Could you imagine doing this today? You'd probably get lawyers making you sign agreements saying your payment of the domain renewal is not a ownership interest in the domain and threatening to take you to court for renewing their domain.

According to the story, it took somewhere between 13 and 19 hours for passport.com to resolve properly after he renewed it for Microsoft. Is that normally how long it takes to reactivate a domain name that has gone into a renewal grace period, or was something different back then?

Perhaps the NXDOMAIN response was cached by ISPs for an especially long time because it was such a frequently visited hostname?

Try to go passport.com nowadays. It redirects you to Bing and search "passport" as result. Handy.

> in addition to a new copy of Visual Studio 6.0 (which I need to compile and run the decss program to decode my DVD's so that I can play them under Linux)

Why would you need VS6 to compile a program for Linux?

I'm confused, how did he pay for someone else's domain? Was there no authentication?

perhaps the most surprising to me is the apparent willingness to enter credit card info online in 1999. I wasn't around for this period but wasn't the conventional wisdom back then that this was insecure? hence PayPal?

It’s always nice to hear about people doing the right thing. Thanks for sharing the story.

Biggest anachronism is his mailing (maybe home) address and phone number at the bottom.

Great move, kudos to Micheal!

This happened in 1999/2000, maybe someone could add (2000) to the title?