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Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

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Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#31

Post by Gigachad »

billpg wrote: post #9

Why do domains have WHOIS records anyway? I get why IP blocks have it because machines actually do things from behind IP addresses, but the only thing I'm doing from a domain name is stopping other people from using it. Someone is hosting copyrighted content? Look up that machine's IP-WHOIS. Someone is trying to DDOS me? Look up that machine's IP-WHOIS. Someone is holding a domain I want? If their answer is going to…

These days they are somewhat useless as every domain name provider redacts everything about the owner.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#32

Post by Aeolun »

superkuh wrote: post #26

Whois was killed off by the European Union passing the GDPR. It really changed how I use the internet for the worse. In the old days I could always at least send an email to a domain hosting a service. Now there's no default contact information and everything is behind walled gardens. Email was the great communicator. Removing it from WHOIS made the web more fragile and broken. But whois doesn't have to be that way a…

To be fair, when I recently found all my historical addresses (past 15 years or so) connected to my name on some random website there was only one source they could’ve gotten that information from.

I’m inclined to believe that most people looking up WHOIS details have good intentions, but clearly there are people that use them for their own purposes.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#33

Post by CydeWeys »

tptacek wrote: post #22
cloudyporpoise wrote: post #19

It's sad we can't improve and build modern APIs that can support load and querying and exactly why companies exist whose main business function is scraping services like WhoIs, Social Media, or Sites behind cloudflare.

As the article observes, we can and are doing that: that's what RDAP is.

And the linked article, written in January, is out of date on that front. The timeline has finally been set and Whois is transitioning to RDAP for all new gTLDs next year.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#35

Post by calmconviction »

zanethomas wrote: post #24

once upon a time i wrote a whois server

Is the source available to play with? I wanted to fool around with hosting a whois server but couldn't find any software out there. The server would be completely useless for anyone else but would be fun to use some time learning about this old protocol/tech/etc.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#36

Post by _8j50 »

I use to have a very reliable but simple python script that asks the whois server for the TLD then gets the whois server from it and asks that server the whois of the apex and if it gets another whois it asks that server and so on recursively. It was more reliable than any service I found because a lot of TLDs that aren't mainstream or run by random countries have their own finnicy whois with some custom weird webui bur whois on port 43 is always there and contains a lot more info than RIR whois which is what most services tend to show.

Some parameters are reliably there and in a way it is very easy to parse since it is key value separated by a colon (cut -d ':' -f 1,2) but there is no "schema" you can follow and sometimes I saw unique and extra additions by some servers and missing critical fields by others. "Your domain is compromised, bad guys are doing bad stuff with it" how do I reliably find out the right contact for example? That last bit was always a manual excercise.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#37

Post by deathanatos »

midislack wrote: post #34

What's needed is for Facebook and Google to gin up a replacement!

… or use RDAP:

> since 2019, ICANN requires registrars and registries to implement an RDAP service.

At least, as much as one can. It'd be nice if ICANN required registries to implement an RDAP service.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#38

Post by mike_d »

A lot of Linux based command line whois clients still use "whois-servers.net" to look up up the appropriate whois server for a TLD, which is long dead (it still responds but is no longer maintained).

Many years ago I built a replacement whoisservers.org, and tried contacting a few maintainers, but nobody seemed to really care.

If you want to make use of it, you can run "whois -h com.whoisservers.org exmaple.com" (or substitute -h with the appropriate flag for your client to specify a server)

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#39

Post by billpg »

layer8 wrote: post #13
billpg wrote: post #9

Why do domains have WHOIS records anyway? I get why IP blocks have it because machines actually do things from behind IP addresses, but the only thing I'm doing from a domain name is stopping other people from using it. Someone is hosting copyrighted content? Look up that machine's IP-WHOIS. Someone is trying to DDOS me? Look up that machine's IP-WHOIS. Someone is holding a domain I want? If their answer is going to…

A single IP can host many domains, each of which may have separate technical and administrative contacts. Conversely, different subdomains (and MX for email) can live on different IPs. If I use dyndns, there isn’t any fixed relation between IP and domain at all. I happen to own several domains, but I don’t own the IPs where they are hosted.

But why would I, a complete stranger to you, need to look up that contact information? We both hold a number of domains, but that alone isn't a reason for needing to contact each other.

Re: Whois: Fragile, Unparseable, Obsolete

#40

Post by newman314 »

I've been using https://github.com/likexian/whois This is a Go WHOIS client that is able to emit JSON.

I would like to use RDAP instead but RDAP coverage is even spottier than WHOIS.

BTW, if anyone knows of a WHOIS server able to handle the .de TLD, please let me know as all I get right now is "The DENIC whois service on port 43 doesn't disclose any information"

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