[UFO Chicago] [beirne at lsd.chicago.il.us: "ufo.chicago.il.us"]

[Peter A. H. Peterson]

Hi all,

I got this message a few days ago. I just wanted you to know that I
will take care of it shortly.

Peter

----- Forwarded message from "Michael G. Beirne" <beirne at lsd.chicago.il.us> -----

Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:53:29 -0600 (CST)
From: "Michael G. Beirne" <beirne at lsd.chicago.il.us>
To: pedro at tastytronic.net, pedro at tastytronic.net, ufo-info at tastytronic.net
Subject: "ufo.chicago.il.us"

Hello,

Recently Neustar, the current owner of the .US domain sent an email to us
saying that they were going remove the delegations of the chicago.il.us
and chi.il.us domains due to not having received the required paperwork.

Here is some history. Jon Postel formed the .US domain as a free domain for the
use of local governments, schools, libraries and individuals that did not fit
into the .com, .org or other Internet name spaces. While he worked at the
Information Sciences Institute of the Univisertiy of Southern California,
he and Ann Westine Cooper maintained the registrations and delegations for
the .US domain. The Clout Project was delegated the chi.il.us domain
around this time and when he decided abbreviated names were causing too much
confusion, we got the chicago.il.us domain too. We allied ourselves with
Uniforum Chicago and became a Project of that non-profit group. Ann developed
carpal tunnel syndrome and Jon Postel passed away.  No one else wanted to
maintain the .US domain and changes took a long while to get done.

ICANN gave the .US domain to Verisign for a while, but they didn't want it,
as it is mostly a free domain.

After 9/11, the Department of Commerce decided that they wanted to verify that
all .US domains were actually registered to US citizens or corporations.
Neustar thought that they could make money off of it and put in a bid
to maintain it. Neustar sent out emails saying that we had to sign a
"Delegated Manager Agreement", 
http://www.neustar.biz/enterprise/docs/misc/domain-name-registry/us_delegated_manager_agreement_june_2010.pdf,
which required us to accept legal liability for any court costs, collect
complete registration documents, collect contracts with registrants and submit
registrant information to them for entry into a registry database searchable
by whois. We mostly ignored them since we are a non-profit group and we don't
have any money and didn't want to spend the time collecting notarized
registrant documents and contracts for all past registrants.

So we will have to have all current registrants of the chicago.il.us and
chi.il.us COMPLETELY fill out a new registrant form, get it notarized, sign a
contract with us and mail them to us from a US address. If we do not
provide Neustar with this information, they will take away the domain from us
and all previously registered chicago.il.us and chi.il.us domains will go
away. If they dispute the accuracy of the registrant data supplied and we
cannot provide acceptable verification within thirty days to them for any
registrant, they can take the domains away too. If they take them away from us,
they will not delegate it to anyone and will require you to purchase the
domain you previusly had from one of their approved registration providers
like Godaddy.com, Network Solutions, ... Full domain forwarding and updating IP
addresses when needed are not services Godaddy or Network Solutions provides,
so you would have to contract with someone else to provide these services too.
If we do not receive the registrant form, then the domain will removed in
sixty days and not restored until we do receive it.

Since the contract would be between you and Uniforum Chicago, I will let
them compose it.

The registrant form is here: http://www.clout.chicago.il.us/Neustartemplate.txt
Unless you already have your own nameservers, leave section 7 and 8 alone. The
data in this form will be published on the Internet via whois for ANYONE to
access, so while we require the correct USPS address, you might want to
give us an email address that is well filtered for spam.
Please mail it to:

UniForum Chicago
P.O. Box 343
Lisle, IL 60532

			Sincerely,
			Mike Beirne
			At the request of the Uniforum Chicago Board

----- End forwarded message -----

-- 
Peter A. H. Peterson
Graduate Student Researcher
Laboratory for Advanced Systems Research
University of California, Los Angeles