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New Microsoft Security Flaw, Music Industry Condemns Filesharing, New Worm/virus/trojan Sweeps the Net, etc, etc, etc.

And today it's time to publish another story from one of the regularly recycled subjects.

I refer of course to domain name scams which, for some strange reason, seem as often as not to come out of Australia.

Yes, once again dozens of readers have emailed me to advise that they've received mail or faxes from an Aussie-based domain name registration company and those documents look at first glance, suspiciously like a renewal notice for their existing domain names -- but they're not.

The solicitations are in fact simply a pitch to sell you the .net.nz version of a .co.nz domain name you already have.

Don't bother. You don't need the .net.nz version and you certainly don't want to pay the extortionate prices being demanded by this company.

This time the offending company flies under the banner of Domain Names NZ but the pitch is no different to that which has been tried before by the likes of ING almost exactly a year ago.

But questionable deals and marketing practices linked to the provision of domain names go back further than that.

In January of 2001 I published this story involving a spam-run by DomainLeasing.co.nz.

According to many of the ISPs, web-designers and hosting companies who contacted me yesterday, quite a few recipients of the messages from Domain Names NZ are confused by these invoices.

So how can scammers like this get away with such unethical marketing tactics?

Simple -- the public is generally ignorant of such things.

Given the frequency with which such pitches for domain names and other products or services are arriving in peoples email or mailboxes, perhaps it's time for a more organised advisory service to be set up.

Why doesn't InternetNZ (or some other independent party) set up an RSS or other service whereby critical information such as security an virus alerts, scam warnings and other information important to every Net user is embedded in all NZ ISPs homepages.

This information could be administered on a single server but automatically picked up and included in any other webpage on the net via such a simple syndication service. It would provide a valuable service to every Net user while allowing InternetNZ (or whoever) to maintain a worthwhile profile within the online community.

The only protection we have against these scams is education.

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