Show HN: Strange Whois Records for Major Sites

8 points by nosensor ↗ HN
Open your Terminal / Console / sh prompt and type the following:

whois aol.com

whois google.com

whois microsoft.com

... etc.

Can anyone explain why WHOIS/Verisign can't prevent this? I found some explanations but none of them made much sense.

1 comment

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http://www.internic.net/whois.html

Go there and pick "nameserver" and then plug in one of these silly names. The whois request you're running is ambiguous at that level, so you get back both those nameserver substring matches and the domain itself.

This is old news, unfortunately.