DomainTools has been temporarily banned from collecting and publishing the Whois records of all .nz domains. A Washington court yesterday handed down a preliminary injunction against the company, after New Zealand’s Domain Name Commission sued it in July for scraping and republishing its Whois in violation of its terms of service. Notably — especially if […]
Could a lack of Whois records thwart the fight against attempts to interfere in this year’s US elections? That’s the threat raised by DomainTools CEO Tim Chen in a blog post, and others, this week. Chen points to recent research by Facebook, based on an investigation by security company FireEye, that linked a large network […]
DomainTools now has records of over a billion domain names in its database, according to the company. The billionth name was added last month, according to a blog post. The company notes that there are only about 350 million domains in existence today, meaning that twice as many domains have been deleted and never re-registered […]
DomainTools announced its free reverse domain WHOIS today, called Iris Mirror. ™ The service is available to everyone, even those without a credit card, and it’s quite revolutionary, according to those of us who beta-tested it for the past six and a half weeks. “Iris Mirror ™ is the next step in digital data digestion, […]
Brian Krebs, investigative journalist and publisher of the infosec blog Krebs On Security, uses DomainTools to research rogue domain owners. In a recent article, Krebs shared news of how Bitcanal – a Portuguese network – has been aiding spammers by hijacking millions of IP addresses. According to Krebs, security researchers have tracked the suspected theft […]
A small group of large technology companies including Microsoft and Facebook have demanded that ICANN Compliance take a closer look at AlpNames, the budget registrar regularly singled out as a spammers’ favorite. The ad hoc coalition, calling itself the Independent Compliance Working Party, wrote to ICANN last week to ask why the organization is not […]
The war of WHOIS information is escalating, and DomainTools is on the offensive. GoDaddy is now keeping part of the publicly available WHOIS information private, for domains that are queried via third party tools. At first, we thought that DomainTools had a special agreement with the largest domain registrar in the world, to display the […]
DomainTools is to scrap at least five of its services as it tries to crack down spam. It’s getting rids of its mobile apps, its APIs, and is to stop showing registrants’ personal information to unauthenticated users. CEO Tim Chen told us in an email at the weekend: The Android app is no longer supported. […]
GoDaddy has seriously limited DomainTools’ access to its customers’ Whois records, pissing off DomainTools. DomainTools CEO Tim Chen this week complained to DI that its access to Whois has been throttled back significantly in recent months, making it very difficult to keep its massive database of domain information up to date. Chen said that DomainTools […]
Regular users of DomainTools should expect significant changes to their service, possibly unwelcome, as the impact of incoming European Union privacy law begins to be felt. Professional users such as domain investors are most likely to be impacted by the changes. The company hopes to announce how its services will be rejiggered to comply with […]
