I havent had a successful use of whois in probably over a decade. What was once a useful tool was destroyed by spammers harvesting email addresses and privacy oriented registrars.
I do. The terms of the domain registration say that providing incorrect information can result in revocation of the registration. Not really worth the risk, IMO, for any domain I actually care about.
Not just that, but also if the registrar turns out to be fraudulent or someone convinces your registrar to transfer the domain (scam the support team), or they get your account password and transfer the domain that way (data leak elsewhere, password reset with a sim swap, you name it)... there are so many ways you can have "technical difficulties", but in the end: you're the one with an ID card that has your name on it. You can take the TLD to court and have them give you back the domain that was legally purchased in your name
Except if it's not in your name
So yep, as you say: make this decision (fake or real information) knowing the risks involved in not legally owning it
Domains point to IPs, and IPs already have subpoenable ownership records at RIRs. In the real estate metaphor: we have property ownership records, but we don't have records of every rental tenancy.
This article is not inconsistent with my comment. The court rejected a subpoena against the ISP for the identity of the user of the IP, not against the RIR for the identity of the owner of the IP. This is like the court rejecting a subpoena against the landlord for their tenant's identity.
That's not true. Those are registration records NOT ownership records. People do not purchase ip address or domains. They register them for temporary use.
For non-legacy allocations, point taken (but my original comment still stands if you replace "ownership" with "registration"). For legacy allocations, it's more complicated.
I'm not sure this follows. You're allowed to publish, say, a book or pamphlet without signing it with your legal name and address. So is a website more like a book, or a building?
Somewhere in the middle IMO. If the domain name is desirable it looks more like a building, because people generally care about who owns the land when it is not getting put to good use.
Websites are more like books when they have a domain no else else cares about.
So, maybe require official ID/address/contact info for any domain over a certain price? Or for all domains under a certain character count, maybe, which could vary for TLD.
How do you determine the value of a domain name? Also there's nothing particularly valuable for most short domain name strings except on .com. It's generic words that tend to be valuable, not a short random string.
ICANN accredited domain registrars (so any registrar selling generic TLDs like .org, .com, .design etc) have contractual obligations related to technical abuses like phishing, malware, and botnets, insofar as they intersect with a domain name.
Content/expression related harms are outside of ICANNs bylaws and any obligations related to what a domain points at are not from ICANN, but from the laws in the jurisdiction in which the registrar operates. This is generally good. There is no global standard for acceptable limits on expression, with the possible exception of CSAM which is illegal everywhere.
Requiring domain registrars to arbitrate what content should be accessible via the DNS is perilous.
It's useful for checking if a domain name is taken without doing that through a registrar, which is both less convenient, and (in case of shitty registrars) can be sold to domain speculators.
Interestingly, when discussing WHOIS with my networking students, I discovered .edu WHOIS is not (cannot?) hidden. I suppose EDUCAUSE either requires WHOIS to remain open or they do not offer information hiding.
Doing some WHOIS lookups, we found a point of contact at a university, called the network admin said hello and launched into an impromptu network admin interview. It was cool stuff. I emailed him later in the day to apologize to and thank him for being a good sport about the whole thing. He (fortunately) found it all rather enjoyable.
Some other TLDs, like .us and .in, also forbid WHOIS privacy. TLD owners are free to set whatever policy they want around this. Perhaps .edu does the same.
Both give you a way to find out the domain's registrar, registration date, transfer status, and administrative contacts like abuse@. Nameserver data can also be somehow useful.
Otherwise, what did you expect the registrar to divulge to you, a random passer-by?
As an Australian, I can look up the ownership of random properties in the US for free. But if I want to do the same for a building on my own street, I have to pay a US$11 fee per a property searched.
The US has a reputation of being a hypercapitalist society, yet they seem to be behind Australia in the descent into hypercapitalism by not (yet) privatising the registration of land titles. [0]
It doesn’t because you can negotiate a bulk discount. If you want all the titles, they’ll sell that to you - for a huge fee, but still a big discount off paying for them all individually. So essentially it prevents mass scraping by individuals and small businesses, while posing no real obstacle for megacorps with megabudgets
Considering Australia (SA) invented the concept of the Torrens Title which means that we don't have to pay extra to protect a piece of paper, and that the Titles Office has always charged for access to titles, I don't think that this is the "hypercapitalism" hill to die on.
It also means that banks can't sell mortgages out from under their borrowers because all liens and other finanacial liabilities attached to a title are known.
Wow. I never noticed how much how I used the internet changed. I haven’t done a WHOIS in a decade.
When I started using the internet, it’s how I contacted people. If I liked their site or their blog, I’d check who was behind it and get an email address I could contact.
Now… humans don’t really own domains anymore. Content is so centralized. I obviously noticed this shift, but I had forgotten how I used to be able to interact with the internet.
Although shit did happen back in the day. Someone show up at the house of the DeviantART CEO in like... I wanna say like, mmm.. 2007? and slashed his tires etc. WhoIs was only cool in the 90s.
I think in most ways it's better, it makes the web more approachable to less technical users, making it less gate-keepey, but I also kind of miss the loosely-coupled cluster of web pages from the late-90's and early 2000's web.
Stuff felt less homogeneous; everyone had kind of a loose understanding of HTML, and people would customize their pages in horrendously wonderful ways. It felt more personal.
So many tech people have a fondness for that time. To me, it was a very narrow slice of the human experience. Today I can find sites and communities on any subject I can conceive and billions more that I cannot.
And personally I found it more horrendously ugly than horrendously wonderful. But that's just my opinion.
Yeah, as I said in most way things are better now than they were in the rose-tinted memories of the late 90's and early 2000's. Now if you want to say something on the internet, you can open up a Substack, or a Bluesky, or a Medium, or you can find a niche Subreddit. You don't need to know anything very technical, and that's a good thing.
I'll acknowledge that the old web was ugly, even at the time. I guess I just liked how much of it was, for lack of a better word, "custom". Most people were pretty bad at HTML, common web standards really hadn't caught out outside of "make it work in Internet Explorer", and CSS really hadn't caught on, so people glued together websites the best that they could.
Most websites looked pretty bad, but they were genuine. They didn't feel like some corporation built them, they felt like they were made by actual humans, and a lot of the time, actual children. I was one of those children.
I posted about this a week ago [1], but my first foray into programming was making crappy websites. It felt cool to me that a nine year old could make and publish a website, just like the grownups could. I didn't know anything about style so I had bright green backgrounds and used marquee tags and blink tags and I believe I had a midi of the X-files theme song playing in the background.
I guess it's the same sentimentality that I have when I look at a child's terrible drawing or reading one of my old terrible essays I wrote when I was eleven years old that my mom kept around. They're bad, they're embarrassing, but they're also kind of charming.
> Yeah, as I said in most way things are better now than they were in the rose-tinted memories of the late 90's and early 2000's. Now if you want to say something on the internet, you can open up a Substack, or a Bluesky, or a Medium, or you can find a niche Subreddit. You don't need to know anything very technical, and that's a good thing.
By 1999 you could create a LiveJournal or find a niche forum through Google. You didn't need to know anything very technical.
You could, Xanga as well, but it was still less connected. People complain about recommendation systems on YouTube and Facebook and Reddit, but one thing that they do well is give people more reach that they probably wouldn't have gotten before.
I've found so many interesting YouTube videos from people that I haven't ever heard of, just because of YouTube recommending them to me. Stuff like that didn't really exist for quite awhile; for a long time the best you had was aggregator sites like ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com or similar sites.
Less gate keepey? Big Tech is literally the gatekeeper. Want to see a story without account? Too bad. What to see what events are going on without Facebook account? Too bad. Want to search discord or twitter. Too bad. Big Tech sucks in all user content and then hides it behind paywalls.
I think a lot of people fail to appreciate that the alternative to big tech taking over was not keeping things exactly the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago, but developing in a different direction.
It was the direction in which people expected things to develop: decentralised and democratised. There was a lot of optimism about empowering individuals.
> I think in most ways it's better, it makes the web more approachable to less technical users
There's a big gap between looking up someone's contact info using a protocol that many tools and websites implement (anyone can open www.who.is from search results) and the second example of needing an understanding of HTML to make a webpage. I don't think it's gatekeepey to be able to email the human behind a given website, whereas the current internet is full of walled gardens, gatekeepers, and faceless/supportless services (thinking of Discord, Cloudflare, and Google as respective examples)
We can have both human-run services and WYSIWYG website builders on the internet concurrently
Not just that. People had ".plan" files that could be viewed with finger, and they would post updates there. I specifically remember John Carmack sharing daily news and updates on his account. It was the first form of "Twitter" back in the 90's.
I sometimes use whois multiple times in a day lol.
Should it exist? Maybe not, probably not, but that doesn't stop me from using it when I want to try to do some sleuthing. Most of the time though it doesn't work because they have privacy enabled.
I did get screwed once with certain TLDs not being able to enable privacy. I had registered a .at domain to use with a video site I had that at the time was reasonably popular and going viral fairly regularly. I hadn't realized beforehand that privacy wasn't possible, but once I learned, I didn't love it, but I wasn't sure if it would matter that much. I was wrong. I was getting calls and emails regularly from random people on the internet who found our content on reddit or whatever and decided to do some sleuthing
That works great until the TLD decides you need to hop through extended verification and fork over an identity card and a recent (3 months) invoice showing the address you signed up with 12 years ago, freezing your domain such that you can't update the information to be your current address even if you wanted to share that with the world (because privacy doesn't exist and GDPR doesn't apply in French-run/France-headquartered AFNIC). There's no time to dispute it or go back and forth: the initial email already comes with the announcement that your domain will go dark if they haven't processed your response after 14 days. Oh yeah, and you need to submit this via plain text email. If you send a link to the pdf scan, so that you can remove it after they've viewed it, that gets rejected (but it will be downloaded by an overseas system, run in the USA, within seconds of sending it), they'll respond that it specifically needs to be an attachment so that it will linger in their inbox forever
If you use fake info in relation to WHOIS data, you also need to be prepared to forge an identity document (a pretty bad felony in most countries per my understanding)
That said, on most forms I enter fake info because they they have no legitimate use for it anyway and they also can't compare it against anything. Buying a game or event ticket needs my address? For what, linking my purchase to a profile they're building? Nah, fake address it is
My only nitpick is that humans still own domains, but I agree with the overall sentiment and thank you for sharing this perspective.
It is fascinating to consider how our experience with the internet is changing over time.
Remember phreaking? Having been born in the Netscape era, I certainly don't, but I can imagine that losing the ability to pull that trick off must have felt like a loss to those who were initiated in the art.
Thankfully the trend appears to be that new technologies and thus new 1337 h4x are still forthcoming.
On the other hand, I did a WHOIS days ago to check up on a potential scam site my partner landed on while working on an e-commerce platform. I hope some alternative exists, people using Let's Encrypt leaves an entry in the transparency log but people don't necessarily need to use that. I haven't researched the alternatives to WHOIS yet but now I'll have to.
I did a Whois last week to prove to my previous registrar that I'm no longer with them, and that the invoice they sent was invalid. Unexpected use-case, but useful.
They’re pretty expensive, and the nature of the service means that if they disappear, they have ownership of your domain and you have no recourse to get it back.
Worse: if Njalla decides you shouldn't have a domain - for any reason whatsoever, including "we don't like your web site" - they can seize it, and you have no legal recourse.
You mean the "domains" that >99% of users can't even resolve, which can't be used to send or receive email, and which you can't have SSL certificates issued for? Don't be daft.
That's the nature of 'private' domain registration used more commonly, at least to some degree for many private registrations. If you read the agreement, you are transferring your domain registration to the privacy service, and they forward stuff to you. I don't know what happens if they disappear, however.
GDPR applies when using a service that has KYC, and it applies only to EU citizens. As for paid privacy services, they get altogether ignored by aggressive sites like BeenVerified.
In contrast, when offering a service that is politically incorrect, at least in some geographies, it is useful to remain anonymous as the service provider. It is also then useful to not collect any unnecessary user data that could put the user at risk due to a data leak, although an email address is commonly still required for each user.
The crypto-privacy-coin world is at an altogether different level wrt privacy than the rest of the world. It is a lot closer to being the real deal.
What does this mean for the command line tool whois? It definitely works still and it's still being updated...
> whois ycombinator.com
% IANA WHOIS server
% for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org
% This query returned 1 object
refer: whois.verisign-grs.com
domain: COM
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address: 12061 Bluemont Way
address: Reston VA 20190
address: United States of America (the)
contact: administrative
name: Registry Customer Service
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address: 12061 Bluemont Way
address: Reston VA 20190
address: United States of America (the)
phone: +1 703 925-6999
fax-no: +1 703 948 3978
e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com
contact: technical
name: Registry Customer Service
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services
address: 12061 Bluemont Way
address: Reston VA 20190
address: United States of America (the)
phone: +1 703 925-6999
fax-no: +1 703 948 3978
e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com
It has already stopped working for domains on TLDs that have sunset WHOIS and over the next few months it'll stop working for a lot more TLDs and registrars. The command line tool is nothing more than a thin client that queries a server WHOIS endpoint.
One bright side of ICANN being a California non-profit is that when they tried to sell off .org to their own confederates so they could juice up the prices they were stopped from doing it. If they were in other places, I imagine it would have gone through.
Whois needs it's own port open usually, this is good I suppose, now it's all HTTPS. Now, if only passive dns resolution data was part of this same api. As it stands today, if you're looking into WHOIS information, historical WHOIS and passive dns are a must, and they are usually provided by commercial entities.
I’m serious! I don’t know why we’re turning a fundamental command off, even if it didn’t work correctly for everything. Do you realize how much documentation and how many tools reference it? And it still can work.
The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
If I register a domain, the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available and then mirrored across thousands of shady scraped content sites in perpetuity. Even If you don’t care about that, then begins the never ending emails texts and calls begin from sleazy outfits who want to sell you related domains, do SEO for you, revamp your site, schedule a call, or just fill your spam box up with legitimate scams and bootleg pharma trash.
All because you wanted a $10/year dot com without paying the bribe.
And yes I grew up leafing through well worn phone books next to corded phones. This is not comparable.
Web hosts competing based on who had the prettiest cPanel theme. The number of email accounts were allowed was something that mattered. If you were lucky enough to get SSH access, it was jailed and only really allowed you to move files around easier or edit something with vim/nano.
Oh, I have unintentionally become a GoDaddy customer (a company I have spent ample time hating and shitting on over the years) because I was a legacy Media Temple customer going back to like 2006 and I still just can't be bothered to clear out everything on those sites/domains and they eventually got acquired
Let's encrypt has done great work with certs for free. But they do still cost money. Insane for how long unencrypted traffic was the default. But i could not have done anything, if browsers had soft-enforced https earlier. I simply could not have paid that money.
I still can't get my head around why a .com costs $9.59 (plus registrar margin)
There are 160 million registered .com domain names.
I understand that operating root servers isn't free, but surely they don't cost $1.5 billion per year! Wikipedia's hosting costs are $3 million per year, for comparison.
Because it's a natural monopoly. Nobody ever got taken seriously with a .biz address.
(.com is basically price-regulated because of this, FWIW, Verisign can't just raise prices whenever or however it wants. But obviously it's still a pretty sweet deal for them, I'd imagine.)
Hell, even .net will lose you traffic. If someone has your desired name with .com so that you use any other TLD, you will lose traffic. If your .com is taken by someone in the same line of work and not just a coincidental use of the same domain, then you'd be insane to not change the domain. I'm not sure how many people manually type domains in any more (I do though), and .com is muscle memory.
If a system is built in a way that creates a monopoly I'm not sure it's legitimate to refer to it as "natural". The characteristic that defines natural monopolies is that there's no realistic (at least known) alternative way to go about things which isn't also a monopoly.
Only $0.18 goes to ICANN, the non-profit. The rest goes to the Verisign which is a publicly traded for-profit company which ultimately gets that $9.59. I bring this up because it of course _doesn't_ cost that much. Incidentally, Verisign posted $1.56 billion in revenue last year and spent about $1.21 billion on stock buybacks in the same time.
Because that doesn’t solve the problem. The demand doesn’t go away if you charge less – if you charge $1/yr for .COMs, they will all be permanently squatted. (Well, like now, but worse!)
We could use anti-scalping techniques, but that’s non-trivial to implement. Perhaps some name squatting policy? No idea how to enforce it though, especially without money.
Yeah, that’s a good point. Then again, you can also that for any other gTLD (why should Google get the proceeds from .dev?), and that would be a valid question.
I think the current system is inherently flawed... but it kinda works, and nobody wants to figure out the politics of fixing it – so I guess we’re stuck with it for a while.
Of those 160 million, what percentage of them are on the 1-year renewal plans, and how many of them are on multi-year plans. I'm guessing the vast majority are yearly. It would be interesting how many of them never get re-registered after the first year
I agree that it's ridiculous, but absent some sort of regulation, things are not priced based on how much they cost the provider, but based on how much people are willing to pay. Even if they're unhappy about it.
The thing is there are supposed to be regulations. .com is not privately owned but a public good that is supposed to be regulated by ICANN with the interests of the public in mind.
Just in case: you can get a .com for less than that nowadays, sometimes $3 for the first year (then transfer it back and forth for $5–7). Here are some price comparisons: https://tldes.com/com, https://tld-list.com/tld/com
I assume some registrars sell these at a loss and expect to offset that by selling you WordPress Supreme Ultra Enterprise hosting for... $40/yr? No idea how this works.
To be fair, OP never said this was necessarily related directly to the article.
I’ll often post loosely related tangents like this because I would enjoy discussing the tangent with the HN crowd, but there’s often not a better opportunity to discuss it, so why not while we’re sort of on the topic anyway.
Ack that I don’t think it makes sense to discuss not even remotely related topics. But as long as it’s in the ballpark and it’s not going against other guidelines and leads to interesting discussion, I think it’s fine.
Indeed. Furthermore, the fact that there is still a replacement makes the discussion even more pertinent in this case, since OP is arguing for the abolition of any such protocol.
That was a common racket a long time ago, but pretty much every widely recommended registrar offers free whois privacy now. At least when they're allowed to, some TLDs forbid obfuscating the whois information.
At the same time, expecting that your NAP info isn't already in the hands of anyone who wants it makes no sense in this day and age.
Between the countless DB leaks and numerous infostealer campaigns, and considering that anyone who has you in their contacts list is extending the exposed surface area, it's untenable. Other events like marriage and home ownership further complicate any attempt to keep your name and address private.
Not saying you shouldn't opt for domain privacy, just giving a reality check. To really enforce your privacy you have to have multiple phone lines and a shell company, at the least. And really, even that isn't enough unless you can also commit to being a hermit.
There is a tangible difference between some people having this data somewhere out there, and literally anyone who wants to have it being able to look it up in a few seconds using tools already installed on almost every computer anywhere.
The ability to look up the correct contact details for a commercial enterprise on that enterprise's website is a good thing imo. It is (or was) part of the EU requirements for commercial websites (anything selling, giving purchase advice, advertising, ...).
It's a useful filter, a seller without identifiable people and location is a big red flag.
According to German law every website who is owned and operated by a person or entity in Germany needs an imprint with full name, address, email address and phone number… (of the owner 2 owning entity)…
So this in practice is a massive push to centralization: if you have a Facebook page or Instagram account, you don't need to risk that level of privacy compromise.
a) This is only for commercial websites although what counts as commercial is vague and probably not something you want to argue in court so it's safer to just add it unless you are absolutely sure.
b) You need a valid postal address where you can receive mail but this doesn't have to be your home address. A PO box is fine.
c) You don't need to have a phone number in your Imprint.
The base requirement of commercial operations having to have valid contact information (that can be used for legal communication) is pretty sensible. The details could be a bit friendlier towards individuals running purely personal sites.
you just have to have enough money to have some legal entity register on your behalf and that legal entity then has their system spammed, but they have their phone public anyhow...
the idea is to have individuals accountable while not annoying owners.
in that sense it makes _perfect_ sense and works as intended.
a proper solution ingredient would be trustworthy and affordable pseudonymity, and that can be lifted by court orders only. but then who guarantees the independence of courts? and the fairness of laws?
Exactly. All their info was scraped long ago. Whois and abuse info, it all needed to be depreciated a few decades ago. But, pity the poor fool who actually contacts me. I treat them like regular scammers. Get all the info, and then tell them to pound dirt.
Except for the guy who tried to sell me annuity liquidation. Yes, if the person gets unalived earlier than expected, you win.
In related news, I saw someone buy $150 worth of lottery tickets, as I was on the way to a large hospital to visit a sick friend. The lottery guy I am sure lost, and the hospital guy (profit-care) won, while the ward was understaffed( a profit-center). And 7 out of 8 fare collection machines were out of order ( deferred maintenance as a profit-center). I get the distinct feeling that corporate America, just does not even care in the slightest.
For the organization that managed the WhoIs? The horse left the barn so long ago, it's great great great grand-children are old and gone. Long gone.
Laws are crazy. The CAN SPAM act requires you to publish a physical mailing address in the email you send. It was an anachronism even when it was originally passed -- who wants to unsubscribe to email via physical mail? And yet it's still there, for no reason.
I have two .in domains with namecheap and whois data is all "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY" despite namecheap not allowing me to add domain privacy when I purchased the domains.
I’ve looked into it a bit more, and turns out there are two options for redacting WHOIS data:
- “Privacy service”, which is these funky named LLCs replacing your data in the WHOIS
- Just the redaction, which replaces almost all data with REDACTED FOR PRIVACY (except for registrant's country, state, and organization name).
No idea why or how any of this works! Apparently, Porkbun does both: on my another domain, aedge.dev, it shows REDACTED FOR PRIVACY and replaces org name with “Private by Design, LLC”. For notpushk.in, it does show my country (RU... looks like I haven’t updated my address in a while lol) but everything else is redacted, too.
Spaceship on the other hand doesn’t bother and returns only this tiny response:
Domain Name: lunni.dev
Registry Domain ID: 4AF9AE073-DEV
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.nic.google
Registrar URL: None
Updated Date: 2025-03-10T13:01:35Z
Creation Date: 2022-12-11T02:30:54Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2025-12-11T02:30:54Z
Registrar: Spaceship, Inc.
Registrar IANA ID: 3862
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@spaceship.com
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +1.6027723958
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited
Name Server: coco.bunny.net
Name Server: kiki.bunny.net
DNSSEC: unsigned
URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/
>>> Last update of WHOIS database: 2025-03-17T17:11:09Z <<<
Edit: or, rather, that’s what whois.nic.google returns for a domain registered in Spaceship.
a little less than a year ago, my wife registered a .us domain that she ended up not using at all. she still gets phone calls nearly daily from people trying to sell her web design/dev work
So .us is more trustworthy than .com. Good to know.
Im one of those that think that developers are hiding too much, which makes things like vs code extension viruses rampant.
I wont force you to not be anonymous, but if you are going to run your software on my device I want some accountability. Our salaries should also reflect that.
So far I haven't encountered a single actual virus, and if you're referring to the recent Material Theme debacle, there was never any malicious code involved, only third party libraries with obfuscation.
I think I understand your point, but your wording leaves some ambiguity. If I am running my software on your device you must be a cloud provider. In that case, the accountability you are looking for is probably not provided in the same way it would be if you were running my software on your device.
Either way, your aversion to anonymity of developers is interesting. It's a discussion for a different thread, but I think an important one.
It would be nice to find such a thread. This is a pet peeve of mine.
It’s one thing if you have a PO Box, and it’s consistently used in your various documents and registrations. I get wanting a firewall to direct availability.
But if I can barely find evidence you exist other than your software, or if you operate a fairly large scale service and you haven’t filed a yearly required corporate report (a specific example I recently came across), then those are red flags to me. Not immediate showstoppers necessarily, but if you’re trying to get me to make a purchase, I probably won’t.
It’s fine if you have domain privacy turned on, but you’re selling me software or services you have got to offer some kind of evidence that you have some kind of business nexus someplace. In a business context, I’ve got to know that for avoiding sanctions violations at the least.
A lot of effort has been spent studying trust. I'm not clear how a PO Box creates trust.
How do you trust that food from McDonalds is safe? How do you trust that Samsung hasn't empowered parties to control the mic on your phone? How do you trust Wells Fargo to hold your deposits? How do you trust the kennel to walk your dog?
Trust is really really hard. So a lot of people choose to adopt a zero trust philosophy.
Except they still eat at McDonalds and buy Samsung and bank at Wells Fargo. But they drop their dog off with Aunt Lawana now, instead of the commercial kennel.
Do you remember when Sony installed rootkits? Do you remember when Windows got compromised every 5th day for two years straight? Do you remember when HP broke every HP printer with a firmware update? Do you remember when the whole world got put on pause because an "anti" malware software pushed a flawed update? Do you remember when a certain credit-rating bureau got breached and exposed the PII of, well, everybody?
Do you remember that every one of these companies went on to post record profits?
> So .us is more trustworthy than .com. Good to know.
Be careful about concluding things like that.
The TLD has a requirement that you publish your info. That doesn't mean they have any way of verifying it. If someone could prove that the info was false then they might lose the domain, but they also lose the domain if someone can prove that they're operating a scam. So the scammers just make up fake info and all the requirement is doing is impacting the privacy of honest people who want a .us domain.
I don't understand why people aren't using fake addresses for registering domains. I've had a few registered to 1001 Main St in my local town and a made up phone number for over 10 years now with no issue. Main Street will never be over 40 addresses for the foreseeable future and I can just update the record if need be.
Dear User,Our system has identified an unpaid toll charge linked to your vehicle. To avoid additional fees or service disruptions, please settle this matter within 12 hours.
Best of luck trying to get an unknown Chinese registrar to stop their spam. My carrier does not even have a clue. My routers now block anything *.Xin. Anything and everything.
They always list it in the line items and in the renewal but whatever. In fact, it looks like I forgot to turn on auto-renew on their domain privacy product so it's sitting there in the 'grace' period. They work as a registrar so I use it.
Note that it is being replaced with a different protocol, is there any indication that there are less stringent requirements on identity data disclosure on the new proto?
It's the same data. What's different is essentially the transport layer for the information.
> Two protocols that have the same data would be quite redundant.
When one is plaintext, underspecified, and decades old, they're not. I don't think you realize how primitive WHOIS is; this is the entirety of its RFC: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3912 Note how it doesn't go any farther than "it's a plain text blob retrieved over TCP". Now contrast with the RDAP RFCs, which fully specify every aspect of how an RDAP service works:
Integrating with WHOIS is a nightmare, as every registrar/registry does it differently since there's no common specification other than "connect over TCP". RDAP is fully specified, so you can simply use a language-specific library and then inspect a strongly typed response object returned by said library to get specific information out of the response. It's a night-and-day difference, and there's obviously a reason for the new spec to exist even though it conveys the same data. It's absolutely not redundant.
GDPR is what changed this. Before that, registrars had little incentive to hide it for free when they could instead charge you for the service. It was not trivial that Google Domains (rip) came with free privacy proxy right from the beginning.
So I've walked past Lennart Poettering's house before without knowing it. (And that is not the sort of area where I'd have guessed he would live.)
If I were some kind of crazy maniac, I could pay him a visit and shut down systemd for good. You see why having this information out there is dangerous?
It not so much that registrars had little incentives, but rather that GDPR defined the concept of legitimate interest as the definition for when registries should give out public information about domain ownership. That allows the contact information to still point to the correct domain owner without going through a proxy, while still creating a small hoop for parties interested to extract ownership information from the registry.
One can see this in practice in that company registration information is usually still available (through often behind a captcha), while personal information of private registrations require additional steps to demonstrate a legitimate interest. All this is also generally occurring at the registry level, rather than at the registrar.
It should be mentioned that privacy proxy is very similar to a straw man registration. If the registered owner is the proxy, then you are trusting that the proxy will honor the contract that is linking you with the property.
> The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
The concept of most internet things has felt sleazy for many years. Right around the time that businesses started monetizing the internet is when that feeling really kicked off tbqh
> The concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years.
More recently, yes. But the original (perhaps naive) goal was to keep domain owners accountable for whatever they were serving from hosts under their domains. That seems reasonable, at least on a more "polite" internet, where things weren't scraped and monetized and SEO'd into garbage.
I was going to buy a domain back in my student days, but I stopped when I realised I didn't have a phone number. I used the public phone-box on the corner whenever I needed to actually call anyone. It was a little annoying to have to register a phone number when I didn't actually want anyone to call me.
For .pl TLD, due to GDPR, domain data is hidden by default for private individuals (as opposed to companies), yet some registrars still try to upsell the "domain privacy", hoping you don't know about it.
The general purpose of publicly accessible registrant data is that people should be able to contact the owner of the domain in case of an issue, rather than the registry or registrar. "domain privacy" is simply the registrar putting themselves as the domain contact and becoming a forwarding service to you.
For large companies, and registrants under those ccTLD's that require local presence, it not uncommon that a legal firm acts like a proxy for the domain owner. This is a service that they take a few dollars for, and is in many ways similar to domain privacy.
The requirement of having the registrant as the contact person for a domain is something that (to my knowledge) comes from ICANN, and I think it has a positive effect. A domain should be owned and controlled by the registrant and not the registrar, which is then reflected in the contact information. In an alternate history we could see that the registrar (or even registry) owned the domain and only leased it to the registrant, in which case the registrant's power would be limited to other online services that people "buy" today.
> the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available
I don't play with domains all day, but this very much feels like nothing important was accomplished, and things are just being made more complicated for political reasons. Sorry if that is being harsh, but I've never had any issue using WHOIS.
If you've ever tried to parse WHOIS programmatically, you'd realize that it being an unstructured blob of text is actually quite unconducive to it being useful. Having every endpoint return a standardized JSON payload specified in an RFC is much better.
All users of the service. Because RDAP has a fully specified format, your client can interpret it in predictable ways and then actually present the information to the user in a consistent format (or be used programmatically). WHOIS is just a blob of text that every service implements somewhat differently, so WHOISing domains across different registrars/registries does not provide a consistent UI, and it's often confusing.
Most people won't even notice this change. They'll still go to a "whois lookup service" and input a domain, and get the same results. The fact that it arrived via a different protocol (RDAP) won't mean anything.
If you `ping`, your recursive resolve (like Google DNS, or your ISP DNS servers) will do the recursive lookup for you.
WHOIS data are irrelavant to resolving the host IP address. The SOA will be used to find the primary name server (for an AXFR lookup perhaps), but generally, each NS entry will work in a round-robin fashion and SOA isn't queried.
Most resolves just ignore duplicate records, but I imagine some resolvers may change the "odds" to likely pick the duplicated NS entry.
Finally, most authorative resolvers do not want to spend resources on ANY queries and almost always don't return all records, or like you saw, do not de-duplicate answers.
> Do you know why the name servers are part of the WHOIS data?
The NS returned from the registrar's WHOIS server reflects the registrar's view; the NS returned from the TLD nameservers reflects the registry's view; the NS returned from the zone's authoritative nameservers reflects the registrant's view. These should typically be the same, but can differ.
> why is the name server present in SOA record too?
The NS in the SOA record is used for RFC2136 dynamic updates and RFC1996 zone replication.
If you're trying to debug why a website's setup isn't working, the first step is to see if what the registry thinks the nameservers should be matches what the nameservers in DNS actually are. These can fall out of sync if e.g. the registry's connection to its DNS provider is experiencing issues. This does actually happen from time to time.
In practice it will round-robin because all of those guys have the same performance characteristics but through whoever else is upstream of you in the DNS chain. The SOA isn't used for resolution so it doesn't matter there.
The NS records and the WHOIS should be the same usually. One comes from the registrar's configs and the other from your next level upstream resolver (which should, unless it's cached and a recent change happened, be the same). But the thing that is used is whatever your next level upstream resolver is, which is the `dig` output unless you did `dig @someoneelse`.
The SOA nameserver is pretty much only significant for DNSSEC these days. In the AWS case there, I don't think it does anything unique. Pretty much there just to meet the standard.
I remember in the past I've managed to screw up my setup so that the name servers on WHOIS and name servers on DNS NS records mismatched. I can't remember which record won during name resolution.
I guess I still don't understand why the name servers need to be both in WHOIS records and DNS NS records. Does the name resolution use the name server data in WHOIS records in any form or manner?
In short, name resolution does not use the records in WHOIS.
Think of the WHOIS information as more of an administrative database, and the actual DNS servers (which are located at the location of the NS records) as the operational database.
It is useful to know, in your administrative database, how to get to the organisational database, but it does not hold all of the information -- just where it is located.
In operational contexts (actual DNS lookups), you only use the operational database (the nameservers).
In administrative contexts (transferring a domain between registrars), you use the information from the administrative database (WHOIS).
There are additional wrinkles, like GLUE records, but those are probably a bit beyond the scope of what you're asking.
The NS record wins. The data in WHOIS is just non-operational metadata, WHOIS is not used for lookups.
Which server gets used is usually randomized from the set of possible ones. Same for which of multiple A or AAAA records are used to connect to.
Us sysadmins would love to be able to specify weights or round robin or retries (like with SRV records) to move load balancing and failover to the clientside but for whatever reason browser vendors have rejected this for years.
Back in 2014, when TLD .church was introduced, me and my friends tried to register alonzo.church and (ab)use the contact information records to provide some biographic information and links, explaining literally whois alonzo.church on the command line. That would not prevent hosting whatever services on that domain as normal.
Sadly, we were not able to secure the domain on time, and after 11 years, the attempted trick is becoming irrelevant.
Anyone experienced with this, I am not seeing abuse contact info, usually a phone number or email. Am i supposed to follow hyperlinks to get this info or something? Like search the registrar for this data?
People say WHOIS is useless these days due to WHOIS privacy, but it's useful for at least one thing: checking when a domain was registered/transferred. Fishy stuff tend to be registered/transferred recently. Also older and larger companies tend to not hide their organizational identity.
Btw, I tried the icann-rdap CLI tool and the default rendered-markdown output mode is atrocious. Sea of output, each nameserver has one or more standalone tables taking up 15x$repetition lines, almost impossible to fish out useful info. The retro gtld-whois mode is so much cleaner. Their web tool https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup is fine too, don't know why the rendered markdown mode isn't like that. WTF.
it's still unsupported by a lot of tld's and the rate limits are atrocious. some registrar's only allow 10 requests per day and will group huge netblocks into one single block.
ICANN's DNS servers is one of the only systems on the internet that requires people to continually pay money to have a name. X, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, etc all let you register a name for free and without submitting all of your personal information. The entire model here is outdated with what users want.
i’m glad it requires money. $1/month for a top level name isn’t much, and it means there are lots of good names available rather than all of them being grabbed by someone not interested in using them. when making a reddit account it’s actually pretty tricky to find a decent name that’a available
I think both models have a place. Sometimes I just really want a persistent identifier that I can take with me (unlike an IP) with minimal maintenance. Even if it is something unreadable like a UUID.
We should totally have a free .uuid TLD (which will predictably get blocked by 90% of networks... Although DoH would probably still work)
Twitch for example will allow you take over usernames of accounts that are unused. Also having a good name is less important than you think. Most people don't navigate by going to exact identifiers. They just type the name of the thing into a search and relevant results will be returned. Dead or useless results should not rank high.
So I should decide to be beholden to the whims of search engines and not have any other way to direct people to my content (besides QR codes maybe?)
I'll admit it works sometimes. "news.ycombinator.com" is not as memorable as "hackernews.com" would be. But I like being able to have my website be chadnauseam.com (the name was unavailable on reddit), I like that no one is going to decide I'm not using it enough and take it away from me, and $1/month is so trivial that I think it's worth the benefits.
Besides, if you don't care about having a short and memorable name people can type exactly, why not just host your site on the free subdomain vercel or heroku gives you?
...and to host associated services to resolve this name to an IP address, as well as administrative overhead
I'd rather not that my domain name is funded by ads and sponsorships, the way that "X, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, etc all" are (no love for open source or decentralised platforms btw? The more commercial the better, except when it costs you money?)
Bit deceptive to editorialize it into something that sounds like something else much more interesting (removing contact info from domains) but isn't the case at all (they're just changing the method to access the same info).
it was fun when having a network solutions/internic contact handle was a badge of honor.
the early internet was fun. whois was always a fun dimension.
is there a canonical rdap client that will end up everywhere? one of the nice things about the early Internet was that there were canonical utilities that were everywhere.
I've had domains registered for over 30 years. I liked WHOIS because it provided a means to report abuse, which has gone from zero 30 years ago, to massive amounts of daily spam and network probes.
I was not happy when ICANN began to allow privacy features in domain registration data, and I never made mine private. Most reputable sites still provide contact information via WHOIS.
Hopefully RDAP will be a suitable replacement. I haven't tried it yet.
> I was not happy when ICANN began to allow privacy features in domain registration data, and I never made mine private
The issue for me is that you can't simply publish contact information. It requires you to either publish a legal owner in full or nothing. I can't publish abuse@example.org as contact method (because, yes, I do want to receive an email if someone finds an issue with my services), I need to publish also a legal name, address, sometimes a phone number. Those things cost money to set up to be fake-but-legit (burner SIM card, rent a letterbox somewhere, get someone else to submit their name and ID card) whereas an email address is inconsequential to publish and I can rotate it monthly to avoid it becoming enrolled on too many spam lists
So my sites never provided contact info via WHOIS when I could avoid it, yet I'd think my sites are as reputable as they come. You can always find a plain old email address via some link on the homepage and I have no spam filter (just email address rotation) so there is no chance that you're algorithmically filtered out, either
In the case of YC they defer to the AWS dns admins but you can set it to whatever you want unless your DNS provider does not let you. I've always run my own DNS so maybe that's less of an option for hosted DNS these days for all I know.
I had forgotten about that email address! And I'm not sure I set it correctly on email servers after I was a teenager and did things per the instructions, as I didn't see it being used for anything and it's just another potential way to funnel spam to your email host. Maybe someone does use it then? Do you know of any type of system or situation where this is used?
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 345 ms ] threadI won't even notice its gone
Maybe I'm confused but whois gave me domain owner, but whois -r gave me Arin IP netblock ownership.
Arin is useful, whois is not.
Except if it's not in your name
So yep, as you say: make this decision (fake or real information) knowing the risks involved in not legally owning it
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/court-rules...
See: Are IP Address Allocations Property? (2014) https://www.ethanheilman.com/x/19/index.html
Websites are more like books when they have a domain no else else cares about.
Content/expression related harms are outside of ICANNs bylaws and any obligations related to what a domain points at are not from ICANN, but from the laws in the jurisdiction in which the registrar operates. This is generally good. There is no global standard for acceptable limits on expression, with the possible exception of CSAM which is illegal everywhere.
Requiring domain registrars to arbitrate what content should be accessible via the DNS is perilous.
Doing some WHOIS lookups, we found a point of contact at a university, called the network admin said hello and launched into an impromptu network admin interview. It was cool stuff. I emailed him later in the day to apologize to and thank him for being a good sport about the whole thing. He (fortunately) found it all rather enjoyable.
Otherwise, what did you expect the registrar to divulge to you, a random passer-by?
The US has a reputation of being a hypercapitalist society, yet they seem to be behind Australia in the descent into hypercapitalism by not (yet) privatising the registration of land titles. [0]
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-12/$2.6-billion-price-ta...
A private industry would be able to maintain the records for next to nothing by advertising or offering related services.
The govt could restrict themselves to ensuring no monopoly.
It also means that banks can't sell mortgages out from under their borrowers because all liens and other finanacial liabilities attached to a title are known.
Huge protocol for cybersecurity
When I started using the internet, it’s how I contacted people. If I liked their site or their blog, I’d check who was behind it and get an email address I could contact.
Now… humans don’t really own domains anymore. Content is so centralized. I obviously noticed this shift, but I had forgotten how I used to be able to interact with the internet.
Even when they do, it's generally a smart idea to anonymize the whois information.
You might be looking up my domain to make a buddy, but someone else might be looking up my domain to SWAT me.
Stuff felt less homogeneous; everyone had kind of a loose understanding of HTML, and people would customize their pages in horrendously wonderful ways. It felt more personal.
And personally I found it more horrendously ugly than horrendously wonderful. But that's just my opinion.
I'll acknowledge that the old web was ugly, even at the time. I guess I just liked how much of it was, for lack of a better word, "custom". Most people were pretty bad at HTML, common web standards really hadn't caught out outside of "make it work in Internet Explorer", and CSS really hadn't caught on, so people glued together websites the best that they could.
Most websites looked pretty bad, but they were genuine. They didn't feel like some corporation built them, they felt like they were made by actual humans, and a lot of the time, actual children. I was one of those children.
I posted about this a week ago [1], but my first foray into programming was making crappy websites. It felt cool to me that a nine year old could make and publish a website, just like the grownups could. I didn't know anything about style so I had bright green backgrounds and used marquee tags and blink tags and I believe I had a midi of the X-files theme song playing in the background.
I guess it's the same sentimentality that I have when I look at a child's terrible drawing or reading one of my old terrible essays I wrote when I was eleven years old that my mom kept around. They're bad, they're embarrassing, but they're also kind of charming.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43297104
By 1999 you could create a LiveJournal or find a niche forum through Google. You didn't need to know anything very technical.
I've found so many interesting YouTube videos from people that I haven't ever heard of, just because of YouTube recommending them to me. Stuff like that didn't really exist for quite awhile; for a long time the best you had was aggregator sites like ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com or similar sites.
I think a lot of people fail to appreciate that the alternative to big tech taking over was not keeping things exactly the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago, but developing in a different direction.
It was the direction in which people expected things to develop: decentralised and democratised. There was a lot of optimism about empowering individuals.
There's a big gap between looking up someone's contact info using a protocol that many tools and websites implement (anyone can open www.who.is from search results) and the second example of needing an understanding of HTML to make a webpage. I don't think it's gatekeepey to be able to email the human behind a given website, whereas the current internet is full of walled gardens, gatekeepers, and faceless/supportless services (thinking of Discord, Cloudflare, and Google as respective examples)
We can have both human-run services and WYSIWYG website builders on the internet concurrently
Should it exist? Maybe not, probably not, but that doesn't stop me from using it when I want to try to do some sleuthing. Most of the time though it doesn't work because they have privacy enabled.
I did get screwed once with certain TLDs not being able to enable privacy. I had registered a .at domain to use with a video site I had that at the time was reasonably popular and going viral fairly regularly. I hadn't realized beforehand that privacy wasn't possible, but once I learned, I didn't love it, but I wasn't sure if it would matter that much. I was wrong. I was getting calls and emails regularly from random people on the internet who found our content on reddit or whatever and decided to do some sleuthing
If you use fake info in relation to WHOIS data, you also need to be prepared to forge an identity document (a pretty bad felony in most countries per my understanding)
That said, on most forms I enter fake info because they they have no legitimate use for it anyway and they also can't compare it against anything. Buying a game or event ticket needs my address? For what, linking my purchase to a profile they're building? Nah, fake address it is
It is fascinating to consider how our experience with the internet is changing over time.
Remember phreaking? Having been born in the Netscape era, I certainly don't, but I can imagine that losing the ability to pull that trick off must have felt like a loss to those who were initiated in the art.
Thankfully the trend appears to be that new technologies and thus new 1337 h4x are still forthcoming.
No first hand experience, however.
This is not a hypothetical, by the way.
99% of the target users will resolve it if they want access (by installing the necessary browser extension).
As for system emails, etc., they can come through any regular domain.
In contrast, when offering a service that is politically incorrect, at least in some geographies, it is useful to remain anonymous as the service provider. It is also then useful to not collect any unnecessary user data that could put the user at risk due to a data leak, although an email address is commonly still required for each user.
The crypto-privacy-coin world is at an altogether different level wrt privacy than the rest of the world. It is a lot closer to being the real deal.
> whois ycombinator.com % IANA WHOIS server % for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org % This query returned 1 object
refer: whois.verisign-grs.com
domain: COM
organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services address: 12061 Bluemont Way address: Reston VA 20190 address: United States of America (the)
contact: administrative name: Registry Customer Service organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services address: 12061 Bluemont Way address: Reston VA 20190 address: United States of America (the) phone: +1 703 925-6999 fax-no: +1 703 948 3978 e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com
contact: technical name: Registry Customer Service organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services address: 12061 Bluemont Way address: Reston VA 20190 address: United States of America (the) phone: +1 703 925-6999 fax-no: +1 703 948 3978 e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com
nserver: A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.5.6.30 2001:503:a83e:0:0:0:2:30 nserver: B.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.33.14.30 2001:503:231d:0:0:0:2:30 nserver: C.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.26.92.30 2001:503:83eb:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: D.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.31.80.30 2001:500:856e:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: E.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.12.94.30 2001:502:1ca1:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: F.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.35.51.30 2001:503:d414:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: G.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.42.93.30 2001:503:eea3:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: H.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.54.112.30 2001:502:8cc:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: I.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.43.172.30 2001:503:39c1:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: J.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.48.79.30 2001:502:7094:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: K.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.52.178.30 2001:503:d2d:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: L.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.41.162.30 2001:500:d937:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: M.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.55.83.30 2001:501:b1f9:0:0:0:0:30 ds-rdata: 19718 13 2 8acbb0cd28f41250a80a491389424d341522d946b0da0c0291f2d3d771d7805a
whois: whois.verisign-grs.com
status: ACTIVE remarks: Registration information: http://www.verisigninc.com
created: 1985-01-01 changed: 2023-12-07 source: IANA
# whois.verisign-grs.com
>>> Last update of whois database: 2025-03-17T01:27:31Z <<<$ rdapper ycombinator.com # cf. https://github.com/gbxyz/rdapper
Handle : 147225527_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Status : client transfer prohibited secureDNS : {"secureDNS":{"delegationSigned":false}} objectClassName : domain ldhName : YCOMBINATOR.COM nameservers : {"nameservers":[{"ldhName":"NS-1411.AWSDNS-48.ORG","objectClassName":"nameserver"},{"ldhName":"NS-1914.AWSDNS-47.CO.UK","objectClassName":"nameserver"},{"ldhName":"NS-225.AWSDNS-28.COM","objectClassName":"nameserver"},{"ldhName":"NS-556.AWSDNS-05.NET","objectClassName":"nameserver"}]} events : {"events":[{"eventDate":"2005-03-20T23:51:07Z","eventAction":"registration"},{"eventAction":"expiration","eventDate":"2026-03-20T22:51:07Z"},{"eventDate":"2025-02-14T02:53:36Z","eventAction":"last changed"},{"eventDate":"2025-03-17T01:38:05Z","eventAction":"last update of RDAP database"}]}
================================ Terms of Use ================================
Service subject to Terms of Use.
================================ Status Codes ================================
For more information on domain status codes, please visit https://icann.org/epp
======================= RDDS Inaccuracy Complaint Form =======================
URL of the ICANN RDDS Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://icann.org/wicf
Edit: Fixed formatting of command line/comment.
Major regression. How can we trust the internet now ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification is a big enough problem that we're being taught about this in school so that we're aware of the problem and maybe things get better in the future
If I register a domain, the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available and then mirrored across thousands of shady scraped content sites in perpetuity. Even If you don’t care about that, then begins the never ending emails texts and calls begin from sleazy outfits who want to sell you related domains, do SEO for you, revamp your site, schedule a call, or just fill your spam box up with legitimate scams and bootleg pharma trash.
All because you wanted a $10/year dot com without paying the bribe.
And yes I grew up leafing through well worn phone books next to corded phones. This is not comparable.
https://porkbun.com/products/whois_privacy
Two decades late on a problem
Oh, I have unintentionally become a GoDaddy customer (a company I have spent ample time hating and shitting on over the years) because I was a legacy Media Temple customer going back to like 2006 and I still just can't be bothered to clear out everything on those sites/domains and they eventually got acquired
There are 160 million registered .com domain names.
I understand that operating root servers isn't free, but surely they don't cost $1.5 billion per year! Wikipedia's hosting costs are $3 million per year, for comparison.
(.com is basically price-regulated because of this, FWIW, Verisign can't just raise prices whenever or however it wants. But obviously it's still a pretty sweet deal for them, I'd imagine.)
Which begs the question, why doesn't ICANN just replace Verisign them with a different authoritative register that charges much less?
We could use anti-scalping techniques, but that’s non-trivial to implement. Perhaps some name squatting policy? No idea how to enforce it though, especially without money.
Shouldn't ICANN collect that margin and use it for charitable purposes instead?
I think the current system is inherently flawed... but it kinda works, and nobody wants to figure out the politics of fixing it – so I guess we’re stuck with it for a while.
The vast majority of people in the world have $0 on the line and no clue how these systems work.
The majority who have an interest in fixing it have something like N×$10 per year on the line for a fairly small N.
Those who don't want it fixed have billions on the line.
It's not getting fixed anytime soon.
I assume some registrars sell these at a loss and expect to offset that by selling you WordPress Supreme Ultra Enterprise hosting for... $40/yr? No idea how this works.
Also, why the title is not same as the article? It makes no sense.
I’ll often post loosely related tangents like this because I would enjoy discussing the tangent with the HN crowd, but there’s often not a better opportunity to discuss it, so why not while we’re sort of on the topic anyway.
Ack that I don’t think it makes sense to discuss not even remotely related topics. But as long as it’s in the ballpark and it’s not going against other guidelines and leads to interesting discussion, I think it’s fine.
RDAP offers several advantages over WHOIS including [...] the ability to provide differentiated access to registration data.
Somewhere enshitification fits all over the place.
Between the countless DB leaks and numerous infostealer campaigns, and considering that anyone who has you in their contacts list is extending the exposed surface area, it's untenable. Other events like marriage and home ownership further complicate any attempt to keep your name and address private.
Not saying you shouldn't opt for domain privacy, just giving a reality check. To really enforce your privacy you have to have multiple phone lines and a shell company, at the least. And really, even that isn't enough unless you can also commit to being a hermit.
It's a useful filter, a seller without identifiable people and location is a big red flag.
A freelancer's sites are also considered commercial use.
And such sites without imprint have been fined & taken down.
If you engage in commerce, you need to publish enough contact information that others could serve you a court summons.
b) You need a valid postal address where you can receive mail but this doesn't have to be your home address. A PO box is fine.
c) You don't need to have a phone number in your Imprint.
The base requirement of commercial operations having to have valid contact information (that can be used for legal communication) is pretty sensible. The details could be a bit friendlier towards individuals running purely personal sites.
the idea is to have individuals accountable while not annoying owners.
in that sense it makes _perfect_ sense and works as intended.
a proper solution ingredient would be trustworthy and affordable pseudonymity, and that can be lifted by court orders only. but then who guarantees the independence of courts? and the fairness of laws?
we're in a tough ride.
Except for the guy who tried to sell me annuity liquidation. Yes, if the person gets unalived earlier than expected, you win.
In related news, I saw someone buy $150 worth of lottery tickets, as I was on the way to a large hospital to visit a sick friend. The lottery guy I am sure lost, and the hospital guy (profit-care) won, while the ward was understaffed( a profit-center). And 7 out of 8 fare collection machines were out of order ( deferred maintenance as a profit-center). I get the distinct feeling that corporate America, just does not even care in the slightest.
For the organization that managed the WhoIs? The horse left the barn so long ago, it's great great great grand-children are old and gone. Long gone.
Call me 1-800-555-1212.
[1]: https://www.registry.in/system/files/Terms_and_Conditions_fo...
I have two .in domains with namecheap and whois data is all "REDACTED FOR PRIVACY" despite namecheap not allowing me to add domain privacy when I purchased the domains.
In fact Namecheap explicitly state that they can't provide privacy services for .in domains on this page: https://www.namecheap.com/security/what-is-domain-privacy-de...
- “Privacy service”, which is these funky named LLCs replacing your data in the WHOIS
- Just the redaction, which replaces almost all data with REDACTED FOR PRIVACY (except for registrant's country, state, and organization name).
No idea why or how any of this works! Apparently, Porkbun does both: on my another domain, aedge.dev, it shows REDACTED FOR PRIVACY and replaces org name with “Private by Design, LLC”. For notpushk.in, it does show my country (RU... looks like I haven’t updated my address in a while lol) but everything else is redacted, too.
Spaceship on the other hand doesn’t bother and returns only this tiny response:
Edit: or, rather, that’s what whois.nic.google returns for a domain registered in Spaceship.Porkbun docs on WHOIS privacy options: https://kb.porkbun.com/article/97-new-whois-privacy-settings...
Im one of those that think that developers are hiding too much, which makes things like vs code extension viruses rampant.
I wont force you to not be anonymous, but if you are going to run your software on my device I want some accountability. Our salaries should also reflect that.
Im sure that this will be unpopular though.
How do you come to that conclusion?
>vs code extension viruses rampant.
So far I haven't encountered a single actual virus, and if you're referring to the recent Material Theme debacle, there was never any malicious code involved, only third party libraries with obfuscation.
Either way, your aversion to anonymity of developers is interesting. It's a discussion for a different thread, but I think an important one.
It’s one thing if you have a PO Box, and it’s consistently used in your various documents and registrations. I get wanting a firewall to direct availability.
But if I can barely find evidence you exist other than your software, or if you operate a fairly large scale service and you haven’t filed a yearly required corporate report (a specific example I recently came across), then those are red flags to me. Not immediate showstoppers necessarily, but if you’re trying to get me to make a purchase, I probably won’t.
It’s fine if you have domain privacy turned on, but you’re selling me software or services you have got to offer some kind of evidence that you have some kind of business nexus someplace. In a business context, I’ve got to know that for avoiding sanctions violations at the least.
My personal take is that we need a society with a lot more trust.
How do you trust that food from McDonalds is safe? How do you trust that Samsung hasn't empowered parties to control the mic on your phone? How do you trust Wells Fargo to hold your deposits? How do you trust the kennel to walk your dog?
Trust is really really hard. So a lot of people choose to adopt a zero trust philosophy.
Except they still eat at McDonalds and buy Samsung and bank at Wells Fargo. But they drop their dog off with Aunt Lawana now, instead of the commercial kennel.
Do you remember when Sony installed rootkits? Do you remember when Windows got compromised every 5th day for two years straight? Do you remember when HP broke every HP printer with a firmware update? Do you remember when the whole world got put on pause because an "anti" malware software pushed a flawed update? Do you remember when a certain credit-rating bureau got breached and exposed the PII of, well, everybody?
Do you remember that every one of these companies went on to post record profits?
Trust is really really hard to figure out.
Be careful about concluding things like that.
The TLD has a requirement that you publish your info. That doesn't mean they have any way of verifying it. If someone could prove that the info was false then they might lose the domain, but they also lose the domain if someone can prove that they're operating a scam. So the scammers just make up fake info and all the requirement is doing is impacting the privacy of honest people who want a .us domain.
If you go by the book e.g. Cloudflare not every field (e.g. state and country) is hidden. So not exactly.
Dear User,Our system has identified an unpaid toll charge linked to your vehicle. To avoid additional fees or service disruptions, please settle this matter within 12 hours.
https://e-zpass.org-qrh.xin/indexshtml"
Best of luck trying to get an unknown Chinese registrar to stop their spam. My carrier does not even have a clue. My routers now block anything *.Xin. Anything and everything.
> Two protocols that have the same data would be quite redundant.
When one is plaintext, underspecified, and decades old, they're not. I don't think you realize how primitive WHOIS is; this is the entirety of its RFC: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3912 Note how it doesn't go any farther than "it's a plain text blob retrieved over TCP". Now contrast with the RDAP RFCs, which fully specify every aspect of how an RDAP service works:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7480 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7481 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7482 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7483
Integrating with WHOIS is a nightmare, as every registrar/registry does it differently since there's no common specification other than "connect over TCP". RDAP is fully specified, so you can simply use a language-specific library and then inspect a strongly typed response object returned by said library to get specific information out of the response. It's a night-and-day difference, and there's obviously a reason for the new spec to exist even though it conveys the same data. It's absolutely not redundant.
And yet all German sites must have such thing: https://0pointer.net/imprint
Mastodon _instances_ have Impressumspflicht, sure. But normal users don‘t and I have never seen anything contrary about private accounts.
Edit: unless the Account is for/by a business of course.
https://allaboutberlin.com/guides/website-compliance-germany...
If I were some kind of crazy maniac, I could pay him a visit and shut down systemd for good. You see why having this information out there is dangerous?
One can see this in practice in that company registration information is usually still available (through often behind a captcha), while personal information of private registrations require additional steps to demonstrate a legitimate interest. All this is also generally occurring at the registry level, rather than at the registrar.
It should be mentioned that privacy proxy is very similar to a straw man registration. If the registered owner is the proxy, then you are trusting that the proxy will honor the contract that is linking you with the property.
The concept of most internet things has felt sleazy for many years. Right around the time that businesses started monetizing the internet is when that feeling really kicked off tbqh
More recently, yes. But the original (perhaps naive) goal was to keep domain owners accountable for whatever they were serving from hosts under their domains. That seems reasonable, at least on a more "polite" internet, where things weren't scraped and monetized and SEO'd into garbage.
For large companies, and registrants under those ccTLD's that require local presence, it not uncommon that a legal firm acts like a proxy for the domain owner. This is a service that they take a few dollars for, and is in many ways similar to domain privacy.
The requirement of having the registrant as the contact person for a domain is something that (to my knowledge) comes from ICANN, and I think it has a positive effect. A domain should be owned and controlled by the registrant and not the registrar, which is then reflected in the contact information. In an alternate history we could see that the registrar (or even registry) owned the domain and only leased it to the registrant, in which case the registrant's power would be limited to other online services that people "buy" today.
Your registrar is scamming you.
The name server `ns-225.awsdns-28.com` is present three times- in WHOIS, in DNS NS records, in DNS SOA record.
Which of these name servers get used to resolve `ycombinator.com` to its IP address like when I do `ping ycombinator.com`?
What if the information between the WHOIS and DNS NS records and the DNS SOA records are inconsistent? Which record wins?
WHOIS data are irrelavant to resolving the host IP address. The SOA will be used to find the primary name server (for an AXFR lookup perhaps), but generally, each NS entry will work in a round-robin fashion and SOA isn't queried.
Most resolves just ignore duplicate records, but I imagine some resolvers may change the "odds" to likely pick the duplicated NS entry.
Finally, most authorative resolvers do not want to spend resources on ANY queries and almost always don't return all records, or like you saw, do not de-duplicate answers.
Same question for SOA record. If the NS entries are used in a round-robin fashion, why is the name server present in SOA record too?
The NS returned from the registrar's WHOIS server reflects the registrar's view; the NS returned from the TLD nameservers reflects the registry's view; the NS returned from the zone's authoritative nameservers reflects the registrant's view. These should typically be the same, but can differ.
> why is the name server present in SOA record too?
The NS in the SOA record is used for RFC2136 dynamic updates and RFC1996 zone replication.
Which data though? Is it the WHOIS name server data that is used for round-robin? Or the DNS NS record data?
Do you know why the name server is present in SOA if it isn't used?
The SOA nameserver is pretty much only significant for DNSSEC these days. In the AWS case there, I don't think it does anything unique. Pretty much there just to meet the standard.
I guess I still don't understand why the name servers need to be both in WHOIS records and DNS NS records. Does the name resolution use the name server data in WHOIS records in any form or manner?
Think of the WHOIS information as more of an administrative database, and the actual DNS servers (which are located at the location of the NS records) as the operational database.
It is useful to know, in your administrative database, how to get to the organisational database, but it does not hold all of the information -- just where it is located.
In operational contexts (actual DNS lookups), you only use the operational database (the nameservers).
In administrative contexts (transferring a domain between registrars), you use the information from the administrative database (WHOIS).
There are additional wrinkles, like GLUE records, but those are probably a bit beyond the scope of what you're asking.
Which server gets used is usually randomized from the set of possible ones. Same for which of multiple A or AAAA records are used to connect to.
Us sysadmins would love to be able to specify weights or round robin or retries (like with SRV records) to move load balancing and failover to the clientside but for whatever reason browser vendors have rejected this for years.
Sadly, we were not able to secure the domain on time, and after 11 years, the attempted trick is becoming irrelevant.
Anyone experienced with this, I am not seeing abuse contact info, usually a phone number or email. Am i supposed to follow hyperlinks to get this info or something? Like search the registrar for this data?
Btw, I tried the icann-rdap CLI tool and the default rendered-markdown output mode is atrocious. Sea of output, each nameserver has one or more standalone tables taking up 15x$repetition lines, almost impossible to fish out useful info. The retro gtld-whois mode is so much cleaner. Their web tool https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup is fine too, don't know why the rendered markdown mode isn't like that. WTF.
it's still unsupported by a lot of tld's and the rate limits are atrocious. some registrar's only allow 10 requests per day and will group huge netblocks into one single block.
We should totally have a free .uuid TLD (which will predictably get blocked by 90% of networks... Although DoH would probably still work)
I'll admit it works sometimes. "news.ycombinator.com" is not as memorable as "hackernews.com" would be. But I like being able to have my website be chadnauseam.com (the name was unavailable on reddit), I like that no one is going to decide I'm not using it enough and take it away from me, and $1/month is so trivial that I think it's worth the benefits.
Besides, if you don't care about having a short and memorable name people can type exactly, why not just host your site on the free subdomain vercel or heroku gives you?
...and to host associated services to resolve this name to an IP address, as well as administrative overhead
I'd rather not that my domain name is funded by ads and sponsorships, the way that "X, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, etc all" are (no love for open source or decentralised platforms btw? The more commercial the better, except when it costs you money?)
> ICANN Update: Launching RDAP; Sunsetting WHOIS
Bit deceptive to editorialize it into something that sounds like something else much more interesting (removing contact info from domains) but isn't the case at all (they're just changing the method to access the same info).
the early internet was fun. whois was always a fun dimension.
is there a canonical rdap client that will end up everywhere? one of the nice things about the early Internet was that there were canonical utilities that were everywhere.
There's no need for people to know my information because I happen to own a domain.
Hopefully RDAP will be a suitable replacement. I haven't tried it yet.
The issue for me is that you can't simply publish contact information. It requires you to either publish a legal owner in full or nothing. I can't publish abuse@example.org as contact method (because, yes, I do want to receive an email if someone finds an issue with my services), I need to publish also a legal name, address, sometimes a phone number. Those things cost money to set up to be fake-but-legit (burner SIM card, rent a letterbox somewhere, get someone else to submit their name and ID card) whereas an email address is inconsequential to publish and I can rotate it monthly to avoid it becoming enrolled on too many spam lists
So my sites never provided contact info via WHOIS when I could avoid it, yet I'd think my sites are as reputable as they come. You can always find a plain old email address via some link on the homepage and I have no spam filter (just email address rotation) so there is no chance that you're algorithmically filtered out, either
For what it's worth one can publish that email address in their DNS zone SOA record. Some people will figure it out.
In the case of YC they defer to the AWS dns admins but you can set it to whatever you want unless your DNS provider does not let you. I've always run my own DNS so maybe that's less of an option for hosted DNS these days for all I know.