It's fake news folks.
Bigly fake.
That 'Trump lawyers threaten teen over kitten website' yarn is Fakey Fakey McFake Fakeface
There's a rather dodgy tale going around that US President Donald Trump's lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to a website featuring his face being pawed by kittens. The unbelievable yarn was picked up this week by The Hollywood Reporter and the New York Observer. The story goes that a San Francisco 17-year-old called Lucy …
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 21:47 GMT Eddy Ito
Re: It's fake news folks.
It is getting a bit of a fishy stink to it as according to domaintools the site is rather new and was never registered before. It's looking a lot like a PR stunt.
edit: The other site kittenfeed.com has been around a lot longer and actually predates trumpscratch. How could Lucy change the name from trumpscratch to kittenfeed? Going back in time perhaps.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 22:54 GMT veti
Re: It's fake news folks.
Domain tools aren't quite the clincher they're being presented as.
Looking at the linked page: domain registered 22 March. But the story was being discussed before then (see here, for example). That means this registration didn't even exist at that time.
Looking a little further down the record, I see: "1 record has been archived since 2017-03-21". What did that record say? Well, it'll cost you at least US$49 to find that out. I'm actually tempted to spend it.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 23:26 GMT Eddy Ito
Re: It's fake news folks.
It is getting curious but a C&D letter would take at least a few days in the mail unless sent express. It would also be fairly easy to mock up a fake letter so I'd really want to see the envelope with the postmark. Sure, it could have been an email but most folks wouldn't call that a letter. Also it seems that kittenfeed now redirects to facescratch which goes back six years but was last registered today and appears to be down.
Definitely seems to be past its smell by date.
edit: Sorry for the duplication, diodesign just beat me to it. ;)
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Friday 24th March 2017 10:49 GMT ElReg!comments!Pierre
Re: It's fake news folks.
When I kindly ask ICANN, they always end the reply with this disclaimer (their caps): "LACK OF A DOMAIN RECORD IN THE WHOIS DATABASE DOES NOT INDICATE DOMAIN AVAILABILITY"
In other words, when the info is present it's more or less reliable, but absence of data does not indicate absence of registration, imminence of a zombie alien Elvis invasion, or ongoing communist conspiracy.
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Friday 24th March 2017 05:49 GMT Kiwi
Re: It's fake news folks.
edit: The other site kittenfeed.com has been around a lot longer and actually predates trumpscratch. How could Lucy change the name from trumpscratch to kittenfeed? Going back in time perhaps.
Well, your own link to the page at Domaintools has this little bit of text : "Created on 2017-03-02"
It also has :
IP History 27 changes on 17 unique IP addresses over 8 years
And
Hosting History 14 changes on 6 unique name servers over 8 years
The Wayback machine (aka archive.org) shows some more answers for you as well. At this page it shows that in 2014 the site was a Sedo parking page : http://web.archive.org/web/20140105090653/http://kittenfeed.com/
And this one shows that 3 years before that (Jan 2011) it was a GoDaddy parking page : http://web.archive.org/web/20110129055350/http://kittenfeed.com/
And in may 2010 the page got a Google 404 error : http://web.archive.org/web/20100513030413/http://kittenfeed.com/
I don't know. I might be crazy but.. I wonder if it is possible for, oh, I dunno, ownership of URL's to be transferred? Perhaps even dropped? Perhaps some people even register pages thinking they could make some money from the domain but don't get round to it? Nah. That'd be crazy. Why would someone go to all the 2 minutes of trouble to register a domain and let it go some time later? That'd never happen, no one would ever drop a domain nor would Sedo etc put up a "parking page" on something. Would never happen, would it?
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 23:23 GMT diodesign
Re: It's fake news folks.
It does look too good to be true, however: The Hollywood Reporter and the New York Observer both say they have been in contact with Lucy, a kid who is learning basic web dev skills in a coding bootcamp, apparently. THR and NYO aren't really the sort of publications to make up quotes separately and independently about the same person. I'll be very disappointed in THR if this turns out to be fake.
Crucially, NYO says it has seen the C&D letter. The WHOIS records also suggest TrumpScratch.com predates kittenfeed.com. I've added a link to the NYO story and some more info about the domains.
If there is a PR viral marketing thing behind this, it's not clear who the beneficiary is - it's a long-winded way of touting a porno website, which we spotted and isn't mentioned in the THR and NYO reports.
One odd thing is that NYO is owned by the family trust of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, also an advisor to the president. You'd have thought that may have put off NYO from running anti-Trump news, but OTOH perhaps the title has proper independence (which is a good thing). It did publicly back Donald as the Republican candidate, though.
Very odd, and a bit of pre-Friday fun. It's not exactly Watergate. Take it with a pinch of salt if you wish.
Update: We've seen the DNS records - the domain was registered on March 22, weeks after "Lucy" claimed to have received the C+D demand so it's pretty much Fakey McFake Fakeface. Sorry. Lessons learned.
C.
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Thursday 23rd March 2017 05:15 GMT Number6
Re: It's fake news folks.
One odd thing is that NYO is owned by the family trust of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, also an advisor to the president. You'd have thought that may have put off NYO from running anti-Trump news, but OTOH perhaps the title has proper independence (which is a good thing). It did publicly back Donald as the Republican candidate, though.
The conspiracy theorist would expect the NYO in the next day or two to publish something along the lines of how all this fake news is ruining the good name of the guy in the White House and how they'd been taken in (alternatively, either made it up themselves or didn't spend five minutes to research it the way the comments section here has done). It is quite possible that someone did come up with the C&D letter in the correct format, which was presented to the NYO in support of an otherwise unverified claim.
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Thursday 23rd March 2017 21:51 GMT veti
Re: It's fake news folks.
Assuming NYO and HR interviewed "Lucy" by phone, or better yet Skype - she could be anyone, anywhere. They may have reported the story in "good faith" (setting aside for the moment that they really should have checked the domain record).
Since trumpscratch.com "now" belongs to a soft porn site, she might just be one of its "models". Or some random actress hired for the part.
A bit more fact checking on stories like this would be nice. C'mon, surely someone can claim $49 for expenses?
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Friday 24th March 2017 16:13 GMT The Man Who Fell To Earth
Re: It's fake news folks.
Even the Hollywood Reporter is questioning the story.
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Friday 24th March 2017 19:55 GMT ElReg!comments!Pierre
Re: It's fake news folks.
> Even the Hollywood Reporter is questioning the story.
So if EVEN THR is questionning the story (based solely on the rebuttal from Trump Co's head shark, also mentionned by pretty much every source), then that's sorted. Fake news it is then. Because the Hollywood Reporter is a paramount of unbiased, investigative journalism. I also heard that Springfield News has expressed doubts. Unfortunately I can't post a link to the story as the journal consists entirely of 2 photocopied pages distributed in the neighbourhood by owner, editor-in-chief, and columnist Leonard "Lenny" Rump IV, whenever he is sober enough to find the keys for his truck (which, we learn by reading the editorials, may or may not be hidden by his wife on occasion, the bitch; proof that he should use the belt -the heavy one, with the eagle buckle- more often).
It's not even like it's a big issue, corporate landsharks send this kind of letters by the hundred every day, just in case. That is very litterally what they are paid for.
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Thursday 23rd March 2017 11:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Trademarks
That Wikipedia article you linked to says, " failure to actively use the mark in the lawful course of trade, or to enforce the registration in the event of infringement, may also expose the registration itself to become liable for an application for the removal".
Certainly the enforcement requirement is "a thing" in England* (it's even in one of my course texts from my UG degree...).
* Yeah, I know, the article's about the US, therefore England's laws are irrelevant, although possibly relevent to the cause of confusion in the discussion.
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Thursday 23rd March 2017 12:42 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: Trademarks
I see C&D letters being sent to the owners of the 'Trumpton' series any day now.
Then next will be banning bridge players from bidding '7NT' (seven No Trumps).
Then they'll have a go at 'Nellie the elephant' who packed her 'Trump' at least that is how my granddaughter sings it.
You gotta protect that name not haven't you?
The name Trump is already verging on being an object of derision already. I'd hate to think what it will be like by the time he gets booted from office.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
