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by tuoret 432 days ago
How is it not unethical to grab a domain you don't need and had no intention of buying until you learned someone else was interested in it? Especially since it usually involves extorting money from the would-be buyer.

I fully agree you need to buy the domain as soon as you name your project, and that's where this person went wrong, but that doesn't make domain sniping any more ethical.

1 comments

Completely agree. GP might be mixing up legal with ethical, which is quite common. The grabber's actions were performed intentionally, in bad faith.
There is no evidence that the person who bought the domain name in bad faith. The blog post is suggesting that someone is literally scraping GitHub and buying the domain name of every single public repo.

The MUCH more likely scenario is that someone simply thought of the same name and bought it.

> The blog post is suggesting that someone is literally scraping GitHub and buying the domain name of every single public repo.

I think you are severely underestimating how often this sort of behaviour happens.