Change in faq pages for this group
 

The faq web pages for this group at winefaq.cwdjr.net are a subdomain
of one of my primary domains www.cwdjr.net. I recently have made a
change for the main domain to increase privacy. This likely will make
no difference for the winefaq pages, but I thought I should mention
it.

When you put up a primary domain, registration information including
name, address, phone numbers etc is required. This information usually
is made public and can be viewed by anyone on the Whois site at
http://www.tucowsdomains.com/whois/ . This information is used by
marketers and hackers and can greatly increase your net spam, junk
mail, and junk telephone calls. Being on both national and state do
not call lists, using call blocking for automated phone calls, etc is
not enough. The final event that made me do something was a phone call
from who knows where that woke me up and wanted to know if I wanted
the caller to set up a web page for me for selling wine!

The host for my web pages has just set up a service called Whois
Privacy. Now when someone tries to get my domain registration
information from Whois, they are directed to a privacy company in
Canada. One can send an email to me there, but the requester is given
no registration information, and I do not have to respond to any email
sent. If you want to check on Whois, you only enter the cwdjr.net part
in my case where you would get registration information of the main
domain. If you enter a subdoman name before this or anything else such
as www., you will not receive information.

Change in faq pages for this group
 

cwdjrxyz wrote:
>
> The host for my web pages has just set up a service called Whois
> Privacy. Now when someone tries to get my domain registration
> information from Whois, they are directed to a privacy company in
> Canada. One can send an email to me there, but the requester is given
> no registration information, and I do not have to respond to any email
> sent. If you want to check on Whois, you only enter the cwdjr.net part
> in my case where you would get registration information of the main
> domain. If you enter a subdoman name before this or anything else such
> as www., you will not receive information.

Good idea. A number of such whois privacy services exist, precisely for
the reasons you describe (one can also imagine more fraught
circumstances arising from personal information being leaked). Despite
precautions such as CAPTCHA being used on web-based whois sites, nothing
stops a determined organization from doing repetitive whois lookups with
a simple automated script. Fortunately, I did a whois on the site years
ago, so I can still hunt down your wine cellar for my own nefarious
purposes! :)

Mark Lipton