[dannyw]

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.

[dewey]

I actually think it would be the opposite now. Things like bug bounties or a huge PR problem by the affected problem posting it on Twitter are new things. It was more prevalent to send lawyers for accessing public but not meant to be public URLs back in the days than it's now.

[SMAAART]

And - of course - the same lawyers would bill MSFT $5,000