[Coco] bogus WhoIs complaint

[Aaron Wolfe]

On Sun, Jun 13, 2010 at 11:34 PM, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sunday 13 June 2010, Sean wrote:
>>>>>register with donotcall.gov
>>>>>then you will have legal recourse if "phone spammers" do call your
>>>>> cell.
>>>>
>>>>That doesn't even remotely look like a government web site.
>>>
>>> Put a www. in front of it, somebody might be domain squatting on the
>>> plain address.
>>
>>That's not how it works.  If you own something.com, nobody can use
>>other prefixes for it. It's the site owner's responsibility to make
>>sure the DNS entries go to the right place, point www.something.com
>>and just something.com to the same IP.
>
> Maybe in most locales, but I have seen it make a difference too many times
> to make that sort of a blanket statement.
>

In theory, the owner of xyz.com controls *.xyz.com (and *.*.xyz.com,
etc).   DNS works by delegation of authority, starting from the
lefthand side (.com, .org, etc) and working towards the hostname
(www).  Name servers for top level domains (TLDs: com net org gov,
etc) delegate the next level (xyz) to the servers which the "owner" of
that domain specify.  Any requests for *.xyz.com are then handled by
servers which in theory are controlled by the owner of xyz.com.
These servers could in turn direct queries for a sub domain to another
set of name servers, for instance *.foo.xyz.com can be handled by a
different set of servers than *.bar.xyz.com, and so on if you like
really long dns names.

The reason you sometimes find "www.xyz.com" is a legitimate site and
"xyz.com" or "something.xyz.com" looks like a shady scam site is that
sometimes the owners of xyz.com delegate a less than reputable company
as their DNS service.  These companies will provide the correct
servers for dns names that the owner specifically sets up (www
perhaps) but will send requests for *anything else*.xyz.com to their
own servers, which give out various forms of sketchy looking pages.
If you are using a "free" DNS service, chances are this is happening
to your domain.

So... long story short.. even though every site ending in xyz.com
*should* be under control of the xyz people, sometimes the xyz people
try to save a few bucks and you end up finding shady stuff in their
domain that isn't actually anything to do with them.   There are some
other strange things that can happen, but giving control of their DNS
to a shady company is the #1 reason for this.


> In any event, that is the correct site.
>
> --
> Cheers, Gene
> "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
>  soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
> -Ed Howdershelt (Author)
> World War Three can be averted by adherence to a strictly enforced dress
> code!
>
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