Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

One criminal Internet registrar down…

analysis
Oct 29, 20081 min

EstDomains has finally lost its Internet Registrar accreditation due to the criminal activity of its CEO. Well, he *was* already in jail...

Garth Bruen of KnujOn writes:

An issue we’ve been hammering away at has finally been resolved. EstDomains has lost its Registrar accreditation due to the criminal activity of its CEO and generally bad business practices and relationships. KnujOn has been following EstDomains for several years and documenting their persistent support for illicit pharmacies and on-line abuse. We’d like to thank Stacy Burnette at ICANN, Brian Krebs at the Washington Post, Jart Armin at HostExploit, Danny Younger and many others who made this happen.

Details and full background: https://www.knujon.com/news.html#10292008E

In case you haven’t been following this, the president of EstDomains, Vladimir Tsastin, was convicted and jailed in Estonia in February for credit card fraud, money laundering, and document forgery.

EstDomains’ domains will be bulk-transferred to another registrar. I hope the new registrar will take a hard look at all of these domains for legitimacy.

Nice work, Garth!

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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