That is an excellent idea, but I would limit the tool to domains registered through OpenSRS.. Make the service free but you the domain must be registered through us for the service to work. We can not be responsible for the (in)accuracy of whois data with domains registered through other registrars.
In addition the format of the whois data is quite different for some registrars, and is subject to change without notice which could break the parsing of data from their whois servers. Making reliability of this tool for data from other registrars somewhat difficult.
If there is enough interest, I can start writing a tool like this that:
Has a database of Domain Names and Contact Email Addresses
Monitors each domain in the database and if there is any change in the WHOIS info the contact email address in the program database is notified of the change.
Obviously there is the issue of the number of requests to the OpenSRS whois server, and the program would have to be throttled appropriately to not over query the server.
Michael
Michael
George Kirikos writes:
Hello,
With all the domain thefts going around (I just got a call from someone
about yet another one today), I wanted to make a product suggestion. A
professional-level WHOIS monitoring system. Given Tucows is a
registrar, they'd have better ability to do this than others who have
tried (e.g. WHOIS.SC has a free system), via the batch-pool, etc.
For domains that are already at OpenSRS, the monitoring is simple (just
add an event manager that is triggered when a domain change is made,
such as unlocking, nameserver change, or WHOIS contact/registrant
change).
For domains not yet transferred into OpenSRS, but that one wants
monitored, I'm not sure of all the info the RRP access gives one for
.com (the thick registries obviously provide more details), but if one
can monitor the nameservers, lock status, last updated date and
registrar (which is info available from Internic), that would likely
provide sufficient security.
Pricing would hopefully be reasonable...contact via various methods
(email, pager, etc) and monitoring frequencies.. perhaps team up with
those "uptime" monitoring services, that already have the
infrastructure in place.
In an industry where price competition is fierce, I think security is
one of the ways to add value (a lot of folks considering getting a Mac
or moving to Linux, for example, to avoid Windows security problems).
Already a lot of the best Internet companies use OpenSRS because of
that (e.g. Microsoft.com is registered at OpenSRS) and also large banks
(e.g. Citicorp.com), and I doubt that is by random chance.
Sincerely,
George Kirikos http://www.kirikos.com/
