Talk:WHOIS

Terrorism and Child Porn?

In the uses of WHOIS we see the following rather extreme examples:

Assisting law enforcement authorities in investigations, in enforcing national and international laws, including, for example, countering terrorism-related criminal offenses and in supporting international cooperation procedures. In some countries, specialized non governmental entities may be involved in this work; Assisting in the combating against abusive uses of ICT's, such as illegal and other acts motivated by racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance, hatred, violence, all forms of child abuse, including paedophilia and child pornography, the trafficking in, and exploitation of, human beings.

This seems like, frankly, farcical overstatement. Surely this could be condensed into a single point which reads "Assistance in the identification of network owners, which may be of aid in investigation of Internet crime such as hacking existing sites, or hosting content considered illegal in certain jurisdictions."

Indeed, the comprehensive, overstated nature of this particular list would lead me to believe its been copied and pasted from an offical US govt website, which could fall foul of copyright.

84.12.111.19 (talk)

More Info

This page definetly needs more info, i.e. how details get put on the database and stuff and also how to get details taken off... i.e. putting in false info and stuff like that

Where would we find this info; I am not sure it is available. you clearly don't have to give info to Nominet, the UK whois. Nice challenge anyway, and will see what I can come up with, SqueakBox 15:49, May 26, 2005 (UTC)

Why remove the external links? I have replaced them, SqueakBox 14:41, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a web directory. Please read Wikipedia:External links. --W(t) 16:58, 2005 Jun 8 (UTC)

I notice the external links section is building up again. I would it is far more partial than it was before, but Weyes insists on his great external links purge. Even so I urge people to bulk out the external links section as a lot of useful information has been deleted, and redeleted, without reference to the talk page while claiming that Wikipedia:External links is a policy not a guideline, SqueakBox 16:36, Jun 9, 2005 (UTC)

I've replaced them as some of them were useful, and there aren't that many. SlimVirgin ^(talk) 04:00, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

I think the original person who marked this page as needing attention was perhaps confusing Whois with the general process of domain registration and updating. Details on registering a domain, updating registrations, etc. would belong in a different article, as domain registration is not the same thing as whois. However, more details would definitely be good and I'll be adding sections. Jeff The Riffer 18:07, 14 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Right, now I've fleshed out the Whois history section, though there may still be some holes or inaccuracies. I'm going to hit on some old cohorts to see if I can get them to verify it. I removed the Attention template as it seems like this article is much more current. Jeff The Riffer 20:26, 25 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Re-organisation

I've just re-organised the article a fair bit, and moved some stuff around. I think there are too many links to external sites; but I don't see the solution is to just delete them. They need better sorting, and organising, and perhaps the vast majority could be kept, if better linked, and better described.

It would also be good to see expansion of the "problems" section at some point. & to include details of exactly how (and where) the databases are maintained. UkPaolo 28 June 2005 20:31 (UTC)

The Whois infrastructure is now quite large and somewhat complex, not sure how much scope this entry should really cover. Many different companies, government and non-profits maintain whois data and servers. Jeff The Riffer 20:07, 25 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Whois servers

Currently we have a buttload of web based whois servers, but what about actual whois servers, those that listen at TCP port 43? You'd think these would be even more obviously listed here than the web interfaces, but not even one is? I'm currently writing a WHOIS client as a small personal client/host learning project and for fun, but having a heck of a time to find a list of good WHOIS servers to try against. You know, common .com/.net/.org whois server(s). It would be nice to have some international servers too, and maybe even national for countries with a large internet-enabled population. I'm not asking anyone to bother digging up the most strange tiny WHOIS servers, but at least some commonly used ones, for example used by those web based services we have listed, if possible. -- Jugalator 00:58, July 30, 2005 (UTC)

The jwhois configuration file is probably what you are looking for. --Jeff The Riffer 22:47, 14 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Please Pronounce

The most obvious way, it seems, is "Who is?", since that is obviously where the term comes from.

However I have also heard people prounounce it as a one syllable word, that kind of rhymes with "Joyce" or "Voice" -> "woyce" or "woice".

which one is correct? --Ted Jones 15:46, 27 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

i've never heard anything other than the obvious "who is" pronounciation. UkPaolo 21:07, 27 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I've never heard anything other than the obvious "who is" pronounciation. -- Reinyday, 01:30, 30 August 2005 (UTC)

It's pronounced "who is". Pronouncing it as "whoice" is a sign of trying to hard. Jeff The Riffer 18:07, 14 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Article title

The article sat quietly for 2 years uner the lowcase title Whois until a smartass anon made a forbidden cut and paste move to WHOIS on January 18, 2006 and nobody noticed that. I fixed it (merged the article histories).

Now you watch out, and by the way decide which artcile name is preferrable? mikka (t) 03:32, 8 March 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, WHOIS is probably the historically accurate term to use. While it's not a true acronym, it is an explicitly defined protocol and protocol names are often capitalized (i.e. HTTP, SMTP, POP, etc). I think both are appropriate, and one of them should just auto-forward to the other. Which is what it appears to do currently...

--Jeff The Riffer 01:23, 17 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

All of your examples are acronyms (or at least initials). Whois is neither and should not be capitalized as such. --Bearheart 20:30, 7 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Example Query

In the Example query section, several e-mail addresses are sitting there in plain text, and I think they're just waiting to be collected by spambots if they haven't been already. Should these addresses be obfuscated? ScottyWZ 02:56, 25 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

They are part of the whois record anyway, so I assume they are already listed. But conforming to RFC 2606, the example maybe should cover example.com Dork. 00:43, 1 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Confusing pronoun reference

In the passage (under "History"), "A month later it had self-detecting CGI support so that the same program could operate a web-based WHOIS lookup...", what does it refer to? --orlady 15:49, 3 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That prose was cut-and-pasted from the documentation for my [BW Whois] client, notably not by me nor with my permission. Therefor "it" refers to [BW Whois].

This may have happened because BW Whois was the first client to support thin whois servers after the big change in Dec 1999.

Nutshell box

I added a Nutshell box (Template:Easier_Version:WHOIS) here and removed the "May be confusing" box as I tried to make it as easy and clear for Wikireaders that may not understand the complexity of the article. JoshEdgar 23:46, 14 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Web based clients ordered by TLD

A lot of TLD doesn't provide direct WHOIS service for example .ar .bm .firm etc etc. I think it would be perfect if we will provide an External Link to some whois web based servers ordered by TLD like this Whois servers ordered by TLD Adrian13 09:55, 4 May 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Correct?

Registrant City:St. Petersburg

Is that correct? 83.226.116.7 11:43, 22 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Content of the reply

Is the content of the reply described in some RFC? I don't mean the formatting (that's quite different from whois server to whois server), but what fields are supposed to be included in the reply, and what they should contain. One example: whois.godaddy.com contain phone numbers without international prefix, while whois.dotster.com usually lists phone numbers with their international prefix. So the data presented there can be rather difficult to interpret, even if they are meant for human beings. Any hints? Cordula's Web 19:12, 21 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Rewrite!

"If a WHOIS client does not he WHOIS client understood how to deal with this situation, it would display the full information from the registrar."

This sentence doesn't make sense but I don't know enough about WHOIS to rewrite it. Anyone want to take a stab? Nwjerseyliz (talk) 18:02, 14 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

WHOIS Scams

From this article: http://www.securitynewsletter.com/news/attacks/icann-front-running

"The domain names authority warns of possible scam when checking domains availability. Malicious operators could be intercepting the requests and buying the domain names first." —Preceding unsigned comment added by James Lednik (talk • contribs) 20:50, 13 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]