Comments on: Network Solutions Displays Customers’ Whois Queries to the Public

By: Anthony Mitchell

Anthony Mitchell — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:07:15 +0000

Privacy is not something that I’m merely entitled to, it’s an absolute prerequisite.-Marlon Brando.

Reading the comments on the article about EscrowDNS, it became apparent that self interest drives some people’s perceptions of right and wrong.

Somewhere in Texas, late at night, a man sits at his desk wondering if the rest of humanity has taken leave of its senses. I’m wondering too.

By: Andrew Allemann

Andrew Allemann — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:01:22 +0000

Donnie, a couple points. When I wrote “Figure out domains people are looking to buy and beat them to it”, I mean someone searches for the whois to contact the owner of the domain, so I swoop in to make an offer before they can. This is possible. I wasn’t referring to the domain search availability box, just whois.

As for the op-ed side, every thing is op-ed TechCrunch, every domain news site, this site…we all have a slant. But you’re write, I’ve hit sarcasm pretty hard in this post.

But I must stop arguing, because I need to challenge Berryhill on his logo assertions

By: John Berryhill

John Berryhill — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:56:02 +0000

You guys are all missing the big story here.

Netsol has ditched their “broken gears” logo for something that looks like a printer status display for “paper jam”.

This is worse than that poor “under construction” digging man who used to be on millions of web sites and is now on unemployment.

By: Donnie

Donnie — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:53:00 +0000

No you’re right we don’t have to agree at all, but given that you are presenting yourself as journalistic you do need some fact-checking. Your three examples aren’t examples – they are assertions based on opinion:

1.) Was proved wrong, you have no proof available names that are searched are presented via this feed: in fact others chimed in to say they aren’t.
2.) There’s no real way to mine this data to determine that it’s a lawyer or any other individual completing the search – the searches are presented as anonymous 100%. So that too is not a real ‘example’.
3.) You’re right people could use this feed as a way of registering alternative TLDs, potentially. But has it had any more clout than the zone file or any other free data source out there, something maybe that domaintools provides? This being a news site for domaineers, you’d think the topic would have been brought up before but it hasn’t, kind of starts to make your point seem null and void huh?

I guess I’m hot and bothered because I don’t like people ranting as if something is skewed in one direction when it is only their opinion. This is an Op-Ed piece, make it so!

By: Andrew Allemann

Andrew Allemann — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:44:52 +0000

Donnie – well, in the case of AOL it was easy to tie search terms together…you can read up on it.

Buy hey, it’s my opinion that releasing info about individual domains people searched on can be bad, and I provided three examples on my story. We don’t have to agree on this one.

By: Donnie

Donnie — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:32:30 +0000

And that made the Internet worse how? What super secrets were revealed? Was security compromised? How and why would something secure be sent to to AOL in the first place? What individual stats are revealed? That some anonymous person searched on “abc.com”? What does that matter? You’re saying its interesting and yet at the same time indicating that something unethical is happening, but you’re not proving your point at all. Your theory has more holes in it than swiss cheese, move on and admit that this is just silly.

By: Andrew Allemann

Andrew Allemann — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 20:05:54 +0000

Donnie – if it was just aggregate stats like what Twitter or Google provides, that’s one thing. But individual searches is another. When AOL released its search data it wasn’t the fact that Brittney Spears was searched a lot that was interesting…it was the individual searches.