Boaz Rymland wrote:
Hi all,
Consultation needed:
A friend of mine and myself are volunteering to launch a charity web site.
My friend is not proficient in web technologies so when he went to
check for registration of the domain, he followed the instructions
recommended on one of the Israeli registrars - internic.co.il and
check through their website the vacancy of the domain we wanted, with
.co.il . It was as vacant as it can be.
The following day, he went to actually register the domain and guess
what? The domain was already registered(!)... .
This smelled very fishy: the domain name was very unlikely to be
requested "by coincidence" at that exact timing; the person holding
the domain was some Israeli name with a very unreadable email address
ending in some .info domain (cannot quote the email address here - see
PS section below).
Now I have another friend who's deep into the hosting business and he
immediately told me that the owners of Internic.co.il are know to be
doing this very ugly move on whois queries running through their web site.
*My questions*:
* is that business method illegal?
* what can be done here in order to react? (be the internic method
legal or not).
Thanks!
Boaz.
*P.S.*
* luckily for us, after I talked to my friend we made it clear that
the needed domain should finish with a .org, not .co.il, so we
actually weren't hit by Internic sting. The incident was and still is,
very irritating.
* the .co.il domain was hijacked on March 24 (IIRC) but its now free -
no registration records exists for it so I cannot quote the snatcher
details. But, since Internic (or the people they're affiliated with)
are making a living in the described method, it should be rather easy
to prove how they work - its a little matter of persistence... .
Complain to ISOC. info-doma...@isoc.org.il
Shachar
--
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com
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