Domain Tasting Not So Palatable

[rooster]

http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/08/es...ashing-halt.ars

By: John Timmer, August 13, 2009

Domain tasters" bitter as new fees put an end to their games

"Domain tasters" take advantage of a five-day domain name grace period to perform risk-free cybersquatting. Since ICANN upped the penalty for excessive cancellations, however, the practice has essentially disappeared. <SNIP>

Apart from the obvious benefits, I'm curious to see what effect this will have on those annoying DNS redirects from MS, Comcast, Earthlink & etc.

Tag:

ICANN Rule 4.2.5

Prohibitions on warehousing of or speculation in domain names by registries or registrars;

http://www.icann.org/en/registrars/ra-agreement-17may01.htm

[rconner]

Do we have any way to know whether spammers use this sort of trick? My impression was that normal registration (in bulk, with crooked registrars) was too easy and cheap to make such cheating worthwhile to them. Plus, the crooked registrars will let you lie in your WHOIS records.

-- rick

[rooster]

Do we have any way to know whether spammers use this sort of trick? My impression was that normal registration (in bulk, with crooked registrars) was too easy and cheap to make such cheating worthwhile to them. Plus, the crooked registrars will let you lie in your WHOIS records.

Points well taken.

I was remembering something I read on CastleCops a while back that 'suggested' (?) some cybercrooks were using "this sort of trick": ... sending out spam with links to sites that might only be up for a few days, the purpose of which was to get the recipient to d/l malicious code.

Perhaps I was idealizing out loud, but if ICANN anti-tasting fees reduce the number of domain names in the reservoir, then spam filtering data bases would be easier to manage; no?

"Crooked registrars..." yeah. That's why I appended the tag. Even legit registrars such as in Canada (CIRA) and the UK no longer have to publish contact info in their whoises anymore. ...my pet peave.