Sure, the island nation is slowly falling underwater, but all hope may not be lost yet. Valleywag points us to a USA Today article from 2004, which says there are exceptons—.su domains from the old Soviet Union are still active. But DomainNameWire refutes this, mentioning that factoid came from a VeriSign, a company that handles all domain transactions for Tuvalu, and their reasoning might be skewed. They instead reference an ICANN rule which states that domain names from any defunct country must be phased out.

So who knows what will actually happen when Tuvalu decides to swim with the fishes. But seeing that .tv domains have big time marketing appeal, I'd have trouble believing they'd just nix the domains. Still, I'm no internet domain lawyer—domain squatters, you might want to heed this warning: BEWARE OF SINKING ISLAND. [Wreck and Salvage via Eddie Codel via Boing Boing and DomainNameWire]

"It's crazy. It's just crazy," was all Clark, who used to run a consultancy, could say after the online auction finished. Originally bought in the hope of attracting a pizza parlor to his consulting firm, pizza.com opened the bidding at $100, before reaching its final price a week later.

Clark, who expects to cash in in a few days time, only has one regret—that he didn't buy more domain names when he could. [BBC Online]