Re: [SAGE] How nice...not. "Fresh WhoIs data (emails, phones, etc.) on sale!"

["Mark C. Langston" <mark@bitshift.org>]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 02:40:50PM -0800, Strata R Chalup wrote:
> Got a spam today in some folks at "sales@outhosted.com" are
> claiming to have done a registry crawl in mid-December 2003.  They
> don't say which registry, but claim to be selling info on 214K
> registrants, including phone and address data.
> 
> I thought this sort of thing was explicitly prohibited by most of
> the current registrars, and that they had (albeit simple) throttles
> to prevent multiple queries of that crawling sort.  Oh yes, and
> the claim is that these wingnuts will refresh the data quarterly.
> 
> Any point in barking up this particular tree? Ie, has anyone here
> seen registrars make any attempt to go after such folks?  Cynically
> I'm assuming that there's a better chance nowadays-- simply because
> so many registrars will sell you marketing data themselves, so now
> it's theft from their viewpoint (rolls eyes).


I don't know how much progress you'd make.  There are either some 
extremely large customers of this sort of operation, or there are
some very large businesses doing this themselves.

Case in point:  I got a spam-phonecall today from Experian.  Asking 
if they'd reached $DOMAIN_I_JUST_REGISTERED.  On a number in the Federal
Do-Not-Call database.

They claimed that if a number is used for business, it's okay.

I explained to them that registration of a domain name does not imply
"business use", and that the number they'd dialed was a residential
line, and was listed in the DNC database.

This wasn't the first time, either.  Last month, I got one (for the same
domain) from a large financial house (Morgan Stanley, I think, but I may
be misremembering).

I've always been a proponent of putting valid information into WHOIS.
That opinion is very rapidly changing, however.


-- 
Mark C. Langston                                    Sr. Unix SysAdmin
mark@bitshift.org                                       mark@seti.org
Systems & Network Admin                                SETI Institute
http://bitshift.org                               http://www.seti.org