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/
MP3 Search Engine
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.
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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Comment removed based on user account deletion
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)...
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.
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."
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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Could you back that up? There are horror stories for every registrar, but GoDaddy is in my opinion one of the best of the cheap ones. Their customer support actually works (I have always got a response to email within 2 hours - Network Solutions has 12-24 hour answer time at best and they cost 5x as much as GoDaddy, not to mention their refusal policy to transfer domains to other registrars without phonecalls (I'm not living in the USA so the phonecalls to them are expensive international ones) just because they think transfer is "suspicious").
Also - GoDaddy has a quite nice spam policy - which other cheap registrars often don't have and they actually do not care much because being too strict about spam would not give them income.
joker.com would be nice because their web interface is clean and they don't try to sell you a kitchen sink with your domain, but their spam policy has at least in the past been non-existant.
check out http://nodaddy.com/ for a few horror stories, Admittedly every business that gets past a certain size will have 'hate' sites against it, but yanking a domain name from Fyoder was a pretty bad idea :P
none that I know of, but I do my whois for domain prospecting from my ISP's registration tool, thus once I find one not taken I'm already registering it. I did some work for a client, and as I had her write down everything she could think of wanting for a domain with her line of business. I ended up registering 10 different domains, figuring I would park those she didn't want with some basic advertisements and an offer to sell for a reasonable price. At first she was leary of having "so many different websites" Till I explained domain forwarding and all she had to do was pick her favorite for the main site and then the rest would point to it. She ended up buying all of them ($500 w/ a 3 year domain support agreement).
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.