Usually the previous registrar will hold on to the domain for 6-18 months in case the customer wants the domain back. After that it’s automatically sold in bulk auctions. The companies, sometimes called domain squatters, buying those domains in bulk hold on to them often for years asking a premium price. The idea is once someone thought that domain name was valuable, it might be valuable again. They buy 1000 domains and maybe sell a dozen or so, but as operating costs are extremely low it’s still somehow worth it. It’s all highly automated at this point, so just a fact of life. I’ve seen domains being held for over 10 years.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting

There is a line after which they are no longer allowed to touch the stone. The handles on the stone have sensors on it, to detect a touch after the line and call foul. But the Canadians touched the stone itself, not the handles. Which isn’t a legal move, but isn’t automatically detected. And with how they did it, the refs didn’t see it right away.

Edit: Correction, it doesn’t actually matter if it’s before or after the hog line, once the handle is released on the stone nobody is allowed to touch it anymore. The release has to be before the hog line, but there is no touching after that regardless of where the stone is.

Yeah I had the same thing. All of a sudden the load on my server was super high and I thought there was a huge issue. So I looked at the logs and saw an AI crawler absolutely slamming my server. I blocked it, so it only got 403 responses but it kept on slamming. So I blocked the IPs it was coming from in iptables, that helped a lot. My little server got about 10000 times the normal traffic.

I sorta get they want to index stuff, but why absolutely slam my server to death? Fucking assholes.

They are trolling, it doesn’t matter at all.