Imagine you could see a registrar's WHOIS query logs in real time...
 

How crazy would you go?

I guess no one thinks it would be cool to see people hunting for possible names, BEFORE they're registered. :winkwink:

post again when you have away to do this ;)

E-mail me I am interested

Like Chris says, for now we'll just keep dreaming. :winkwink:

(I'm sure some guys can see it, whether they could get away with abusing that priviledge is another matter...)

I'm sure it's done in one way or another.

Whether an inside job from someone working at the registrar, or hackers spying on the logs (which would probably be low-risk since they're not actually manipulating data in any way, only viewing it)

that's why when I'm looking for a name I just type it in my browser first :2 cents:

that would be cool. we have a way to lookup whats already registered by nameserver say ns1.nat-net.com or ns1.webair.com or ns1.sun.com it will list all domains currently in their dns server.

host -l ns.foo.bar ?

Its already being done. I had a cyber squatter for a domain I had looked up (the guy had bought the domain only an hour after I had looked it up. 5 Days later the domain was available again (guess he figured I wouldn't buy it from him) and I snatched it up right away

the one thing that happened to me that pissed me off was when I went in to backorder a domain and the company it was registered with ended up keeping the domain and squatting on it instead of releasing it to the public. I really wish i was in that position.

I contacted them to see how much they wanted and they were asking $10k for 24 hours of having a domain.

that shit made me madder than hell

It wouldn't be that low risk, as an example, recently some high profile Estonians got busted for viewing headlines from a business website before the articles were published, allowing them to have insider information with witch to buy & sell stocks with. They're currently having their asses handed to them, even though all they were doing was exploiting a flaw in the website's code and simply viewing the headlines with a spider.

companies that allow you to 'backorder' domains can keep these domains themselves?

Rumors are that many people are already doing it and immediately listing on SEDO/Afternic or testing initial traffic, then dumping within 5 days if there's no bites or hits. Soon they'll be exposed & blacklisted... plus removed (permanently de-accredited) & penalized by ICANN... and all the info will be made public. Already whispers of class-actions against certain companies. End of story, for now.

nuff said.

.

wtf, can they do that??

Interesting. I was just speculating myself when I started this thread, after doing a bunch of WHOIS queries to try to find a suitable domain name for a new project. I'm not too surprised to find out that it's "really" happening. :)

Nowhere already got played that trick on register.com couple weeks ago

Might be the reason why domains registar are getting crazy growdth right now

It is being done.

It would definitely be a goldmine