Quote:As part of its criminal case against Megaupload, the US Government seized several domain names belonging to Kim Dotcom's defunct file-hosting service. While the feds have held onto the iconic # domain for years, it was recently taken over by RegistrarAds, a company with a history of controversial domain cases.

One of these cases was lost after the U.S. branded Dotcom and his colleagues as “fugitives”.The defense team appealed the ruling, but lost again, and a subsequent petition at the Supreme Court was denied.

As a result, Dotcom had to leave behind several bank accounts and servers, as well as all hope of getting some of his dearly treasured domain names back. This includes the most valuable domain of all, #.

The forfeiture was made final earlier this year but since then little was known about the fate of the domain names. This week, however, it became clear that the US Government didn’t plan to hold on to it, as # now has a new owner.

According to the latest Whois information, which was updated late last week, RegistrarAds Inc is now the official # owner. This previously was Megaupload Limited, under FBI control.

Quote:How RegistrarAds obtained the Megaupload domain name isn’t entirely clear. It wasn’t dropped by the registry, but it might be possible that it was scooped up in an auction. Theoretically, the US Government could have sold it too, but we see no evidence for that.

# is not the only domain that changed owners recently. The same happened to Megaclick.com, which is now registered to Buydomains.com. Several of the other seized Megaupload domain names remain in possession of US authorities, for now.

(May 12, 2018 04:50 PM)Individual Byte Patterns Wrote:  That site brings back a lot of memories