Here's the previous study that Ben sent to Politech "Ben Edelman: 4,525 different domains lead to one porn site" http://www.politechbot.com/p-03419.html FYI the House Judiciary crime subcommittee is supposed to vote this Friday on HR 4640, a bill "to provide criminal penalties for providing false information in registering a domain name on the Internet": http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:h.r.4640: -Declan --- From: "Ben Edelman" <edelmanat_private> To: <declanat_private> Subject: Intentional & Widespread Whois Errors - Some Specific Examples Date: Mon, 13 May 2002 11:56:46 -0400 Declan, In the context of this week's Congressional hearings on the accuracy of Whois data [1], I thought your readers might be interested in 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." They're like ordinary domain warehousers in that they seem to seek to sell their domains for a profit, and they're like Tina's Webcam [2] 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 with 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 [3], and the OECD wrote up a jarring report of their experience with these folks [4]. 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: <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/invalid-whois/?d> Regards, Ben Edelman Berkman Center for Internet & Society Harvard Law School http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/edelman [1] Thursday, 9:30am, <http://www.house.gov/judiciary/schedule.htm> [2] <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/renewals/> [3] <http://www.udrplaw.net/DomainForSaleDecisions.htm> [4] <http://www.oecd.org/pdf/M00027000/M00027316.pdf> ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sign this pro-therapeutic cloning petition: http://www.franklinsociety.org -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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