FC: Ben Edelman's report on intentional errors in "whois" database

[Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>]

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" <edelman@law.harvard.edu>
To: <declan@well.com>
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>




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