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Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

bryanbraun.com

11–20 of 195 posts

Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

#11
post #2

one other thing i would suggest is to set up a catch-all email for the domain and see what gets sent to it, sometimes you can access accounts associated with the domain, socials etc

I do that and get the occasional account signup. I also ban addresses that fet sent spam, which happens more than the account signups.

Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

#12

I’ll add: and if you lease a VPS, check out its address reputation and reverse DNS record.

How?

Find out the IP address of the machine hosting the domain, then do a reverse lookup on that IP address. It might show the last domain hosted on that IP address.

Using dig:

$>dig yourdomain.tld

1.2.3.4

$>dig -x 1.2.3.4

evilcorp.com

Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

#13

I’ll add: and if you lease a VPS, check out its address reputation and reverse DNS record.

Isn't it pretty safe to just assume that any IP addresses belonging to public clouds, especially cheap ones, have bad reputations?

Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

#14

I’ll add: and if you lease a VPS, check out its address reputation and reverse DNS record.

How?

I'm not the person you were replying to, but in the past, I've just used an IP reputation checking website, such as:

https://www.apivoid.com/tools/ip-reputation-check/

Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

#15

> Ideally, search engine algorithms would give new domain owners a fresh start. Sadly, I think this would be instantly gamed by abusers. They would release the domain name and attempt to register as a new owner or start repeatedly doing handoffs. It's difficult to tell who the owner is changing between and whether or not the new one is a better actor than the former.

Google product manager interview question - Write some code with an LLM tool that leverages a LLM to determine if the new owner of a domain is doing (a) same dodgy thing as prior owner that got flagged (b) different dodgy thing as prior owner but should be flagged (c) something completely innocuous (d) needs further review.

Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

#16
post #15

> Ideally, search engine algorithms would give new domain owners a fresh start. Sadly, I think this would be instantly gamed by abusers. They would release the domain name and attempt to register as a new owner or start repeatedly doing handoffs. It's difficult to tell who the owner is changing between and whether or not the new one is a better actor than the former.

Google product manager interview question - Write some code with an LLM tool that leverages a LLM to determine if the new owner of a domain is doing (a) same dodgy thing as prior owner that got flagged (b) different dodgy thing as prior owner but should be flagged (c) something completely innocuous (d) needs further review.

Please don't give Google ideas for more ways they can have an algorithm arbitrarily screw you over with no recourse, they're listening.

Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

#17
post #16
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google product manager interview question - Write some code with an LLM tool that leverages a LLM to determine if the new owner of a domain is doing (a) same dodgy thing as prior owner that got flagged (b) different dodgy thing as prior owner but should be flagged (c) something completely innocuous (d) needs further review.

Please don't give Google ideas for more ways they can have an algorithm arbitrarily screw you over with no recourse, they're listening.

Follow up interview question. Update the code using your LLM code gen tool of choice that, when someone submits a complaint via an online form, feeds that complaint text back into your LLM to score it again. Points deduction if the candidate ever mentions informing the complainant of anything.

Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

#18
This happened to me and I found this tool super helpful to get my site unblocked: https://dnsblacklist.org/

I purchased a valuable premium domain to host a personal art collection (of anime cels). For some bizarre reason, the site was inaccessible from my work computer and it was de-listed from Google even if I typed the url itself into search.

I hired a square space specialist to figure out why, to no avail. I then begged our company’s CISO to investigate and it turns out we had some firewall setting on UniFi that blocked the domain because it appeared on a list. Once I checked way back, it turns out that it was as an anime porn aggregator years back. I personally reached out to all the web filters out there (Google, Symantec, bing) and one by one filed tickets for them to mark it as art instead of pornography and it worked. I am now properly crawled on Google but still MIA on Bing, search console is giving me some BS error that’s incomprehensible, typical of MSFT.

Re: Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it's haunted

#20

> Ideally, search engine algorithms would give new domain owners a fresh start. Sadly, I think this would be instantly gamed by abusers. They would release the domain name and attempt to register as a new owner or start repeatedly doing handoffs. It's difficult to tell who the owner is changing between and whether or not the new one is a better actor than the former.

Sadly, the same holds true for IP addresses.
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