Slashdot Mirror
Network Solutions Overhauls Whois Results
Robert Accettura writes "Network Solutions has updated its whois interface, giving it an interesting new twist. On top of regular info provided, it shows data that appears to be from Alexa, including a screenshot of the homepage (though not terribly recent), as well as looks up your IP, and displays lots of information on it. It even shows the server type, if it supports SSL, DMOZ, Yahoo listing, traffic ranking, and lock status. This comes right after they announced rapid DNS updates. Perhaps they are trying to win over the geeks before they turn on sitefinder?"
Perhaps they are trying to win over the geeks before they turn on sitefinder?
Maybe. However, my bet is on friendlifying (hey, I just coined a word!) the service for something far more sinister. This wreaks of targetting manadrones with all sorts of feelgood updates that don't serve that much purpose for real geeks...
Maybe I'm paranoid, but when you're dealing with a group like this, you can't look at it with too much suspicion.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
The info appears against my Network Solutions domains, but not my Tucows ones.
And in some respects the Tucows approach is better. A Network Solutions query shows all my details directly. Tucows requires a query to input a grahpics based password so it is harder to harvest the info.
They are cracking down on bogus domain registration information for the sole purpose of being able to make money on their new service which allows you to keep your registration information private.
They didn't give a crap until they realized it would affect their profits.
Tried testing it out through a proxy that strips the referrer and user-agent fields (no tin-foil hat here ;-) ). Just kept giving me 302 redirects back to the same front page
Just what we need - a fussy site.
I'm a bit disappointed that you cannot perform a whois lookup on .us domains.
.us people? Were they denied access to the data?
Doesn't Verisign like the
Register.com lets me do a lookup. Perplexing.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
How does the submitter expect the geeks to care when we have a shell to get faster results?
So Alexa is an Amazon company and they are making money by taking screenshots of copyrighted material?
Maybe everyone who has screenshots of their website in Alexa should file a DMCA complaint Amazon. Seems fair to me since Amazon loves bogus patents.
You have to click on "underlying Whois data" to get the registrar info. At least you still can.
Registrars are going to be annoyed about this.
i like my whois command. no fuss, no ugly browser. every info i will ever need on my STDOUT!
They used to require you pass a captcha to get the information about the domain. Oh wait, that's 9 bucks a year and only works for domains registered through netsol now.
That was nice of them.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Does anyone know what the Traffic Rank means? My company's site is listed as a 2, slashdot is a 1. Lowest I can find is a 4. Lots of sites have a Not Available rank.
who noticed slashdot's traffic ranking was #1?
It says "IP Location: US(UNITED STATES)"
Totally useless answer, but technically correct. I should expect no less from Verisign. heh.
Stll looks the same to me:
.ORG WHOIS information is provided to assist persons in determining the contents of a domain name registration record in the PIR registry database. The data in this record is provided by Public Interest Registry for informational purposes only, and PIR does not guarantee its accuracy.
localhost:~$ whois slashdot.org
NOTICE: Access to
This service is intended only for query-based access. You agree that you will us
(snip)
I don't know about this being intended to court the geeks, as any actual geeks would be rather unlikely to use a web interface to do a whois query.
Read, L
It got the Phoenyx' location right (unsurprisingly, since our IP is right where you'd expect it to be).
But yeah, we're "e-commerce: yes" too, which is fightin' words, as we're a free site, where "free" doesn't mean "call it free then shove ads at you."
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Would it be terribly difficult to implement a system like whois.sc, where it shows images of your email address instead of text?
Yes, in the United States, at least. Are you familiar with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines?
Tucows requires a query to input a grahpics based password so it is harder to harvest the info.
So what are blind people supposed to do? The TUCOWS Whois interface doesn't seem to provide a way to download the digits as an audio file in Ogg Vorbis format.
I figured I'd try the new web interface out. Entered in our main domain, and well...
I noticed that the one weak link for the company I'm contracting to, that's on my list to fix (one of the reasons I'm here now), namely the domain name stuff...was actually in the MIDDLE of being compromised. They seem to have just kidnapped our corporate domain, and were on their way to our actual product site. Not all our domains are with NSI (thank god), but the fact I lucked out and checked it by fluke is damn scary.
Looking at their results for a whois on my domain, I found something rather stupid. I clicked on the DMOZ results (hey! I didn't know someone put me in there...) and discovered that they convert DMOZ urls to all capitals. Wonderful. This is highly unlikely to work on a majority of websites... case matters in URLs!
A domain I sold 6 weeks ago is still listed to me.
It still seems to be wrong. It says my web server is in San Fransisco, CA. when doing a whois lookup on the IP address gives the correct location for the netblock (Houston, TX).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
At least the rest of the info appears to be correct; right down to the registrar name (GoDaddy).
You can't take the sky from me!
Basically this allows Google to spider my site, but when robots like msnbot decide to ignore this, reading and parsing robots.txt at each line, they'll follow block_crawler.pl, which is a script that appends their IP, date, time, etc. to .htaccess, with a "Deny from" rule.
For excessive abuses, I just block their /24 at the firewall.
Incidentally, they are ignoring robots.txt because they want to beat google at indexing "More(tm)" content, and be the "premiere" search engine out there. A year of "accidentally" crawling more content than they should, and their search engine will appear to have a LOT more pages that google does. You can bet a press release advertising this fact will appear soon after.
I have another little trap for the harvesters, called "Can-o-Raid", which I've been using for about 4 years now. You can read more about it on my Perlmonks writeup over here. Being able to pollute the search engines with +/- 7 million fake email addresses per-night is pretty nice.. and I can slow them down by adding a sleep(45) to each page reload. They can't get out, once they get in.
Did anybody else notice that whois.sc is using IE (or IE libraries) to take the screenshots? I took a look at my flight school's web site, and the center pane was misaligned; this is due to a CSS bug in IE that I've not yet worked around. I also took a look at my homepage, and it rendered one of the transparent PNGs on a grey background (with the normally-invisible black text clearly visible--it should say "If you can read this text, click 'about this site' to find out why!" "About This Site" is a page that talks about IE bugs.). It should be noted that I'm looking at whois.sc with Moz, so the rendering issue isn't here; also, the screenshot image is a JPEG.
"Make it ten--I am only a poor corrupt official."
--Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), Casablanca