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Some people have successfully gotten into the Mediabistro site today; many others — including us — have not. Times real-estate Hunter Joyce Cohen writes in with a partial explanation:

I tried to log onto Mediabistro very late last night, only to find the cute under-construction shoveling man. Sure enough, Whois listed the domain as "pending termination or renewal." Mediabistro, it seemed, had neglected to renew its domain name, similar to what happened to The Washington Post's email domain nearly two years ago.

I'm sort of interested in Internet security issues anyway. So I was intrigued by the fact the domain now seemed to be for sale. My intent was to buy the domain name mediabistro.com — hijack it, as it were — to reveal a loophole in the system, and then I'd cede it back to its rightful owner, Laurel Touby.

Network Solutions took my credit card number and let me pay for the domain registration. But then I saw the registration remained in Laurel's name. Turns out there's a password-protected grace period, so it's not that easy — at least for a rank amateur — to hijack a domain.

My plan was foiled. I left messages for Laurel, telling her all of this. She was annoyed that the domain had expired, but grateful that I helped get it up and running expediently. Word from Network Solutions is that it will take up to 24 hours to get it back fully online. So by 3:47 a.m. tonight, all should be right with the 'Bistro.

All this prompted a horrible acid flashback from our distant past: Laurel, we remembered, has a habit of registering strange, French-inspired domain names and having them resolve to Mediabistro. We tried one, and, sure, enough it worked.

Need to get onto the 'Bistro before 3:47 a.m. tonight? Just go to jusdemots.com.

Earlier: D nde Est el Mediabistro?