Slashdot Mirror
Domains May Disappear After Search
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Daily Domainer has a story alleging that there may be a leak that allows domain tasters to intercept, analyze and register your domain ideas in minutes. 'Every time you do a whois search with any service, you run a risk of losing your domain,' says one industry insider. ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC ) has not been able to find hard evidence of Domain Name Front Running but they have issued an advisory (pdf) for people to come forward with hard evidence it is happening. Here is how domain name research theft crimes can occur and some tips to avoiding being a victim."
Always use a command line tool. The webservices are notorious for such sniffing, I've never seen or heard about it happening from the unix command line. :)
Better still, simply use your registrar to do a registration, if that works then it was free
http://rndpic.com/
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It has long been rumored that domain name registries snap up names when they see signs of interest. Unfortunately ICANN's committees don't have the tools to really open up the clamshell and see what is really going on deep inside registries and registrars.
However, there is another matter - that of data mining of the query packets that arrive at root and top level domain servers.
ICANN's contracts do not prohibit data mining of the query stream, in fact they openly permit it. Thus Verisign has the right to look at incoming queries and generate a body of information about what domain names are being uttered by users. It's not a big step from that to come up with a list of names that would be nice things to have if one wants to spatter up a bunch of Google Adsense ads and collect click revenue.
(Also, because the entire domain name, not just the top level parts, hits root and top level domain servers, through a bit of statistical reduction, one can produce a data stream that is of interest not only to paying marketeers but, perhaps, to certain national intelligence agencies.)
Though, not on the "in minutes" time scale.
My buddy and I even made up names with random letters in a string of 15 or 20, then some porn words stuck on the end ".com".
Sure enough, two days later some squatter had them.
I think the leak is in the registrars themselves. Imagine the money someone could get from the squatters by simply setting up a script to automatically email these queries somewhere.
"Never a more wretched den of scum and villany" describes the whole domain registration process pretty well I think.
Over the years, the Internet and its resulting commercialization have lead to some truly awful buzzwords and mangling of the language (may the person who first coined "blog" rot in hell)...
But ye gods! "domain tasting"?!
I can see it now... "The slashdot.org '97 was a superb one; It had a playful nose, a full, rich body and a piquant aftertaste. The digg.com '07, however, can only be described in scatalogical terms."
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
How does this apply to me? I make it a point whenever entering my credit card number and personal information into an order form, to do a Google search first to make sure someone else doesn't have the same information, so they don't get confused and send my order to them instead.
Theft? Crimes? Does Slashdot now think, an idea can be "property" and/or "stolen"?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I'll swear this has been happening for years. I've taken to the habit of not searching for a new domain until I'm ready to buy it, right then and there. In the past, I've seen cases where customers have searched for a domain, found it to be available, and by the time they had a meeting the next morning to discuss buying it have it be registered by someone else (usually a squatter). In a sense, it's just common sense that a lot of the domain search "services" would engage in a competitive practice like this. I'm not saying it's ethical, but it's been going on for a long time.
Maybe the community can come up with a list of guaranteed reputable domain search services that take measures to prevent this sort of activity, and support those organizations.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I've heard rumors of GD domain "tasting" for the past 18 months, maybe longer. If true, it's pretty pathetic that they need to do that in order to make money.
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- Register a domain as soon as you search for it
- Avoid using registry based WHOIS tools.
The ICANN requirements for becoming a registrar are VERY weak. There are a lot of disreputable operations out there who could be colluding with domain prospectors. Even with the bigger registry operations, its still possible for people to get access to the whois queries. You have no idea what that web whois box is actually querying, and there is no privacy guarantee.perhaps whois should provide Md5 lookup for a domain instead so people cant snoop at the domain being queried.. so instead of for example whois: somedomain.tld its whois: a79f888f1c2dc50c6b354c0d816f5bf5 simple and effective.
Actually most of bigger squatting operations don't pay a dime on a per name basis. They hold the name for 30 days, then release it at no cost.
One of the problems stem from the fact that any whois query can be sniffed (or SNORTed) if it passes over the wrong network hop anyway, so there isn't much you can do unless you're ready on the trigger to register the domain almost immediately. One thing you CAN do if you're going to do web queries (because not everybody has a whois command line installed) is query via;
https://www.easywhois.com/
Note httpS. I can certify that Mark J doesn't do domain tasting, that's not the business EasyDNS is in. So if you do do a query via EasyWhois it's not going to get snagged after 24 hours (at least not from our end).
[ Disclaimer: Yeah I work for EasyDNS
-- The unsig...
No, because they get to sit on the domain name for free for 30 days and then drop it if they want. Domain Name registration is an amazingly shady part of the internet for being such an important piece. I have long suspected that the registrars (especially the no-name ones) and the domain squatters are one in the same.
I read the internet for the articles.
Period.
Much of not most of the spam I'm deflecting nowadays seems to come from 'tasted' domains. Or just made up. I almost don't care about the difference.
The last time I read about this, more than a month ago, one snarky idea was to script a tool to randomly taste domains, constantly. If the registrars are forwarding the requests to squatters, they would go crazy with the surge in requests. The squatters would fritter away resources keeping up with these random searches, and eventually the WHOIS functionality of the registrars would have to change. And the script would change, and so on.
I think domain tasting ought to go away, or cost something. $2 for a 14 day taste would wreck the economics, maybe, certainly if random search scripts got going. My server could probably do 100,000 searches a day. I know it can send out 3-4 million spams a weekend, sadly.
Of course, the registrars could block my IP after a while. And blocks of IPs. So we need a Seti@Home-type script that hammers these things out, and let them block every dialup/dsl/cable/sat block. Hehe.
No, it's not devious enough.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Can anyone give one legitimate reason why anyone would need to "trial" a domain? Is that to see how it looks in the browser's address bar?
Wouldn't doing away with that stupidity make things a lot harder for these losers that park / squat domains?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
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Packets are being sniffed as they traverse thru the tubes. Try this, do a google search for something made up. Try to get a page result of 0. Do this a few times and write down each time you get a 0 result. Come back in a few days and do a google search and you will probably find some custom pages. Is this google tasting?
I'm thinking that I'm not liking the direction this is going...
Sniffing, tasting, hmmm, what comes next, digesting? Excreting?
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When thinking of potential domain names, I usually use the inurl: function in Google. I generally only use part of the name too - that way you're able to see all the potential variations of the domain name you're thinking of working with (and possibly giving you some inspiration too)...
This type of domain name sniffing and squatting has been happening for years. I 'tested' registration of a domain name on ICANNs biggest contractor. They havent changed their page. and the next morning, as I was paying for the registration, the registration record came up 'owned' by someone else. ( Purchased the following day. Since I tested the name at about 11:15 p.m. It was an automated system, in place and doing its dirty work.) A squatting company in Pasadena, who sold it to someone in Oregon. Nothing has appeared on the site EVER, and that was a way back in 1999, but it kinda angered me that it happened, and I never understood the mechanism, but now see clearly that ICANNs contractors were behind it. There is a domain-name squatters magazine, and a domain-name squatters trade show!
I guess from now on one will have to register a name blind and see what happens.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I posted this over 18 hours ago. I checked it on Network Solutions's web-based Whois last night and again a few minutes ago. The domain is available.
By the way, the solution to the "tasting" problem is to either put a very low limit on the number of "free tastes" people or companies can have in a year.
Another way is to simply charge tem a pro-rated amount based on a minimum usage, say, 1/26 of the annual fee for 2 weeks.
Another way is to charge a non-refundable setup fee, say, 1/12 of the annual fee, which would be credited against the 12th month of service. Whatever this fee is, it should cover the actual costs of registering and de-registering a domain plus provide an optional small profit to the registrar.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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There's been some concern about this over at the Anti-Phishing Working Group. Much phishing seems to come from domains held for very short periods. But it turns out that's not "domain tasting". It's phishers buying domains with stolen credit card numbers, using retail domain registrars. After a few days, the credit card number is detected as stolen, the transaction is reversed by the bank, and the registrar deletes the domain.
This seems to be a separate problem from "domain tasting". But the "grace period" loophole that makes "domain tasting" possible also enables this scam. If registrars couldn't return domains to the TLD registry without paying, they'd have to raise their standards of customer validation.
Curiosity was framed, Ignorance killed the cat.
Let me get this clear, you think that destroying a fairly vital part of the internet infrastructure by a ddos is a good use of a bot net ?
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From the page linked from TFA:
"It is such a strong urge to type the domain name into the address bar and see what website comes up. Most users think perhaps there is already a company using the name and this will be a quick end to the question. Wrong! This is the most dangerous thing to do. Internet Service Providers (ISP) sell NXD (Non-eXistent Domain) data."
Maybe someone can enlighten me here. If I look up a domain, then try to buy it and see if it is taken, I move on to some other variant of the name. Do people actually purchase from squatters? I guess it's the same as, do people buy products from email spam? It only takes a couple to make it profitable.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
Why is this so hard to verify. Use each registrar to test availability of domain xyzzyplugh99.com, changing the index number "99" for each test. Try back the next day and see which ones are sudden unavailable, then complain LOUDLY!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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Its happened to me several times and the domain names were not very common words- or words at all for that matter.
People don't really learn german or latin or whatever roots to their languages these days, so they're unaware of the true meanings of some words. It's not uncommon for half of peoples' vocabularies to come from words that they just know by rote. People on the internet and in music (and pop culture in general) are now just making up words because they feel they have a word that fits better simply because they feel the word they use somehow has an intrinsic meaning, or that the use implies its meaning and it takes hold. The language you know and love only is used in business and has its roots in proper grammar and definitions etc; It's not the same language that people use in social situations or popular culture. This pop language will continue to grow and evolve because it has its roots in today's culture because the people creating and growing these terms do so because they understand where the words come from. They don't understand the roots of their language so they're not going to use words that they learnt by rote instead of by the root, when they can just as easily throw out words that have much more meaning to them and the people around them. We're just going to have to start having "formal english" and "social english."
By instinct, I would pronounce a lot of words the wrong way, such as "draught" or "digest", because I don't know how to pronounce those words except phonetically. I never learned the roots of the words or how to pronounce certain things when or why. Some words are going to sound or look weird to me or even seem out of place just because I don't know these things, so I will be much more likely to use words that mean something more to me and tie into my experiences more.
I don't know if you've seen some french books, and then heard french people talking. Around here at least, it's totally not the same thing. One is definitely more formal and one is definitely more slang-laden. It doesn't even matter if the book is for casual reading. If you walk into a job, then you're not going to use the slang-laden french either, you'll turn to the more formal french. And then when you're hanging out with friends, it's back to slang-french. That's just how things will always be until people in formal situations accept slang, or people are taught languages formally and learn the roots of their languages as well.
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Actually, Bob Parsons (CEO of GoDaddy) has been complaining about "domain tasting" and "domain kiting" for years. Google Bob Parsons domain tasting and look at the results. I wouldn't be surprised if it's happening upstream from Godaddy, but I'd be shocked to find Godaddy is in any way willingly facilitating the practise.
What registrar registers a domain for $2?
[*] Just to be silly, I've done a whois on syntheticdemand.com, which at the time I write this post does not exist. Wonder how soon that will get registered?
Yes. I do. And I didn't say ddos it. If I send out a whois every second for a month, I'll probably get banned from doing a whois. Some idiot might have registered 2,592,000 domains, but no one is going to take notice.
Now say I spread that request out so that one computer is doing a whois per month but still the same total. Less likely to get banned and I could probably up that to 2-3 per day and still be safe.
If you DDoS the entire thing, you're done. NO ONE can do anything their scripts will be useless they're just going to chalk it up to a DDoS and go on. However if you load it up to 90% of capacity then these automated "take a whois and register it" scripts will be registering everything possible. If you get enough computers loading the system so that everything is being registered someone is going to notice it.
Beat the scammers at their own game. Set up an automated script that does whois lookups for random combinations of words. More or less just flood them with requests and they won't be able to tell which ones are legit lookups. Whoever the douchebag is, will either eventually run out of money, or have to expend more time to improve his algorithm, or just blacklist your ip.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Bogus whois is cause for domain cancellation.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
This sort of thing has been going on for ages. You check on a domain name, it turns out to be available, then next day it's mysteriously gone. After all, why would someone check up on the availability of a domain name unless they were interested in buying it? And if they're interested in buying it, maybe they wouldn't object to paying a bit more for it?
If you can afford a Nominet membership, two static IP addresses and a Linux box with Apache, Perl, GPG and BIND, you too can become a domain scammer! Sell domain names "from" some riduculously low figure, which -- it transpires, after reading the small print, which is so small you have to press ctrl + "+" several times just to be able to see it -- only applies to long, unpronounceable strings, with actual words coming at a higher rate. Set yourself up a dodgy affiliate programme {is that a tautology?} where people can put a little form on their pages querying your WHOIS service. A little drive-by download which diverts other domain queries to your own server wouldn't go amiss {best to do this from one of your affiliates' pages, though}. Now you know what domains people are looking up and, being a Nominet member, you are in a position to register the most interesting ones straight away {you can even do this fully-automatically, since all you have to do to buy a domain is send a GPG-encrypted email}.
Registering a domain is so cheap, if you're a member of Nominet, that it's worth a few failures for the successes you will achieve. (You can also register easy mistypings of the name, and post content there which might help persuade the owner of the correctly-spelt domain to purchase those domains from you.)
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!