Oxford Uni unearths 800-year-old document to seize domain names The University of Oxford has gone all medieval over some dot-com domain names, insisting that it be handed control of oxfordcollegeirl.com and oxfordcollegesc.com due to rights dating back to 1214 A.D. A panelist at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) agreed, although his job was made easier by the fact that …
There's a little place near where my Dad used to live in Dorset named Oxbridge.
Yes you guessed - why not set up a little shop there as the HQ of a global educational institute. Millions more people will be able to say they are Oxbridge grads.
And hands off you greedy bastards. I thought of it first!
"Yes you guessed - why not set up a little shop there as the HQ of a global educational institute"
As I recall, Lord Archer's entry in Who's Who used to read "Education: Wellington and Cambridge".
That would be Wellington primary school and Cambridge College of Arts and Technology. So it was true...and there was not the slightest intent to mislead in any way.
I went to CCAT in the mid Seventies studying City and Guilds in Technology. 1 day a week (day release) in my apprenticeship in Electronics for 5 years.
Bloody cyclists everywhere and lots of collegegirls@Cambridge Uni too. Andy's Records in Mill Road sold L.P.s cheaper than anywhere.
Happy days the 70's.
Apart from Power Station Workers, Coal Miners, Truck Drivers, Car Makers striking and holding the country to ransom.
My mother used to tell people she was educated at Harrow. To be precise, it was Harrow Primary School, a mile or so down the road from the better-known (boys-only) establishment known to the locals as "'arrow on the 'ill".
Re the icon - I'm pretty sure they didn't wear mortar boards at Harrow Primary School
"Oxford University will shortly lose its domains to the Ford motor company"
That would be one hell of a typo - accidentally hitting ox before typing in "ford.com".
Besides, any area in England at least that has a whiff off water near it will sport a town/village/hamlet name suffixed with "ford" and no doubt one or two don't bother with a prefix. I think we can allow common sense to prevail and assume that Ford won't be trying to take on the academics.
"Besides, any area in England at least that has a whiff off water near it will sport a town/village/hamlet name suffixed with "ford" [...]"
Given the likely origin of the name "Oxford" then there are will be many places of that name in the country with ownership going back a long way. As a child I was puzzled why a very local bus route included Oxford. It was one of the other ones.
I'm not sure what the best part of that site is. Whether it's the pictures of Wills and Kate in the "List of honor" (sic), even though they're not named in the list. Or the fact that one of the people in their slider is apparently a hand-drawn circuit diagram. Or that they claim to be "bringing the attention to an important kind of medical research known as clinical research". Or that they claim to offer a graphic design course that includes "Introduction to using windows XP". Perhaps the winner is the claim under "Research Topics > Astrophysics" that Mars is inhabited by primates and clay fertility goddesses, whereas Saturn is inhabited by owls and grey aliens. It's comedy gold wherever you look.
Giving Away The Secrets in Caps Case One Revelation At A Time..
"We found the Need to Publish the Hidden Secrets of the World, ..... Our High Committee Acts as Promoters of Pace and Distributors of Ancient Knowledge in Scientific with Emphasis on Green energy, Humanity, Ancient History. "
Do I have get under a glass pyramid or will going to the lake in Nevada, USA be enough to gain the hidden wisdom thereby gaining a paper that indicates an education (or edukation) from Oxbow at Incident in Wyoming. Look all one sentence and more or less grammatical is that not edukation?
If the site is down by the time you go to look at it, www.royalcollegeireland.co.uk seems to have nearly identical content. (Which, of course, is probably appropriating a real Royal College's name...)
Vincent Ballard (a few posts above) is right, this site is ridiculous. The "Oxford College graduates" starts listing a few graduates and their degrees, then after several graduates, will have like 20 pages of text between each one.. I don't know if it's supposed to be that graduates dissertation or what.
The course descriptions are ridiculous --- one will have a list of courses or general description that looks vaguely like a syllabus... the astrophysics (as Ballard says) just has photos... one with some nonsensical diagram about "white energy" and dark matter, one showing aliens of Mars, Saturn, and Pluto with like owls and monkeys along with greys and such. The hand-drawn electronic diagram was odd to say the least, and didn't seem to have enough components to actually do anything (resistors, 27V worth of 9V batteries, an op amp, a "lamp" and an LED, and a male headphone jack labelled "for colloidal silver"?) The page on "human and poisonous food" is just an anti-meat rant, no description of courses whatsoever. Some pages are a mix, like half the page will resemble what you'd expect from, if not a college then at least a diploma mill, then like mid-page it's like whoever was typing it out lost their train of thought and decided to start talking about something else.
It's really rather nonsensical and mildly entertaining... they don't even seem to be trying to sell anything, insofar as I didn't see anywhere on there to actually sign up for anything or buy anything.
The application form is at http://www.oxfordcollegeirl.com/?id=11 . "Registration Fees 20000 Sterling Plus Donations", which is a somewhat interesting interpretation of "donation". I decided my previous post was long enough without mentioning that. But looking at the list of honour, lists of graduates, and photos apparently of graduation ceremonies, I suspect that they're mainly aiming to defraud people from the Middle East rather than British or Irish.
The trouble with these sort of scam courses are that a lot of people actually are dumb enough to believe this nonsense.
I once met somebody who had enrolled on a "quantum physics" course. Not quantum mechanics, or particle physics, not even actual science, just some Deepak Chopra new age bullshit with enough scientific terms thrown in to make it sound like science. Worse than that, she believed every word of it and thought she was going to graduate as a proper scientist!
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I once had some dealings with a bunch of wide boys calling themselves the Oxford IT Training Academy. Their business model consisted of selling gullible IT wannabes loans to get them through the A+ and a couple of MCP exams, and then boot camping said losers through these exams using any means possible.
I noticed their coat of arms contained a maple leaf and a beaver. They'd lifted it from the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.
I emailed the Canadian government. About a week later, I was BCCed into an email from said government to the aforementioned entrepreneurs, telling them to cease and desist using a coat of arms they weren't entitled to or face a fine of CAD$30,000 a day.
Funnily, they ceased trading.
I think that reports of their death might be somewhat premature. They are listed as having a head office in Harrow (their "campus") and their main office is in St James's Park.
Sooo, they are still trading. I particularly liked this little gem 'wot they rote'<sic>:
"The Oxford IT Training Academy does not place any stress on classroom teaching."
I now realise that all those years I wasted at Uni could have been put to more profitable use.
Not fussed about the bigger picture of what this could mean for other disputed domains that include a trademark name as part of a bigger title that might not actually be related.
It's at least got rid of such an obvious scam which no doubt, some people will have fallen for.
"As things stand, the websites are still up, but they will shortly be handed over to the University of Oxford, which will presumably add them to the long list of domain names it holds and does nothing with in an effort to stop people profiting from its name."
Can't really see a problem with that.
I also note that the same outfit runs http://www.eu-arabstates.co.uk/
Presumably when they've finished with Greece, the EU can raise a case with WIPO...
Needed a few more cynics to staff the new school being established. Oxenford University will offer a DN, DNE and a Diploma in GPW. Interested cynics please apply with outrageous demands included including the amount of the swag expected.
DN = Doctorate of Nonsuch for those that need to impress
DNE = Doctorate of No Ethics for those intending high government position
Diploma in Government Paper Work for those civic minded people wishing to keep thr transfer payment people employed.
That is eerily like the websites of several real universities I know of, except for student "praise" for the university culled from words that have been said in eight or none completely different conversations.
However, I now have a Fasttrack E-PhD in Dynamic and Cyber Arts, but I'm a bit worried about whether it is real - no respectable university would allow a false email address for billing purposes, would they? ;-)
jira.domain.com, now offers something.jira.domain.com The Register 
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