Verisign To Sell DNS Root Server Lookup Data? 115
An anonymous reader writes "According to an editorial at Domain Name News, Verisign is considering selling partial access to DNS root server lookup data. The data would be made available to registrars, who in turn could use it for 'traffic-tasting' non-existent domains entered by any internet user. This would give them a better idea about what bogus domains to put up sites on to capture eyeballs." Haven't seen this story elsewhere and it's based on an anonymous source; YMMV.
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Squatspecting Abounds (Score:5, Insightful)
Now after you try a URL in your browser and get an error saying the domain doesn't exist, you can just wait one minute and try again and someone will have it up and ready to serve you porn.
This is "Do More Evil".
real estate provides a useful historical example (Score:3, Interesting)
But real estate speculation also provides an interesting possible solution: real est
Search engines replacing DNS? (Score:2)
Of course, the fact that trademark law exists at all says that the completely free-market solution is not likely to work. Still, it would be interesting to develop some system where the preference of the global market of users has influence on who "owns" a particular domain name. The present gold-rush first come first served system has obvious disadvantages, and little other than simplicity to recommend it.
I think another 'solution' might be to just give up on DNS and let search engines do the resolution. E.g., instead of having DNS to translate from 'en.wikipedia.org' to 66.230.200.100, you just put "wikipedia" into your search engine of choice, say Google, and then use the IP address that it provides. It wouldn't work right now, because currently the search engines index URLs with domain names, but there's no reason why they have to; Google could just as easily store only server IP addresses in its index,
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Avoid webcentric ideas (Score:2)
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But I can easily imagine a lot
No. (Score:1)
So if search was integrated in the browser and meant to replace DNS, Linux would come with thousands of links, Yahoo will sort of half-work, Google will work great until they slightly change their API and results are, at first, mangled, and within six months, unusable, the other search engines are either terribl
Speculative DomainTasters & Targeted Typosquat (Score:2)
But another kind are the speculative domain tasters, who register large numbers of potentially useful names and return them before the 5-day grace period unless they're going to make more than $6/year in banner ads. ICANN's Soviet-central-planners have decided that the Registry won't cha
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This I think is wrong, however:
what's the "value" of a name? Certainly nothing objectively quantifiable
The value of a name is very quantifiable. It's the price the highest bidder is willing to pay for it. You can ask the same question, and get the same answer, when you ask what the value of real estate is. The fact that we have very limited insight into the mechanism by which people judge the value of things doesn't change the fact that they can and do, and we can measure t
Re: Quantifying domain name values (Score:2)
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"Yeah, except the data could probably be used by typosquatters to... optimize their activities. Anything that helps typosquatters is a bad thing in my opinion."
So just write a script to look up randomly generated web sites, like "mydog42131cat.com", "yourdog42131cat.com", "ourdog42131cat.com" "thedog42131cat.com", and hit those random names many times a day, for weeks on end, until some typo squatter spends the $6 to register it, then stop. "Gee, this domain was getting 100s of hits, now its getting noth
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And eventually, when enough people lose enough money, this typo-squatting stupidity will stop.
Imagine a list, like an adblock list, but filled with typo-squatter urls, and your browser set to hit 4 or 5 (but not show you the resulting page) every time you load a new page, to help obfuscate your browsing history from snoops upstream. Hurts the typo-squatters, since its all bad traffic, hurts the snoops, because its mostly bad data.
Free Domain Tasting = still making money (Score:2)
Because domain tasting is free, it's easy to do brute-fo
Verisign (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Verisign (Score:5, Funny)
Domain Tasting (Score:1)
I googled through and found that there are so many complains about GoDaddy that people's domain tasted by domain tasters in split of a second after query. How its done is still a myth that everyone just guessing there are spywa
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can someone tell me what the hell is about Network Solutions/Verisign? Why do they still allow the kind of 5 days domain tasting even that caused so much problem?
Their ICANN contract requires that they do it. ICANN has formed a committee to study this, so in a year or two, they will have decided if this is a problem, a couple of years after that they will decide what they should do about it, about a year after that they will agree on the verbiage of the new rule, and the problem will be solved when the contract is changed in 2013.
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ITYM Verislime
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Not Root (Score:1)
What they have to be *selling* here would be GTLD lookups, and they don't *get* all that data... In fact, I don't think they get *most* of it.
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Here in the UK nominet run the show. But nominet are obliged to not sell things like the data to make a buck as they're a not-for-profit organisation. There are some good services that N
Actually, their other business is... (Score:2)
I hear they're also big on damning people...
It's crazy.. (Score:1)
Based on what I've misspelled... (Score:1)
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I'm a little surprised that they can make money on these. Either they're getting the domains cheaper than I think they are, are getting more per click / impression than I'm expecting,
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Re: Most registrations are bogus (Score:2)
I'm rather doubtful about how useful that would be (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I'm rather doubtful about how useful that would (Score:5, Informative)
When the caching server misses on a request, it forwards the request upstream...ultimately ending up at one of the root servers.
Mod parent up. (Score:3, Informative)
That is because every spelling error must be sent upstream while just about every correctly entered query should be cached locally.
Mod parent up ^2 (Score:2)
http://root-servers.org/ [root-servers.org]
So, reason #N+1 why this data might or might not be worth a bucket of warm piss, with N+2 being as how anycasting biases requests in a more or less geographic fashion.
Meh.
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So I retract my "meh" and say "pox on Verisign".
Re:Mod parent up ^2 (Score:4, Informative)
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The root server operators are given the root zone files and they run the server. For this to be worth anything it would require a change in the server software, so only the ones run by verisign would ever actually comply.
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Searching for www.msn.com A record at k.root-servers.net [193.0.14.129]: Got referral to b.gtld-servers.net. (zone: com.) [took 113 ms]
Searching for www.msn.com A record at b.gtld-servers.net. [192.33.14.30]: Got referral to ns3.msft.net. (zone: msn.com.) [took 190 ms]
Now, here's the Whois for gtld-servers.net:
Registran
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No, mod above up (Score:1)
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Ain't that the truth. Honestly, the article wasn't very clear...they said "root nameservers" but they sure implied com/net.
They just need a statistical estimation of... (Score:2)
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Re:I'm rather doubtful about how useful that would (Score:2)
This seems odd (Score:5, Insightful)
So they sell the data, new domains are registered, and the sites that go up on these domains will be loaded with pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-offs, and pop-up-ur-as* windows.
Sounds like enabling spam to me!
I bet they've been doing this for years (Score:3, Informative)
That was my first thought too (Score:3, Interesting)
I am sick of sites being taken by domain squatters.
I thought I had a great thing with dig (or nslookup) but that might end if that data is going to be sold too. So then what's the point.
Some data shouldn't be sold.
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I just wrote to Verisign to strongly emphasize that this is wrong. Plus, this would be bad for other registrars because I would think it would cut them o
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Those people probably just got bit by a coincidence.
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"I doubt that it was that fast as you are implying. And what do you mean "some registrar"? Where did they search? At a registrars page? Are you saying that registrar, or some other registrar, registered the name? In either case, it's not likely to happen and means in the former case, the registrar is loosing it's own business (dumb) or is colluding with the competition (also dumb).
Those people probably just got bit by a coincidence.
I used to see it happen a LOT - then I stopped doing name lookups thro
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Oy. Where to begin.
First of all, traffic to the root servers isn't vert interesting. They get queries like "what are the nameservers for
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I doubt that it was that fast as you are implying.
Trivial to automate.
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"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Fun with typosquatters (Score:5, Funny)
$ dig b.com
. . .
$ dig aaaaaaaaa.com
$ dig aaaaaaaab.com
. . .
$ dig zzzzzzzzz.com
Re:Fun with typosquatters (Score:5, Funny)
1 - A few lines of script
2 - p2p dispersal
3 - happiness all around
It should only take about a week before the squatting cycle got so out of hand that domain registration becomes impossible...
ok, script is done... ready?
3... 2.... 1...
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dig $i
done
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Let the little pus-heads register everything. And then cancel. And then register. And then cancel. Repeat.
I may have to put some delay in the script to make it behave, but if some of us ran this 24x7x365, Would this make squatting too expensive for anyone? And, most importantly, would it cause troubles we can only imagine (or not)???
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while true; do
for i in com net org; do
dig `echo $RANDOM*$RANDOM*$RANDOM|bc`.$i
done
sleep 1
done
Illegal (Score:2)
KeywordSquatting - Legal, Just Annoying (Score:2)
i mean (Score:2)
Registrars aren't monopoly. (Score:2)
look in broad perspective (Score:2)
You're still not getting Registry vs Registrar (Score:2)
If you go to R
you are not getting my point (Score:2)
So thats why Slashdot is always behind Yahoo. (Score:2)
So the dot is now waiting to confirm the stories in the national press before posting them?
Am I marketing challenged? (Score:2)
I can't remember an instance where I was trolling for a domain I didn't know, like HotelsInIshpeming.com, landed on a cybersquatter AND saw an ad that I clicked on. "Oh, look, they have percale sheets on sale at Ikea... click, click, spend... Ok, where was I... oh yes... HotelsInIshpeming...."
Are we, the clicking public, this A.D.H.D.?
Why not register variations on your domain? (Score:2)
You don't think of them at the time of registratio (Score:2)
People hate domain squatters for a reason. They are annoying and stealing customers/time/resources from those people that built up their brand (th
Re:Remove ability to "taste" domains? (Score:4, Informative)
It was probably this one:
Putting the lower-case 'r' and 'n' side by side looks just like an m.
http://bankofarnerica.com/ [bankofarnerica.com] A-R-N-erica == evil phishing site!
http://bankofamerica.com/ [bankofamerica.com] A-M-erica == real bank site.
mouse over them both, and see how easy it is to misread the url in the status bar.
This is done already (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently did a search for a domain on GoDaddy, the domain was available. Three days later when I went to buy it, it was not available and had been recently bought by a squatter or reseller or something. This is a whole different problem altogether and another flaw in the system. Anyways, I made it a point not to go to that site to make sure I didn't give them any hits that would encourage them to keep it.
Either way, I just bought another available domain and use that. Can't be too picky these days.
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"I recently did a search for a domain on GoDaddy, the domain was available. Three days later when I went to buy it, it was not available and had been recently bought by a squatter or reseller or something. This is a whole different problem altogether and another flaw in the system. Anyways, I made it a point not to go to that site to make sure I didn't give them any hits that would encourage them to keep it."
Actually, its too bad we can't have some "white-hat botnets" to visit such sites on a regular bas
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opendns (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.opendns.com/ [opendns.com]
Best of all, it is free.
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One potential positive here... (Score:1)
And yes, I do recognize that getting something done about it is a different issue entirely. But if the data was at least available, it could
SlashStalking! Re:One potential positive here... (Score:1)
Although this person doesn't seem very original, so I suspect that someone else has done this to a different member in the past. Can anyone point me to the precedent? Maybe there's a club here on slashdot for other slashstalking victims ?
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Have a good day in your curious world. Frankly, if I was hoping to see more strict controls placed on anonymous co
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Maybe in you feel I spout lies
And all your base are belong to us?
On top of the fact that your questions don't deserve being answered, your claims are not backed up by facts. If you look at my posting history, you will see that many of my past comments in other threads have been moderated +5. Your claim of my being a troll just simply doesn't hold water
But I'll let you continue answering captchas and previewing your own typos as you try to make this odd claim. I guess if it somehow makes you feel better about yourself, feel fre
the slashstalking continues... (Score:1)
Are you really sure that most people browse at 1? Or is this just another fact-out-of-ass?
Your insistence to not read the slashdot FAQ is amusing, for sure. If you were to read it, you would find that the default reading level for browsing slashdot discussions is 1. Sure, even anonymous cowards like you are free to change their own viewing level, all the way down to -1 (to see all the trolls posted by other anonymous cowards) or all the way up to 5 (to see only the moderators' favorites).
Basically, the only reason someone would read at -1 is if they are incredibly bored or if they have
Filtering out bogus domains - one approach (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone actually buy anything from those bogus domains, or are they all making their money by what is essentially click fraud? Most of them seem to just deliver ads from the usual ad services.
We've been demoing our filter for bogus on-line businesses, SiteTruth [sitetruth.com], for a while now. Remember "on the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog?" SiteTruth can usually kick the dogs out.
The basic concept is to try to find the business behind the domain. If the web site isn't selling anything and isn't running ads, it's not rated. If it's selling something, there needs to be a business address on the site, preferably one that matches up with business records. So we look through the site for addresses, check SSL certs, look at business directories, do some crunching, and come up with a rating automatically. This is effective against link farms, spam blogs, landing pages, and most of the other trash on the Web.
We use the ratings to reorder search results. We don't block suspicious sites; they just move down in search results. It's a clue stick to apply to suspicious sites - be clear about who's behind the site, or be ignored.
This is an alpha test demo, set up as a search engine web site. The real version will be a browser plug-in. Meanwhile, feel free to try out SiteTruth and complain where appropriate; that's why we're in test. There's a link to the SiteTruth blog on the site if you want to comment. The most interesting searches to try are for heavily spammed keywords, like "herbal viagra" or "london hotels". If your own domains get low ratings, click on the rating icons to find out why. If you're legit, it's usually because the web site has some easy to fix problem.
We've been hearing some grumbling from a few domain owners about this, which indicates we're on the right track. They usually have some long, whiny explanation of why they shouldn't have to disclose the address of their "online business". Tough.
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Well, OK, as you said so... my site got a red bar thingy.
"Secure certificate
No valid certificate."
I'm running a games website, why the fuck does it need an SSL cert?
"Contents of web site
No street address found on the site."
I'm running a games website, why the fuck does it need a street address?
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From my limited understanding, SiteTruth is only meant for rating online shops. Unless your gaming website is selling something, you shouldn't care about SiteTruth or the rating you receive.
This is retarted... (Score:3, Insightful)
Write a perl script that generates fake domains and then does a DNS lookups against them. Thus ensuring that their busy reserving "www.luckylinuxsexmonkeypants.com"
so why was their contract renewed? (Score:3, Insightful)
We have known for years that Verisign is a badly behaved company. This is just the latest example. I just don't understand why ICANN renewed their contract. Like Diebold and SCO, this is a company that we don't need.
A better use of this kind of data... (Score:1)
Hmmm... probably not a lot of money in that for them tho...
mmm! tasty! (Score:2)
Which is it (Score:2)
So does it, or does it not?
DNS Needs Supra-National Supervision (Score:2)
Ah, catching up with the scammers. (Score:2)
It's corrupting the top level either way.