As per the article, the old domain expired and was picked up by a third party for $20. Said domain was hard-coded into a vast number of networking tools never to be updated again, effectively letting the new domain owner unfettered access into WHOIS internals.

My brother used to own <our uncommon family name>.com and wrote on it a bunch. Eventually he bailed out and let it expire. It turned into a porn site for a few years and now its for sale for like $2k from some predatory reseller.

Same happened to my personal website for which I purchased the domain when I was 14 (long time ago) and at some point decided that a .com domain is ridiculous for a personal website. Chinese porn site it was thereafter …

My old domain remains unregistered... Lucky me. I guess my last name was uncommon enough!

People bookmark stuff. Random systems (including ones you don’t own) have hardcoded urls. Best to pay for it forever since it’s so low of a cost and someone taking over your past domain could lead to users getting duped.

Personal domains are up to you.

You might have accounts associated with the email. You might be a trusted or respectable member who would never.....

A friend of mine recently let the domain used for documentation of Pykka, a Python actor library, expire. Some of course registered the domain, resurected the content and injected ads/spam/SEO junk.

Since the documentation is Apache License 2.0 there isn't much one can do, other than complain to the hosting about misuse of the project name/branding. But so far we haven't heard back from the hosting provider's abuse contact point (https://github.com/jodal/pykka/issues/216 if anyone is interested).