Slashdot Mirror
Many Domains Registered With False Data
bakotaco writes "According to research carried out by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) many domain owners are hiding their true identity. The findings could mean that many websites are fronts for spammers, phishing gangs and other net criminals. The report also found that measures to improve information about domain owners were not proving effective." From the article: "The GAO took 300 random domain names from each of the .com, .org and .net registries and looked up the centrally held information about their owners. Any user can look up this data via one of the many whois sites on the net. The report found that owner data for 5.14% of the domains it looked at was clearly fake as it used phone numbers such as (999) 999-9999; listed nonsense addresses such as 'asdasdasd' or used invalid zip codes such as 'XXXXX'. In a further 3.65% of domain owner records data was missing or incomplete in one or more fields."
really?
You think?
Tim is that you or Linda? :)
:)
:)
Do you block your name and address from being published in the phone book too? Lots of fools out there from the looks of phone books.
How big of a problem is this really? Those worried about spam just need to implement greylisting and spamassassin to eliminate almost 100% of spam. Telemarketers have been defeated by the national do not call list. Those that still call you once you are on the list can be charged very hefty fines. It has been a very long time since a telemarketer called here.
So what else is a problem? If you are so concerned about email issues or spam use a gmail account. They are free and last I looked they are giving out a 100 invites to users. You can check it occasionally just to see if any legit email is sent there. And when needed just create a new one and use that in your registration info.
And if you are so afraid of communicating with people why do you have a domain name to start with? I believe the whole idea is to exchange ideas and to do that you have to allow people to communicate with you.
IMHO, if a registar finds a domain with bogus contact info they should try to contact the owner. If after two weeks they can not contact the owner then that domain goes up for sale again. Kind of like finding a lost nickle in the street. No names associated with it, no way to find who owns it, finders keepers then.