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Intentional & Widespread Whois Errors
Posted by Ernest Miller on Wednesday, May 15 @ 09:50:06 EDT
Contributed by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel)
Governance
Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) writes "In the context of upcoming Congressional hearings on the accuracy of Whois data, I thought it might be helpful to provide some specific examples of the problems at issue here. With that motivation, I've prepared a listing of 988 domains registered by a group calling themselves "NicGod Productions" and "Domains For Sale."

NicGod is much like ordinary domain warehousers in that the company seems to seek to sell their domains for a profit, and they're like Tina's Webcam in that they tend to register domains allowed to lapse by prior registrants. But they're quite different in that they don't register the domains in their own name; instead, they use a mixture of names and organizations including, for some 425 names, "Alan Ginsberg" (a deceased American poet). They also don't register the domains using their own street address; instead, they use a variety of addresses from as many as nine different countries, and they seem to use voicemail and fax-forwarding services to receive requests to purchase domains in their inventory.

I'm certainly not the first to notice NicGod's activities; they've been UDRP'ed at least 27 times, and the OECD wrote up a jarring report of their experience with these folks. But my recent work goes a notch further in that I've documented what I believe to be a substantial portion of NicGod's inventory -- including, for example, schools (armenianschools.com, californiastateuniversity.com), government sites (flintpolice.org, winthrop-police.com), and medical information (doctorjohn.com). For each domain, I've extracted data from archive.org, Alexa, Google, and Yahoo to speak to the domains' prior contents & uses as well as their popularity.

My results are available at:
Large-Scale Intentional Invalid WHOIS Data

Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School"

 
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Related Links
· Congressional hearings on the accuracy of Whois data
· listing of 988 domains
· Tina's Webcam
· UDRP'ed at least 27 times
· jarring report
· Large-Scale Intentional Invalid WHOIS Data
· Ben Edelman
· More about Governance
· News by Ernest Miller


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Intentional & Widespread Whois Errors

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"User's Login" | Login/Create an Account | 5 comments
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Re: Intentional & Widespread Whois Errors (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, May 15 @ 10:51:48 EDT
Huh? Is this Anonymous or is it by Ben Edelman?


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Re: Intentional & Widespread Whois Errors (Score: 0)
by Anonymous (Name Withheld on Advice of Counsel) on Wednesday, May 15 @ 11:18:11 EDT
Of course, even NicGod's methods may be inadequate for keeping secret its identity. Most or all NicGod domains are hosted at dslextreme.com, an ISP in Canoga Park, California; it is possible that this firm knows the true identify and location of NicGod, information that it might have obtained in the course of billing or customer support. Alternatively, any of NicGod's registrars might know the firm's identity location from similar interactions. It is possible that any or all of these firms might disclose known information on the basis of a subpoena or other request. See, that just goes to show you that this law is not about the legitimate searches for contact information of criminals. It's about the witchhunt of a people who are being persecuted for legally made free speech. If they're breaking the law, then get a supeona. Don't make a law against what they are doing just so you can find out who they are.


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