[This post was prompted by a short discussion on the (very specialised) TeX4ht mailing list where mathematician William Hammond referred to a video on his home page that my company had recorded. I noticed the link was broken and commented. So far I have refrained from publicizing the domain problems I have had in order to protect guilty parties, but perhaps now is the time for a few words of explanation, including why I had to change my blog from Bazargan.org to “Uncle Kaveh”!]
It is no secret that my former business associate (Mr CV Radhakrishnan – CVR) and I have major disagreements and that matters are before the courts. For some 15 years we worked as one company with my UK company agreeing to cover all costs of our joint company in India, with complete trust between us – see this interview which shows how things used to be. One aspect of this trust was that most of the internet domains I was using were (I thought) safeguarded by CVR. But since the breakdown of the relationship, he has been taking pleasure in bringing these down one by one and at the most inconvenient times.
First there was River Valley TV, where for over 10 years I had recorded and hosted 1000s of individual conference talks and hosted them free of charge for the benefit of the community. These included a large number of publishing related conferences. CVR’s action caused a great deal of inconvenience for us but we successfully migrated our recording site to zeeba.tv and continue as before (and now in full HD)! The domain change resulted in some 30,000 broken links to these videos on the net. My team tracked down many of these and alerted the site owners, but there are still 1000s of broken links out there and we have no way of finding them. As just one example, here is an article from TUGBoat, the journal of the TeX Users Group, pointing to the famous “Earth shattering announcement” from Don Knuth (bottom of page 119). This is where it points to – and this is the new safe home for the recording! It gets worse: if the user tries to link to the root of the old domain, i.e. river-valley.tv, they are redirected to the web site of the India company! (CVR and the India company had no involvement with the recordings and he had no interest in video.)
Then there was Holographer.org, a free educational site I had set up, again over some 10 years. It had a good following, and was simply a personal educational site for holography, and something of zero interest to CVR. But it was pulled down without notice by him, and we have now had to move the contents to http://holographer.zeeba.tv/. Unfortunately all mails I used to receive at holographer.org now bounce. So sad.
Finally, there was my family domain, Bazargan.org which, yet again for well over 10 years, was used for my personal blog and by immediate family members for emails. This went down last year as predicted. Any mails sent to that domain now do not bounce, so the sender has no idea they are not received by the intended recipient. And I guess CVR can even read all those mails!
There is not much communication between CVR and myself now, but the last reply from him after my enquiry about Bazargan.org was:
“If you are intending to buy this domain from us, please talk to Krishna with a price proposal.”
Needless to say, I am not bidding to buy back my family domain! When politely asking him to reinstate holographer.org, not only was his reply negative, but astonishingly he added:
“Also kindly arrange to pay the fees for using the domain thus far immediately at the rate of GBP 1000 per month from 2003 Jan onwards.”
Perhaps these replies hint at his real motives. Of course all costs were borne by my UK company for the duration of our relationship, so effectively I have paid for all these costs already!!
I guess the good news is, there are no more domains to take down so I can now relax a bit!