2009/4/17 Boaz Rymland <b...@rymland.com>: > Hi all, > > Consultation needed: > > A friend of mine and myself are volunteering to launch a charity web site. > > My friend is not proficient in web technologies so when he went to check for > registration of the domain, he followed the instructions recommended on one > of the Israeli registrars - internic.co.il and check through their website > the vacancy of the domain we wanted, with .co.il . It was as vacant as it > can be. > > The following day, he went to actually register the domain and guess what? > The domain was already registered(!)... . > > This smelled very fishy: the domain name was very unlikely to be requested > "by coincidence" at that exact timing; the person holding the domain was > some Israeli name with a very unreadable email address ending in some .info > domain (cannot quote the email address here - see PS section below). > > Now I have another friend who's deep into the hosting business and he > immediately told me that the owners of Internic.co.il are know to be doing > this very ugly move on whois queries running through their web site. > > My questions: > > * is that business method illegal? > > * what can be done here in order to react? (be the internic method legal or > not). > > Thanks! > > Boaz. > > P.S. > > * luckily for us, after I talked to my friend we made it clear that the > needed domain should finish with a .org, not .co.il, so we actually weren't > hit by Internic sting. The incident was and still is, very irritating. > > * the .co.il domain was hijacked on March 24 (IIRC) but its now free - no > registration records exists for it so I cannot quote the snatcher details. > But, since Internic (or the people they're affiliated with) are making a > living in the described method, it should be rather easy to prove how they > work - its a little matter of persistence... . >
Network Solutions is known to do this as well: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/08/1920215 Actually, it is not uncommon: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/28/1458247 -- Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com http://gibberish.co.il _______________________________________________ Linux-il mailing list Linux-il@cs.huji.ac.il http://mailman.cs.huji.ac.il/mailman/listinfo/linux-il