11 ms·
Launching RDAP; sunsetting WHOIS
- brown 2y agoRDAP replaces WHOIS, offering a more technologically advanced way to discover the domain is protected by privacy services.
- jeroenhd 2y agoDomain whois is useless, but IP whois is at least kind of useful to check before blanket banning entire IP ranges.
- homebrewer 2y agoIt's useful for checking if a domain name is taken without doing that through a registrar, which is both less convenient, and (in case of shitty registrars) can be sold to domain speculators.
- eXpl0it3r 2y agoDepends what endpoint you hit, the look up data will likely be sold regardless.
- grendelt 2y agoInterestingly, when discussing WHOIS with my networking students, I discovered .edu WHOIS is not (cannot?) hidden. I suppose EDUCAUSE either requires WHOIS to remain open or they do not offer information hiding. Doing some WHOIS lookups, we found a point of contact at a university, called the network admin said hello and launched into an impromptu network admin interview. It was cool stuff. I emailed him later in the day to apologize to and thank him for being a good sport about the whole thing. He (fortunately) found it all rather enjoyable.
- kelnos 2y agoSome other TLDs, like .us and .in, also forbid WHOIS privacy. TLD owners are free to set whatever policy they want around this. Perhaps .edu does the same.
- whalesalad 2y agowhois/rdap is very useful to identify if a domain is registered or not, and if so with whom. still lots of use there without pii data.
- nine_k 2y agoBoth give you a way to find out the domain's registrar, registration date, transfer status, and administrative contacts like abuse@. Nameserver data can also be somehow useful. Otherwise, what did you expect the registrar to divulge to you, a random passer-by?
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoAs a random passer-by I can look up the registered ownership of any building on the street.
- skissane 2y agoAs an Australian, I can look up the ownership of random properties in the US for free. But if I want to do the same for a building on my own street, I have to pay a US$11 fee per a property searched. The US has a reputation of being a hypercapitalist society, yet they seem to be behind Australia in the descent into hypercapitalism by not (yet) privatising the registration of land titles. [0] [0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-12/$2.6-billion-price-tag-on-nsw-land-titles-registry-sale/8439176 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-12/$2.6-billion-price-ta...
- emmelaich 2y agoIs that hypercapitalism or .. too much state control? A private industry would be able to maintain the records for next to nothing by advertising or offering related services. The govt could restrict themselves to ensuring no monopoly.
- cuu508 2y agoIntentionally ot not, it also prevents mass scraping.
- skissane 2y agoIt doesn’t because you can negotiate a bulk discount. If you want all the titles, they’ll sell that to you - for a huge fee, but still a big discount off paying for them all individually. So essentially it prevents mass scraping by individuals and small businesses, while posing no real obstacle for megacorps with megabudgets
- TZubiri 2y agoI get the joke, but whois is super valuable for abuse report contact and for registrar and even ip block info! Huge protocol for cybersecurity
- CaffeineLD50 2y agoI havent had a successful use of whois in probably over a decade. What was once a useful tool was destroyed by spammers harvesting email addresses and privacy oriented registrars. I won't even notice its gone
- flyinghamster 2y agoIt is useful for finding out who owns an IP address, but that's about it.
- RIMR 2y agoBGP looking glasses are still a thing, so at least we have that.
- CaffeineLD50 2y agoWhois -r lookups I use Arin for. Maybe I'm confused but whois gave me domain owner, but whois -r gave me Arin IP netblock ownership. Arin is useful, whois is not.
- vekatimest 2y agoTo be replaced with a system providing a standardized method to give law enforcement easier "secure access" to your redacted personal information.
- dawnerd 2y agoWait, people use real information?
- riffic 2y agothat's grounds for cancellation of a domain sooooo.....
- kelnos 2y agoI do. The terms of the domain registration say that providing incorrect information can result in revocation of the registration. Not really worth the risk, IMO, for any domain I actually care about.
- Aachen 2y agoNot just that, but also if the registrar turns out to be fraudulent or someone convinces your registrar to transfer the domain (scam the support team), or they get your account password and transfer the domain that way (data leak elsewhere, password reset with a sim swap, you name it)... there are so many ways you can have "technical difficulties", but in the end: you're the one with an ID card that has your name on it. You can take the TLD to court and have them give you back the domain that was legally purchased in your name Except if it's not in your name So yep, as you say: make this decision (fake or real information) knowing the risks involved in not legally owning it
- wmf 2y agoWe have ownership records for real estate for a reason. Domains need some level of accountability.
- 2y ago
- OutOfHere 2y agoThese days how can one register a domain anonymously, using crypto as payment, and without KYC?
- OccamsMirror 2y agoNjalla is the only service I'm familiar with: https://njal.la/ https://njal.la/ No first hand experience, however.
- cedws 2y agoThey’re pretty expensive, and the nature of the service means that if they disappear, they have ownership of your domain and you have no recourse to get it back.
- nextts 2y agoIt'll be a pick one problem (secrecy, control) until say the big browsers support .bit domains directly doing a lookup on the block chain.
- duskwuff 2y agoWorse: if Njalla decides you shouldn't have a domain - for any reason whatsoever, including "we don't like your web site" - they can seize it, and you have no legal recourse. This is not a hypothetical, by the way.
- gkoberger 2y agoWow. I never noticed how much how I used the internet changed. I haven’t done a WHOIS in a decade. When I started using the internet, it’s how I contacted people. If I liked their site or their blog, I’d check who was behind it and get an email address I could contact. Now… humans don’t really own domains anymore. Content is so centralized. I obviously noticed this shift, but I had forgotten how I used to be able to interact with the internet.
- pavel_lishin 2y ago> Now… humans don’t really own domains anymore. Even when they do, it's generally a smart idea to anonymize the whois information. You might be looking up my domain to make a buddy, but someone else might be looking up my domain to SWAT me.
- neom 2y agoAlthough shit did happen back in the day. Someone show up at the house of the DeviantART CEO in like... I wanna say like, mmm.. 2007? and slashed his tires etc. WhoIs was only cool in the 90s.
- tombert 2y agoI think in most ways it's better, it makes the web more approachable to less technical users, making it less gate-keepey, but I also kind of miss the loosely-coupled cluster of web pages from the late-90's and early 2000's web. Stuff felt less homogeneous; everyone had kind of a loose understanding of HTML, and people would customize their pages in horrendously wonderful ways. It felt more personal.
- jfengel 2y agoSo many tech people have a fondness for that time. To me, it was a very narrow slice of the human experience. Today I can find sites and communities on any subject I can conceive and billions more that I cannot. And personally I found it more horrendously ugly than horrendously wonderful. But that's just my opinion.
- qrush 2y agoWhat does this mean for the command line tool whois? It definitely works still and it's still being updated... > whois ycombinator.com % IANA WHOIS server % for more information on IANA, visit http://www.iana.org http://www.iana.org % This query returned 1 object refer: whois.verisign-grs.com domain: COM organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services address: 12061 Bluemont Way address: Reston VA 20190 address: United States of America (the) contact: administrative name: Registry Customer Service organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services address: 12061 Bluemont Way address: Reston VA 20190 address: United States of America (the) phone: +1 703 925-6999 fax-no: +1 703 948 3978 e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com contact: technical name: Registry Customer Service organisation: VeriSign Global Registry Services address: 12061 Bluemont Way address: Reston VA 20190 address: United States of America (the) phone: +1 703 925-6999 fax-no: +1 703 948 3978 e-mail: info@verisign-grs.com nserver: A.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.5.6.30 2001:503:a83e:0:0:0:2:30 nserver: B.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.33.14.30 2001:503:231d:0:0:0:2:30 nserver: C.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.26.92.30 2001:503:83eb:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: D.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.31.80.30 2001:500:856e:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: E.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.12.94.30 2001:502:1ca1:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: F.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.35.51.30 2001:503:d414:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: G.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.42.93.30 2001:503:eea3:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: H.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.54.112.30 2001:502:8cc:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: I.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.43.172.30 2001:503:39c1:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: J.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.48.79.30 2001:502:7094:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: K.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.52.178.30 2001:503:d2d:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: L.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.41.162.30 2001:500:d937:0:0:0:0:30 nserver: M.GTLD-SERVERS.NET 192.55.83.30 2001:501:b1f9:0:0:0:0:30 ds-rdata: 19718 13 2 8acbb0cd28f41250a80a491389424d341522d946b0da0c0291f2d3d771d7805a whois: whois.verisign-grs.com status: ACTIVE remarks: Registration information: http://www.verisigninc.com http://www.verisigninc.com created: 1985-01-01 changed: 2023-12-07 source: IANA # whois.verisign-grs.com Domain Name: YCOMBINATOR.COM Registry Domain ID: 147225527_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.gandi.net Registrar URL: http://www.gandi.net Updated Date: 2025-02-14T02:53:36Z Creation Date: 2005-03-20T23:51:07Z Registry Expiry Date: 2026-03-20T22:51:07Z Registrar: Gandi SAS Registrar IANA ID: 81 Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@support.gandi.net Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +33.170377661 Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited Name Server: NS-1411.AWSDNS-48.ORG Name Server: NS-1914.AWSDNS-47.CO.UK Name Server: NS-225.AWSDNS-28.COM Name Server: NS-556.AWSDNS-05.NET DNSSEC: unsigned URL of the ICANN Whois Inaccuracy Complaint Form: https://www.icann.org/wicf/ >>> Last update of whois database: 2025-03-17T01:27:31Z <<<
- smoyer 2y agoWhen can I finally see an article announcing that ICANN has been sunsetted?
- RIMR 2y agoWhy so flippant? The Internet would be in a sorry state without ICANN...
- dannyobrien 2y agoCan you explain more?
- renewiltord 2y agoOne bright side of ICANN being a California non-profit is that when they tried to sell off .org to their own confederates so they could juice up the prices they were stopped from doing it. If they were in other places, I imagine it would have gone through.
- notepad0x90 2y agoWhois needs it's own port open usually, this is good I suppose, now it's all HTTPS. Now, if only passive dns resolution data was part of this same api. As it stands today, if you're looking into WHOIS information, historical WHOIS and passive dns are a must, and they are usually provided by commercial entities.
- technopol 2y agoThis seems like it would break things.
- technopol 2y agoI’m serious! I don’t know why we’re turning a fundamental command off, even if it didn’t work correctly for everything. Do you realize how much documentation and how many tools reference it? And it still can work.
- qb_dp 2y agoshocking news indeed. Major regression. How can we trust the internet now ?
- Aachen 2y agoI think people know you're serious (I'm not one of the downvoters), but that it seems silly to stop all innovation for the sake of legacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_ossification is a big enough problem that we're being taught about this in school so that we're aware of the problem and maybe things get better in the future
- transcriptase 2y agoThe concept of WHOIS has felt sleazy for many years. If I register a domain, the registrar will basically extort me a couple extra dollars per year for “domain privacy” for the privilege of not having my name, home address, phone number, and email publicly available and then mirrored across thousands of shady scraped content sites in perpetuity. Even If you don’t care about that, then begins the never ending emails texts and calls begin from sleazy outfits who want to sell you related domains, do SEO for you, revamp your site, schedule a call, or just fill your spam box up with legitimate scams and bootleg pharma trash. All because you wanted a $10/year dot com without paying the bribe. And yes I grew up leafing through well worn phone books next to corded phones. This is not comparable.
- october8140 2y agoYou’re just using bad registrars. https://porkbun.com/products/whois_privacy https://porkbun.com/products/whois_privacy
- CursedSilicon 2y agoPorkbun only came out in 2014 Two decades late on a problem
- nextts 2y agoOh the good ol days. $10/m for slow PHP shared hosting and $150 for an SSL certificate too.
- dkh 2y agoWeb hosts competing based on who had the prettiest cPanel theme. The number of email accounts were allowed was something that mattered. If you were lucky enough to get SSH access, it was jailed and only really allowed you to move files around easier or edit something with vim/nano. Oh, I have unintentionally become a GoDaddy customer (a company I have spent ample time hating and shitting on over the years) because I was a legacy Media Temple customer going back to like 2006 and I still just can't be bothered to clear out everything on those sites/domains and they eventually got acquired
- 1970-01-01 2y agoI don't play with domains all day, but this very much feels like nothing important was accomplished, and things are just being made more complicated for political reasons. Sorry if that is being harsh, but I've never had any issue using WHOIS.
- CydeWeys 2y agoIf you've ever tried to parse WHOIS programmatically, you'd realize that it being an unstructured blob of text is actually quite unconducive to it being useful. Having every endpoint return a standardized JSON payload specified in an RFC is much better.
- 1970-01-01 2y agoBetter for whom?
- CydeWeys 2y agoAll users of the service. Because RDAP has a fully specified format, your client can interpret it in predictable ways and then actually present the information to the user in a consistent format (or be used programmatically). WHOIS is just a blob of text that every service implements somewhat differently, so WHOISing domains across different registrars/registries does not provide a consistent UI, and it's often confusing.
- bravetraveler 2y agoIf distribution packages don't abstract this trivia away I'm going to be endlessly frustrated
- phendrenad2 2y agoMost people won't even notice this change. They'll still go to a "whois lookup service" and input a domain, and get the same results. The fact that it arrived via a different protocol (RDAP) won't mean anything.
- throwaway150 2y agoThere's something about WHOIS I've never understood. If you run `whois ycombinator.com` you'll see name servers in the output. Name Server: NS-1411.AWSDNS-48.ORG Name Server: NS-1914.AWSDNS-47.CO.UK Name Server: NS-225.AWSDNS-28.COM Name Server: NS-556.AWSDNS-05.NET But if you run `dig ycombinator.com ANY +noall +answer` you'll see name servers here too. ycombinator.com. 21600 IN NS ns-556.awsdns-05.net. ycombinator.com. 21600 IN NS ns-1914.awsdns-47.co.uk. ycombinator.com. 21600 IN NS ns-225.awsdns-28.com. ycombinator.com. 21600 IN NS ns-1411.awsdns-48.org. ycombinator.com. 900 IN SOA ns-225.awsdns-28.com. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 86400 If you see all the output together, you'll find the same name servers are present in WHOIS output and the DNS NS records. But wait, there's more. The name server `ns-225.awsdns-28.com` is present three times- in WHOIS, in DNS NS records, in DNS SOA record. Which of these name servers get used to resolve `ycombinator.com` to its IP address like when I do `ping ycombinator.com`? What if the information between the WHOIS and DNS NS records and the DNS SOA records are inconsistent? Which record wins?
- Ayesh 2y agoIf you `ping`, your recursive resolve (like Google DNS, or your ISP DNS servers) will do the recursive lookup for you. WHOIS data are irrelavant to resolving the host IP address. The SOA will be used to find the primary name server (for an AXFR lookup perhaps), but generally, each NS entry will work in a round-robin fashion and SOA isn't queried. Most resolves just ignore duplicate records, but I imagine some resolvers may change the "odds" to likely pick the duplicated NS entry. Finally, most authorative resolvers do not want to spend resources on ANY queries and almost always don't return all records, or like you saw, do not de-duplicate answers.
- throwaway150 2y agoThanks! Do you know why the name servers are part of the WHOIS data? Same question for SOA record. If the NS entries are used in a round-robin fashion, why is the name server present in SOA record too?
- nine_k 2y agoBack in 2014, when TLD .church was introduced, me and my friends tried to register alonzo.church and (ab)use the contact information records to provide some biographic information and links, explaining literally whois alonzo.church on the command line. That would not prevent hosting whatever services on that domain as normal. Sadly, we were not able to secure the domain on time, and after 11 years, the attempted trick is becoming irrelevant.
- TZubiri 2y agoI wasn't aware of rdap. Anyone experienced with this, I am not seeing abuse contact info, usually a phone number or email. Am i supposed to follow hyperlinks to get this info or something? Like search the registrar for this data?
- chrisallick 2y agor dap me up
- oefrha 2y agoPeople say WHOIS is useless these days due to WHOIS privacy, but it's useful for at least one thing: checking when a domain was registered/transferred. Fishy stuff tend to be registered/transferred recently. Also older and larger companies tend to not hide their organizational identity. Btw, I tried the icann-rdap CLI tool and the default rendered-markdown output mode is atrocious. Sea of output, each nameserver has one or more standalone tables taking up 15x$repetition lines, almost impossible to fish out useful info. The retro gtld-whois mode is so much cleaner. Their web tool https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup https://lookup.icann.org/en/lookup is fine too, don't know why the rendered markdown mode isn't like that. WTF.
- zacwest 2y agoI like the `rdap` cli from https://www.openrdap.org https://www.openrdap.org (in Brew, too: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/rdap#default https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/rdap#default). Very clean, concise output.
- whalesalad 2y agocheck out the rdap deployment dashboard - https://deployment.rdap.org/ https://deployment.rdap.org/ it's still unsupported by a lot of tld's and the rate limits are atrocious. some registrar's only allow 10 requests per day and will group huge netblocks into one single block.
- rootsudo 2y agowow! something I didn't expect to read today, or in the near future.
- charcircuit 2y agoICANN's DNS servers is one of the only systems on the internet that requires people to continually pay money to have a name. X, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Twitch, etc all let you register a name for free and without submitting all of your personal information. The entire model here is outdated with what users want.
- ChadNauseam 2y agoi’m glad it requires money. $1/month for a top level name isn’t much, and it means there are lots of good names available rather than all of them being grabbed by someone not interested in using them. when making a reddit account it’s actually pretty tricky to find a decent name that’a available
- PhilipRoman 2y agoI think both models have a place. Sometimes I just really want a persistent identifier that I can take with me (unlike an IP) with minimal maintenance. Even if it is something unreadable like a UUID. We should totally have a free .uuid TLD (which will predictably get blocked by 90% of networks... Although DoH would probably still work)
- charcircuit 2y agoTwitch for example will allow you take over usernames of accounts that are unused. Also having a good name is less important than you think. Most people don't navigate by going to exact identifiers. They just type the name of the thing into a search and relevant results will be returned. Dead or useless results should not rank high.
- ChadNauseam 2y agoSo I should decide to be beholden to the whims of search engines and not have any other way to direct people to my content (besides QR codes maybe?) I'll admit it works sometimes. "news.ycombinator.com" is not as memorable as "hackernews.com" would be. But I like being able to have my website be chadnauseam.com (the name was unavailable on reddit), I like that no one is going to decide I'm not using it enough and take it away from me, and $1/month is so trivial that I think it's worth the benefits. Besides, if you don't care about having a short and memorable name people can type exactly, why not just host your site on the free subdomain vercel or heroku gives you?
- imoreno 2y agoThe article is titled: > ICANN Update: Launching RDAP; Sunsetting WHOIS Bit deceptive to editorialize it into something that sounds like something else much more interesting (removing contact info from domains) but isn't the case at all (they're just changing the method to access the same info).
- a-dub 2y agoit was fun when having a network solutions/internic contact handle was a badge of honor. the early internet was fun. whois was always a fun dimension. is there a canonical rdap client that will end up everywhere? one of the nice things about the early Internet was that there were canonical utilities that were everywhere.
- BizarreByte 2y agoMy favourite part of my .ca domains is that personal data is protected by default and I don't have to pay for it as an additional service. There's no need for people to know my information because I happen to own a domain.
- anonymousiam 2y agoI've had domains registered for over 30 years. I liked WHOIS because it provided a means to report abuse, which has gone from zero 30 years ago, to massive amounts of daily spam and network probes. I was not happy when ICANN began to allow privacy features in domain registration data, and I never made mine private. Most reputable sites still provide contact information via WHOIS. Hopefully RDAP will be a suitable replacement. I haven't tried it yet.
- Aachen 2y ago> I was not happy when ICANN began to allow privacy features in domain registration data, and I never made mine private The issue for me is that you can't simply publish contact information. It requires you to either publish a legal owner in full or nothing. I can't publish abuse@example.org as contact method (because, yes, I do want to receive an email if someone finds an issue with my services), I need to publish also a legal name, address, sometimes a phone number. Those things cost money to set up to be fake-but-legit (burner SIM card, rent a letterbox somewhere, get someone else to submit their name and ID card) whereas an email address is inconsequential to publish and I can rotate it monthly to avoid it becoming enrolled on too many spam lists So my sites never provided contact info via WHOIS when I could avoid it, yet I'd think my sites are as reputable as they come. You can always find a plain old email address via some link on the homepage and I have no spam filter (just email address rotation) so there is no chance that you're algorithmically filtered out, either
- LinuxBender 2y agoI can't publish abuse@example.org as contact method For what it's worth one can publish that email address in their DNS zone SOA record. Some people will figure it out. dig +short -t soa ycombinator.com ns-225.awsdns-28.com. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 86400 In the case of YC they defer to the AWS dns admins but you can set it to whatever you want unless your DNS provider does not let you. I've always run my own DNS so maybe that's less of an option for hosted DNS these days for all I know.
- 2y ago
- RVuRnvbM2e 2y agoStoked to see that ICANN reference implementations are now being written in rust! https://github.com/icann/icann-rdap https://github.com/icann/icann-rdap
- defanor 2y agoI like WHOIS with its extreme simplicity [0]. RDAP, on the other hand, works on top of a large and changing HTTP [1], and uses a JS-derived serialization format [2]. RDAP has advantages, such as optionally benefiting from TLS, the data being better structured and defined, but the cost in added complexity seems high. [0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3912 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3912 [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9082 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9082 [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9083 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9083
- roelschroeven 2y agoAs far as I can see, an RDAP request is a simple HTTP request, looking like http://example.com/rdap/ip/192.0.2.0 http://example.com/rdap/ip/192.0.2.0. Web servers still support HTTP/1.1 (or probably even HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/0.9). This is trivial to implement for clients. A simple HTTP request like that is about he simplest thing to do. You'll have to use curl or wget instead of netcat if you want to do it manually. No big deal. "A JS-derived serialization format" ... You mean JSON, which is about the lowest common denominator in Internet data exchange these days (and has been ever since we found out that XML was overly complex and JSON was much easier to use). You'll have to use something like jq instead of grep to extract information from the data manually. Or rather, you'll be able to use the powers of jq. Again, I don't really see the problem here.
- tankenmate 2y agoAlso, a large number of command line RDAP clients output plain text instead of JSON if you ask nicely.
- defanor 2y agoI did not mean that there is a problem with it, only that I appreciate the simplicity of WHOIS. While HTTP-with-JSON is perhaps the most practical solution these days. To clarify my point of view, an ad hoc HTTP client for this indeed should not be hard to write from scratch, demonstrating that there is not much complexity in that. The server part would be a little more tricky; still doable, but not as easily as for WHOIS, and in most cases a more sensible approach would be to use libraries (or a program like curl, in case of shell scripting or manual usage) for that, as you said. Likewise with JSON: though one can deal with it as with text, some added tools (a library or jq, depending on context) would be sensible to use. But then added dependencies lead to all kinds of issues in non-ideal conditions (e.g., when it is problematic to install those). But again, I am not saying that this should stop adoption of RDAP. On top of that, a complete and proper HTTP 1.1 implementation, server or client, would be quite large. And JSON, while indeed common and not particularly complicated, still has bits I find awkward (no sum types or a standard way to encode those, but has "objects", arbitrary-looking primitive types; no single standard for streaming, either), so working around it is not exactly pleasurable. Those add up to a difference between a trivial protocol and, well, a non-trivial one. I appreciate such trivial yet working and useful solutions, though the other kind is commonly useful as well.
- DeathArrow 2y agoI wonder which other old internet protocols fell into obsolescence. Finger is not officially retired but no one supports it. NNTP seems it had a similar fate.
- hughesey 2y agoThis was announced originally early last year. It removes the requirement for TLD and nTLD (not ccTLD) operators to have a WHOIS service available, but doesn't mandate they must shut them down. So far the sunsetting has had little effect with most TLDs still having their WHOIS services online. In reality, I think we'll see a period of time where many TLDs and nTLDs have both WHOIS and RDAP available. Additionally, since ccTLD's aren't governed by ICANN, many don't even have an RDAP service available. As such, there's going to be a mix of RDAP and WHOIS in use across the entire internet for some time to come. Disclosure: I run https://viewdns.info/ https://viewdns.info/ and have spent many an hour dealing with both WHOIS and RDAP parsing to make sure that our service returns consistent data (via our web interface and API) regardless of the protocol in use.
- jbverschoor 2y agoIt's funny to see that a lot of services are finally moving from a human-readable / plain text format towards structured protocols right at the point where we can finally have LLMS parse the unstructured protocols :-)
- francislavoie 2y agoBut isn't using LLM for that really expensive? Seems wasteful.
- genewitch 2y agoMy desktop GPU can run small models at 185 tokens a second. Larger models with speculative decoding: 50t/s. With a small, finetuned model as the draft model, no, this won't take much power at all to run inference. Training, sure, but that's buy once cry once. Whether this means it's a good idea, I don't think so, but the energy usage for parsing isn't why.
- smokel 2y agoA simple text parser would probably be 10,000,000 times as fast. So the statement that this won't take much power at all, is a bit of an overstatement.
- TheSaifurRahman 2y agoWorth mentioning are two open-source RDAP projects that are helping move the internet to a more structured system: DNSBelgium: https://github.com/DNSBelgium/rdap https://github.com/DNSBelgium/rdap RedDog: https://www.reddog.mx/home/2017/12/14/server-1.2.2-patch-released.html https://www.reddog.mx/home/2017/12/14/server-1.2.2-patch-rel...
- tankenmate 2y agohttps://github.com/openrdap/rdap https://github.com/openrdap/rdap Golang, single binary, cross platform, download and use.
- TheSaifurRahman 2y agoI’m assuming this is a client app, and not a server implementation.
- tankenmate 2y agoYes, it's a rdap client, command line
- tankenmate 2y agoJust noticed that someone is going and down voting any mention of any implementations of rdap clients for this news item. Very strange.
- TheSaifurRahman 2y agoWhois it ;)
- DonHopkins 2y agoI hope archive.org will host a WHOWAS service.
- londons_explore 2y agoWhy isn't this data simply available as a custom DNS record type? Seems far simpler than a whole custom protocol.
- stavros 2y agoHow would that work? Would your DNS server delegate that one field out to your registrar?
- Aachen 2y agoWhy does your registrar need to proxy this? How it could work is that you simply create owner IN TXT Max Mustermann email IN TXT mustermax@example.org Or some other class, so that keys can't clash (already exist), similar to how version.bind is partitioned into the chaos class
- stavros 2y agoBecause you can just lie much more easily than your registrar can.
- account42 2y agoThe domain owner already provides this information to the registrar and is responsible for keeping it up to date.
- stavros 2y agoI don't understand how this relates to how easy it is to lie to your DNS server.
- Aachen 2y agoIf they need legally valid information, they can subpoena the registrar. My phone number and home IP address also don't have a name, address, and email address attached; if someone wants to find who's behind a number, you need to have a reason which a judge will check (or perhaps a public prosecutor depending on if the operator is buddies with the police and it's a criminal offence). Would be kind of crazy if every website you visit gets your full details and can start sending advertisements or harass you for posting something they didn't like. Same for a domain name And that's besides the point that the registrar doesn't check this information. If you wanted to lie, they're not stopping you from getting false info into whois (or any alternative) If it needs to be authentic, then DNS does have signatures nowadays, or a delegation as iirc you mentioned already. I just don't know why it should be more authentic than the unverified information that's currently in whois
- webprofusion 2y agoThe main benefit of whois and RDAP is to see which registrar handles a domain and when there were recent changes or upcoming expiry etc. RDAP is also useful to see who operates an IP address etc. I've been using RDAP for a few years but the service has been spotty, hopefully that improves now.
- zombot 2y agoGood bye, then, whois. I can remember times when you could still see the names and addresses of registrants in whois records. That was before abuse and fraud became everyday occurrences in today's internet. I miss the times when we could still believe in basic human decency.
- mike503 2y agoI have no doubt some of the benefits are definitely to be able to resell or access that data once again. I literally just told someone yesterday “don’t pay for domain privacy, any registrar worth a damn will include it anymore”
- roelschroeven 2y agoAre existing whois-clients going to be updated to support RDAP next to Whois, or will we have to use different clients?
- dgacmu 2y agordap is nice when it's available. cargo install icann-rdap-cli rdap -O json ycombinator.com| jq .nameservers (or brew install, etc., depending on your os and tooling). The jq formatted output is a little more verbose than the whois one, but three cheers for a well-specified machine-parsable format. (and rdap has a pretty-printed format output also)
- qb_dp 2y agothis really looks like a regression. In the sense that RDAP could be cheated
- qb_dp 2y agolooks bad. I see a loss in trust there
- selfhoster 2y agoGlad I read this, I wasn't aware whois was being sunsetted. Now I have to change one of my critical services to do rdap. Wow. How can you sunset the main service that is the backbone of the internet?
- Pxtl 2y agoFrom what I've seen most domain servers don't really implement the history components of RDAP, which is a shame - being able to see if a domain ownership lapsed or was transferred historically would be great for being able to determine if somebody's email address is still trustworthy or has been stolen by a domain transfer.
- einpoklum 2y agoI just did an apt cache search rdap on a Debian (well, Devuan) system, and found nothing. Also could not find that phrase in the name of any executable in /usr/bin or /usr/sbin . :-(
- mdrzn 2y agoThe linked page (https://lookup.icann.org/en https://lookup.icann.org/en) seems to work only for .com domains? "No registry RDAP server was identified for this domain. Attempting lookup using WHOIS service." "Failed to perform lookup using WHOIS service: TLD_NOT_SUPPORTED."
- thayne 2y agoNot just .com, it also works for .org, .app, .dev, etc. As suggested by another comment, it looks like not all ccTLDs support RDAP. For example, .io does not.
- than 2y agoMissed opportunity to call the successor `whodat`
- llacb47 2y agoIt doesn't work with yandex.kz. Someone call Kazakhstan. > No registry RDAP server was identified for this domain. Attempting lookup using WHOIS service. > Failed to perform lookup using WHOIS service: TLD_NOT_SUPPORTED.
- tgtweak 2y agoThe fact most WHOIS is private these days makes it more or less useless. I think rdap with a request/response authentication on the requestor but that the provider can't mask would be more practical. Also requiring that registrars keep a history of changes from the time the domain was first registered would be very helpful vs relying on 3rd parties that cache the data over time (and charge for it) like domaintools. Unlikely that this is in the protocol but I think it would better the entire ecosystem.
- attah_ 2y agoSo... WHOIS is now JSON over HTTP. I guess that's reasonable. But this warrants the sample application to need a gazillion crates why exactly?
- threePointFive 2y agoMy first question when reading this was how is it going to affect the `whois` CLI tool, which I use at least weekly for both IPs and Domains. I even started trying to find source code before getting pulled away. Luckily I had an excuse to use it today and noticed that an RDAP endpoint was already being queried for the information. Good to know I won't have to change any habits!
- Sophira 2y agoMy main use for WHOIS currently is actually not for domain names. I use it for querying IP addresses on whois.arin.net. Does anyone know how this news will impact that particular service, if at all?