In the Domain Registry of America Scam, I wrote about their practice of sending letters that look like a bill for domain renewal. They obviously have found that they are not scamming enough customers, possibly because of the US ruling that they are barred from Misleading Consumers in Marketing of Internet Domain Name Service.

Today, I received a letter, that looks like a bill, from “Domain Renewal Group“. Amazingly, they use the same format and wording as the “Domain Registry of America“.  I noticed that the Domain Renewal Group‘s envelope was unusual, as it was sent by bulk mail from Jamaica.

The contact page for “Domain Renewal Group” unsurprisingly has identical address, telephone, fax and email addresses for support, sales and info to “Domain Registry of America“.

The scam is designed to persuade companies to transfer their domain registry from the current domain registrar to the scammer.

The Domain Renewal Group letter looks like a bill. It is sent five months before the actual domain renewal date. They charge £20 for a year’s renewal of a .com domain. Twice what United hostings, my high quality and legitimate service provider charges.

Rumour has it that they actually transfer ownership of the domain into their own name, and auction it off later.

Of course, anyone should be wary of providing credit card details to an organisation that makes an unsolicited approach, whether buy paper or electronic spam.

A flaw in the stylesheet at www.islandreefjob.com seems to prevent Firefox from loading the job application videos cleanly.

Although the promoters of “The best job in the world” in Queensland Australia seem to have fixed most of their problems, it appears that the designers of www.islandreefjob.com have failed to get their site fully working with Mozilla Firefox 3, although it does work well with Google’s Chrome browser and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Some of the CSS is broken. The w3C CSS checker shows the following errors:

URI : http://www.islandreefjob.com/stylesheets/container.css
17 html Property overflow-y doesn't exist in CSS level 2.1 but exists in [css3] : scroll
180 #animated_title Value Error : margin only 0 can be a length. You must put an unit after your number : 0 auto 27

These errors may be the cause of the embedded youtube videos failing to fully load or play, although of course it may be some other flaw. I hope that the webmasters for www.islandreefjob.com get this technical fault completely resolved very soon, so that they don’t continue to exclude Firefox users from applying to go to be an Island caretaker in Queensland.

Following yesterday’s post about problems accessing islandreefjob.com it seem that Tourism Queensland’s web hosts have improved the availability of the site for the “Best Job in the World”. It now runs smoothly and efficiently, in both English and Japanese. Well done.

Looking at the video applications, for the $150,000 6 month caretaker and publicity job, most applications so far are unfortunately inarticulate or justifying their desire to get the job by saying they don’t like their current one. Many emphasise the their enthusiasm for the benefits of the post as if it is a holiday, not a job, without apparently noticing that paradise island caretaker will be required to communicate well and and regularly.

So far, there has been, to my mind, one outstanding application for the island caretaker job. She is Christine from Canada who shows personality and an ability to communicate well. Since I’m considering applying, she’s the current person to beat.

Apparently Japanese telecoms companies are trying to convince the world that written Japanese does not already have enough characters.

These additional characters are used to depict emotions and other symbols in a similar manner to SMS emoticons.

Rather than being combinations of characters, such a , which is entered as a : followed by a ) ,  to represent a smiley in the Latin character sets, there is a movement to create a whole range of  new symbols, into Unicode, which include colour and animation.

At present, they are exchanged in SMS messages by using privately agreed character codes, but there is pressure to add these new emoji ideographs into the Unicode specification.

Some of the key problems that adding Emoji to the Unicode standards would present include:

1. Adding shapes to Unicode, which has carefully remianed indepentant of how glyphs are drawn
2. Adding colour requirements to Unicode, which again has had no logical need to specify colours for characters
3. Adding the concept of animation definitions to characters, which is well outside the range of a character set definition

In Australia, Queensland’s Tourist Authority is pulling off a phenomenal publicity stunt. Which may be a victim of its own success, as the web site for a single job seems to be barely accessible because of the quantity of hits on their web site.

Queensland are advertising a well paid real job, under the slogan “The best job in the world“, for six month on the the Great Barrier Reef paradise island called Hamilton Island.

The aim of using this job to attract international interest in Hamilton and the other reef islands seems to be being met too well. In the few days since the Queensland Tourist authority started advertising the island reef job, it has attracted the attention of British, American and Japanese news media.

For the last three days, http://www.islandreefjob.com/ has rarely been accesible because of the overwelming web traffic.