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Web Site Title: Progressive news and media coverage on Crooks and Liars (From DNS: here.) Owned and operated by the Progressive Rag Huffpo's own John Amato.

When you start with a bias you end with a bias. Shill much? Yeah...

What?

Seafile is a German company that sells licenses to software that lets you run a Private Cloud (file synching/sharing server).

It's like DropBox you run yourself.

Try again...
A whois lookup for seafile will show the following:

Registry Registrant ID:
Registrant Name: Daniel Pan
Registrant Organization: Seafile Ltd.
Registrant Street: ShangDiJiaYuan, Block 2, Unit 2, #402, HaiDian District
Registrant City: Beijing
Registrant State/Province:
Registrant Postal Code: 100085
Registrant Country: CN

As if using whois will tell you all:
Seafile GmbH
Wiesentheid, Germany

There IS a german company selling the product. AND there is a chinese company developing and selling the software in Asia. And it really doesn't matter. If I buy software to host my own files I don't want anyone snooping in.

What?

Seafile is a German company that sells licenses to software that lets you run a Private Cloud (file synching/sharing server).

It's like DropBox you run yourself.

Try again... A whois lookup for seafile will show the following:

Registry Registrant ID:
Registrant Name: Daniel Pan
Registrant Organization: Seafile Ltd.
Registrant Street: ShangDiJiaYuan, Block 2, Unit 2, #402, HaiDian District
Registrant City: Beijing
Registrant State/Province:
Registrant Postal Code: 100085
Registrant Country: CN

IMO, is that .com(.*) sites are not exclusively commercial, and other TLDs can be commercial. If you want to run a commercial site that takes money (not advertising revenue) from sales - you should provide publicly accessible, verified, identification and contact details.

If you're a small company that operates out of your home, you may not want your street address and home phone directly published in association with your company name.

Then you should register your business at another address or you shouldn't be in business. I never said or implied that the home address of business principals should be in whois (and neither is ICAAN) - only that the correct contact details for the business should be.

How is a whois privacy guard that acts as a proxy any different than say Amazon listing their legal department with a PO box? It's not like a PO box is a real person or publically accessible. It really doesn't give you any more information then the whois proxy. I mean, should't Amazon's whois information list Jeff Bezos's personal information or something?

Since when is a PO box not publicly accessible? Amazon (Amazon Technologies, Inc.) is a registered company, not Jeff Bezo as a sole trader using a trading name registered to his house.

The test is - is the business legally registered? Are the published details correct? Is the contact address real? NOTE: if you can't be contacted at the provided address then anyone can petition ICAAN to take back your domain name. Which is as it should be.

If you don't want people who buy your products or services to know your name - register a company. If the business structure you legally operate under allows a PO box as a contact address - then that's the contact address you can use for whois.

The whole "peeps will know my home address" is a distortion on reality - which best serves the interests of shonky businesses that don't operate within the law in the countries they are based.

IMO, is that .com(.*) sites are not exclusively commercial, and other TLDs can be commercial. If you want to run a commercial site that takes money (not advertising revenue) from sales - you should provide publicly accessible, verified, identification and contact details.

If you're a small company that operates out of your home, you may not want your street address and home phone directly published in association with your company name. How is a whois privacy guard that acts as a proxy any different than say Amazon listing their legal department with a PO box? It's not like a PO box is a real person or publically accessible. It really doesn't give you any more information then the whois proxy. I mean, should't Amazon's whois information list Jeff Bezos's personal information or something?

His website proves itself false. He claims it was founded in 1988; however Whois records for the domain only go back to 2000, and the web address doesnt appear in the Wayback Machine until 2003.

Neither of these mean anything. You can buy a domain name years after founding a business, you can even change names or get a different domain name at a later time. Wayback machine doesn't archive every single website, nor does it archive them from the very start. I remember back then Wayback machine didn't archive anything unless somebody explicitly searched for the domain in Wayback machine.

His website proves itself false. He claims it was founded in 1988; however Whois records for the domain only go back to 2000, and the web address doesnt appear in the Wayback Machine until 2003.

Looks like the guy has tried to mix his own marketing material into google results, but you can see where his highly touted ScenGen actually comes from here:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/wi...

This version of MAGICC/SCENGEN was developed primarily with funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but it rests on developments carried out over the past 20 years that were funded by a number of organizations.

So the "ScenGen" you keep seeing in all the results is not the same as the one this O'brien dude keeps blathering about. In fact, hes apparently the only one who cares about it; he did do one talk at IEEE in 2010 (though strangely theres no mention of it anywhere except the bog-standard event page), but there doesnt appear to have been any chatter on the internet about it whatsoever.

So, to the AC who posted this: hopefully this is a useful lesson. Anyone can say anything on the internet, and even make it look passingly believable. But if it sounds "too perfect", its probably rubbish.

What are you sniveling about now? no-ip.com wasn't seized. The authoritive NS records for the domain still point to Vitalwerks' servers. Ditto for the other no-ip ccTLDs - all of which you listed. Face it, your list is wrong, and RANDOMLY capitalising and bolding WORDS doesn't change that fact, or that hosts files are irrelevant to this discussion.

You can look at their whois http://whois.domaintools.com/0... and you could see that there are things going on with the domain name in the past 2 years (ignore the privacy part)...

There's a a whois listing for my site but none of my information is there, just my registrar/host.

I doubt any .gov domains are listed (I haven't looked). Isn't the government their own DNS and registrar, or are they going through Network Solutions?

Anyone with a 100.64.0.0/10 WAN address is being CGNATted by their ISP. http://whois.domaintools.com/100.64.0.0 How does one do port forwarding when CGNATted? e.g. Black Ops 2 needs TCP 3074 opened. Can anyone who is CGNATted confirm if they can port forward to one of their internal devices? I believe HugesNet uses CGNAT too.

http://www.domaintools.com/research/whois-history/ Ever heard of Steistrand? I never bothered about GP's source. Now that you specifically did not want to mention the name, I had to find it. For the benefit of the rest, I have shared it here.

http://whois.domaintools.com/slashdot.org

Found the WhoIs entry.

Now it's someone else's turn.

> Ok, so where is a safe domain to put my homepage under?

That would depend on what you wish to put on your homepage, and your definition of 'safe'. According to this http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/ page, there are about 130 million registered domains if we only count .com, .net, .info, .biz, and .us (nearly 100 million of those are in the .com domain). So even if 100 (this number is not based on any real statistics, I just made it up) domains are closed each day (completely at random) by law enforcement, there is less than 1 in a million chance of your page getting deleted by law enforcement each day (if you register it on one of those tlds), and since the number of registered domains is growing faster than 100 domains/day (according to the page I linked to, in the last 24 hours about 54k domains expired, and 72k new ones appeared), that chance will go down further over time.

The above is of course in the assumption that random domains are targeted, but as a person who is intelligent enough to operate a keyboard, you will probably realize that the contents of your page (or other pages on the domain, if you share your domain with others) will affect the odds of having it removed. If you write about how much you love ponies, nobody gives a fuck. If you write about how much you like to have sex with ponies, odds are you're going to get some attention. If you write about, and sell tickets (discount for those under the age of 12) for the great parties at your farm where hookers snort cocaine of the backs of stolen ponies and then have sex with them, there's a pretty good chance of your domain being taken down, and you can also expect a visit from the authorities who will want to ask you some questions.

Try using common sense, it works most of the time.

Perhaps if you had specified what you intend to host on that homepage of yours, somebody could have provided an actual answer.

This is somewhat off topic, but I found this part of the article interesting: "The Scottsdale, Arizona based company [...] manages more than 48 million domain names."

According to http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/, there are now 95 million .com domains, 14 million .net and 9 million .org.

Given that there are 7 billion people in the world (of which a lot use the internet), and afaik many of them register domains, not to mention all the squatters and companies, I find this a surprisingly small amount of domains.

What do you think of this?

But, here's what was in the WHOIS response, along with the other data. WnTF did this start happening?

Using what WHOIS service?

Neither DNSStuff or DomainTools give anything of the sort.

I'm guessing it started happening when you started using a WHOIS website that inserts shitty ads in its responses...

The word key only appears twice. Once is a reference to things like encrypted which we both agree isn't happening in Apple's case the other is:

“Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source. The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.

Basically all you have to do ensure that a person can execute modified code and they do. If you can compile and code for iOS you can install and execute modified code.

As for $1T compiler, there is a concept in law when you price something so as not to sell, i.e. its not "reasonable terms" or it "onerous terms". Which obviously doesn't apply in the case of the iOS SDK as 350,000 applications show (about 13x the number in Debian). Every single one of those apps was written by somebody with the iOS SDK so the terms are clearly not onerous, and not meant to prohibit development. Heck I'm not even an iOS developer but if were to pick up the iPhone I'd want to pick up the SDK to be able to install what I want on my system. So I'm either jail breaking or getting the SDK. Heck this is becoming so standard that Macports which is the semi official (see whois entry) open source interface for Mac is bring out an automatic iOS conversion tool so you can just compile list of apps.

Even the GPL itself allows you to charge a margin fee for transferring source code. Back in the early 90's the FSF itself charged $200 for a tape of their sources. There is a difference between $99 and $1T dollars in terms of intent.

Yea, the Egyptian HAM site is hosted at a site for HAMs here in the States

http://whois.domaintools.com/qsl.net

Whois lookup yeilds little....

http://whois.domaintools.com/primariesforpalin.com

Registration Service Provided By: Namecheap.com
Contact:
Visit: http://namecheap.com/

Domain name: primariesforpalin.com

Registrant Contact:
      WhoisGuard
      WhoisGuard Protected ()

      Fax:
      8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 - 732
      Westchester, CA 90045
      US

Administrative Contact:
      WhoisGuard
      WhoisGuard Protected ()
      +1.6613102107
      Fax: +1.6613102107
      8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 - 732
      Westchester, CA 90045
      US

Technical Contact:
      WhoisGuard
      WhoisGuard Protected ()
      +1.6613102107
      Fax: +1.6613102107
      8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 - 732
      Westchester, CA 90045
      US

Status: Locked

Name Servers:
      NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
      NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
      NS3.DREAMHOST.COM

Creation date: 17 Nov 2010 18:36:00
Expiration date: 17 Nov 2011 13:36:00

tens of thousands...for porn? I'd bet money there are hundreds of thousands to millions of porn website, their list will grow by a ludicrous amount each day as well. http://www.domaintools.com/internet-statistics/ rough guess at how many domains are our there, I could easily see at least a couple hundred thousand of the current 125 million domains at least have porn on them somewhere, even if they aren't traditional "porn sites" dedicated to it/requiring payment. in my teen years (not so long ago) I used to visit quite a few "funny video" sites that also would randomly through in some porn just for good measure :P

If they were worried about privacy they wouldn't register porn sites to their home address http://whois.domaintools.com/virtualbabes.com

http://whois.domaintools.com/kristopeit.com

It's also listed on the website itself, kristopeit.com (but I personally wouldn't visit it unless I was behind nine proxies), along with all of his relatives e-mail addresses IIRC.

Keep in mind, though, that if you do send him any of your own personal information he'll probably post it here for the entire world to see.

Registrant:
      Michael Kristopeit
      14605 34th Ave N
      Apt 108
      Plymouth, MN 55447
      US

      Registrar: NAMESDIRECT
      Domain Name: KRISTOPEIT.COM
            Created on: 11-SEP-00
            Expires on: 11-SEP-11
            Last Updated on: 28-JUL-09

      Administrative, Technical Contact:
            Kristopeit, Michael <mike@kristopeit.com>
            14605 34th Ave N
            Apt 108
            Plymouth, MN 55447
            US
            408-307-9811

      Domain servers in listed order:
            NS4.MYDOMAIN.COM
            NS3.MYDOMAIN.COM
            NS1.MYDOMAIN.COM
            NS2.MYDOMAIN.COM

Assuming a "site" == new domain, that would give us roughly 6%* of the registered domains per week are used for phishing...

Curious what the percentage is for porn sites

* using these statistics.

A whois on the domain indicates it's old enough that it was created when Network Solutions was the only real registrar available. Remember, in the 'old' days Network Solutions had a monopoly granted it by the NSF to run the 'American' domains. While 1999 was just at the cusp of the change over, it was still a long while before Network Solutions was finally forced to play fair and real alternatives to them that people could trust showed up.

Domain Name: nswtransportblueprint.com.au

Registrant: BANG THE TABLE PTY LIMITED

Registrant Contact ID: R-000428733-SN
Registrant Contact Name: Karthik Reddy
Registrant Contact Email: Visit whois.ausregistry.com.au for Web based WhoIs

Name Server: ns10.dnsmadeeasy.com
Name Server: ns11.dnsmadeeasy.com

Theories are nice, concrete proof is nicer.

That's concrete proof of why it doesn't look like a Google server? You're answering an unasked question.

Theories are nice, concrete proof is nicer.

Good point. I find it fascinating that slashdot is quoting a web site called "iran video news" that is run out of Arizona. If this is the only source that is reporting Iran is "considering" the death penalty then why the fuck should we believe it? We already know that the United States runs an intense media propaganda network around the world, and used it domestically during the build up to the Iraq war. In terms of Iran's use of the death penalty, they are definitely more fascist than we are, and these executions should stop. At the same time, why don't we start looking at our OWN record? Wouldn't it be easier to end our own human rights transgressions before attacking those of other countries? We've imprisoned journalists, and we've executed people who were children when they committed their crimes, the mentally retarded, and have condemned to death many people who were probably innocent, so our high horse on capital punishment and the imprisonment of journalists is not particularly "high". We've also now started imprisoning without trial and even torture.

I am sad to see slashdot fall for this obvious propaganda. I thought you guys were good critical thinkers.

Just goes to show that the Chinese are as reckless with their advertising process as they are with their manufacturing process.

The company name is actually Love Sciences, LLC

This is so ridiculous. They say they founded their company in 2006. They only registered their domain in 2007. Their patent filing is so fresh, it still says "patent pending".

Personally, I've been making tools like this one since 2001 (and I know I wasn't the only one at the time). Mind you at the time, I didn't have the Twitter/Facebook share buttons (but now, everybody has those -- so it's not like they have anything unique). Besides, the guy complains about the Twitter and the Facebook buttons they both have in common, but if you look closely, you'll see that reframe has five select boxes, and Google has four buttons, and not only is Google only using buttons (instead of checkboxes) -- it has two share buttons that reframe doesn't even have (and it's missing three options that reframeit has).

And don't get me started on those screenshots, they're way too small to read fully (even if you do view image). And the first three screenshots have the same complaint duplicated (so aside from the arrows, I'm guessing that we're missing two of his complaints).

And then, look at what he ends his blog post with.

In any case, pairing a Web annotation service with the leading search engine puts Google at the head of the Web annotation long tail, of which Reframe It, Diigo, JotSpot and others are a part.

Excuse-me!? I've never heard of Reframeit.com. Does he have third party citations to back up his claims? Traffic stats? User reviews? Anything? Personally, I have, and reframeit doesn't even make it in the top ten.

And what about jotspot.com? Weren't they bought out by Google two or three years ago. Shouldn't this guy know this if he's in the space? Besides, it's not like jotspot would even qualify as a good web annotation tool, it was way too feature-rich to be in that category the last time I saw it.

There are several older domains, e.g. purdue.edu: http://whois.domaintools.com/purdue.edu

I agree, Dan was basically right, seven years ago. The situation hasn't improved much. My prediction:

- As we start running out of IPv4 addresses, ISPs will start selling them to each other. Suddenly, we'll start using IP addresses wisely.
- There are only 111 million active domain names. Most of those point to shared IPs on virtual hosts and domain name squatters.
- With so few actual required IP addresses, the IPv6 transition will never happen.

We geeks like to think that the world will naturally adopt new, better technologies, simply because it would be the right thing. Reality is far different:

- Consider UTF-16 and UTF-32. They basically delayed multi-language support world-wide until UTF-8 made it painless for developers, allowing them to continue using 'char' data types in C for strings.
- NAT may have been invented by geeks for various cool reasons. However, it dominates the web because our ISPs like to charge extra money for multiple IP addresses, and we consumers like to dick them out of it.
- ISPs dynamically switch our IP addresses to protect us. A dynamically changing network is far harder to attack, especially when consumers know virtually nothing about security. On a drive through South Carolina recently, I found about 80% of all WiFi points were wide open!
- ISPs would love to force customers onto another level of NAT. They could kill a ton of P2P traffic, with a great excuse for the FCC: "I ran out of addresses!"
- The SIP protocol was designed by committee, like IPv6. It basically doesn't work across NATs worth a damn, and it's slowed VoIP adoption by years.

TCP and UDP increase our addressable space to 48 bits, which should last the rest of our lifetimes. IPv6 should have seen the success of these protocols and created an extension to IPv4 that would work with old equipment and software.

Start by seizing rightful control of the domain name from this asshat

Hostname:en.wikipedia.org
ISP:Wikimedia US network
Country:United States
City:San Francisco
Region:California
IP Address:208.80.152.2

Try again where are they located?
Here is there whois record also..
http://whois.domaintools.com/wikipedia.org

Asus.co.uk is not Asus' UK site (which is uk.asus.com).

Additionally, asus.co.uk is registered through a completely different registrar than asus.com (1&1, whereas asus.com comes from Network Solutions), and the contact info for each are different, which makes me suspect something is hinky.

Registrant: Michael Sharp 12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd. Box 238 Kent, Washington 98030 United States Domain Name: ITSBETTERWITHWINDOWS.COM Created on: 05-Dec-08 Expires on: 05-Dec-09 Last Updated on: 05-Dec-08 Administrative Contact: Sharp, Michael 12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd. Box 238 Kent, Washington 98030 United States (877) 788-8066 Fax -- Technical Contact: Sharp, Michael 12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd. Box 238 Kent, Washington 98030 United States (877) 788-8066 Fax -- Domain servers in listed order: NS61.DOMAINCONTROL.COM NS62.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

Not everything on the internet is real. Whois is your friend.

It is difficult to believe that Asus did this out of love for Redmond. I wonder how much MS paid for this special treatment, or did they threaten Asus with higher prices?

I still don't see any conclusive evidence thi was Asus' work. I think your anger should be directed at Microsoft. I can't prove it for sure but the whois of this domain itsbetterwithwindows.com reads:

Registrant:
Michael Sharp
12932 SE Kent-Kangley Rd.
Box 238
Kent, Washington 98030
United States

Domain Name: ITSBETTERWITHWINDOWS.COM
Created on: 05-Dec-08
Expires on: 05-Dec-09
Last Updated on: 05-Dec-08

And so we put it in the same state as Washington. Now, I'm guessing this is a PR company and we have a perfect match of Arbirtron Ad agency listing Michael Sharp as Manager, Agency & Advertiser Services for several different regions of the US.

Ok, from there if you google Arbitron Asus and Arbitron Microsoft you come up with two very juicy powerpoints from Microsoft on Arbitron's site.

I would put my guess at 95% that this is a Microsoft run and funded site with little to do with Asus other than get their permission.

While people mentioned the phishing implications, the spamming importance of the .cn domain should not be overlooked either. I know I am not the only person who has seen a lot of spam on behalf of .cn domains, and I would say the WHOIS data is part of the reason why. For example, look at abcde.cn:

> whois abcde.cn Domain Name: abcde.cn ROID: 20030311s10001s00024435-cn Domain Status: ok Registrant Organization: æ±åÂÃ¥ÂååÂææéåÂå Registrant Name: ÃÂæÂÂå¥ Administrative Email: domain@abcde.cn Sponsoring Registrar: Ã¥ÃÂÂæÂýÃÂÃÃÂææéåÂå Name Server:ns1.dns.com.cn Name Server:ns2.dns.com.cn Registration Date: 2003-03-17 12:20 Expiration Date: 2010-03-17 12:48

Now how on earth does one contact the owner - or more importantly - the registrar of this domain? Even if you can make sense of the unicode, that is no guarantee that you'll find someone to talk to about this domain.

Try a different whois service. A registrant certainly has the right to register .cn domain names and provide only Chinese characters, without having to convert to Latin characters (which they may not know). Try: http://whois.domaintools.com/abcde.cn

Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last?

No. Although from time to time I notice that Maven2's repo1 is sometimes down which irks me a bit when I'm using new packages. And that's why I have a local repository on my list--in case the bandwidth I steal from Jason van Zyl of Codehaus ever dries up. And if it should, I realize there's not a lot I can do about it ... although I can always keep downloading packages (or even building them myself) and installing them on my local network albeit tedious. I am lucky though as Maven2 is well thought out in this respect, always defaulting through a whole list of repos (indeed if repo1 went down, there are others).

I appreciate Mr. van Zyl's work and efforts but he and I have signed no prior contract guaranteeing the length of time his service should be available to me. And I, of course, expect nothing from him. He's doing me a great service at the moment but the service--though rarely spotty--doesn't have to last past this second.

Say, where's your local repository of Ndiswrapper's database?

Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites.

This is correct. And by that logic, it may benefit you to send the sourceforge developers a simple message asking them if a modest donation of funds could ail this predicament? Every so often I anonymously throw $10-$20 at a project that I use heavily, I really wish others would do the same.

While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?

I'm really not sure although I do realize that if Ndiswrapper is talking to this database on the backend, there's probably no eyeballs looking at ads to the left and right of this database. Which makes it kind of hard for magical ad revenue to come in (similar to the codehaus repo1 scenario listed above). I think you'd be better off appealing to some distribution that may hinge heavily on Ndiswrapper but I'm pretty sure the developers would have exhausted these resources before letting this site lapse into oblivion.

The PWS in this case is Panther Express, which is a CDN. See this DomainTools page for information.

It is inconceivable that Obama's web site is running on Windows 95 or 98. And Microsoft's PWS's last version number was 4.

http://blog.domaintools.com/2008/03/feel-like-paying-more/

Time to add nimp.org to your hosts file. The link is an auto redirect from rds.yahoo.com to members.on.nimp.org. This is how Yahoo redirects search results to find out who clicked what. Yawho? search results are thus no longer safe to click. For best results, add rds.yahoo.com to your hosts file or equivalent blocker as well.

members.on.nimp.org resolves to poulet0.zoy.org. The IP address is [80.65.228.130]. Best to block that as well. The DNS administrator for this server is Slashdot User "Sam H", UID 3979.

Somebody at slashdot should have a look at our anonymous coward's IP address. It would be nice if we could quit this nonsense. I hope this isn't some troll that bought a low UID in the auction.

And maybe some slashdotter in Paris could call Sam and ask him to fix his compromised server. It does look like someone truly nasty took it over in August of 2005. Big Debian fan this one. Likes the GNAA routine and the whole bit.

I'm not certain about pinning this on Sam. sam.zoy.org resolves to a different IP. One of you intertubes wizards want to weigh in here?

Check it yourself at http://whois.domaintools.com/network-solutions-stole-this-domain.com

http://whois.domaintools.com/pzrh5hnf.com

rofl, this is going to be too much fun

http://whois.domaintools.com/nsi-hates-niggers-and-jews.com

http://whois.domaintools.com/cube111.com

Whoever did it, I think it's crap that they scrape out or listen in on potential names.

I'm going to try some semimeaningful name searches on domaintools.com as an experiment.

I think privacy advocates are making mountains out of a molehill. This doesn't seem like an underhanded attempt at tricking users. After all, the ".net" at the end gives it away as a URL pretty quickly. Omniture has used the 2o7.net domain for a long time. It's been registered since 2000. http://whois.domaintools.com/2o7.net One could argue that Omniture is just boneheaded in general for using domain for so long that doesn't mean anything, but I wouldn't think of this as directed toward Adobe users. Plus, you have to realize that Omniture is just a web analytics package. It just shows things like page views, clicks, and possibly behavioral data in aggregate. There's no "Spy on Users" or "What's John Doe at 11 Main Street Buying?"