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Wow. 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 peop

Wow. 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 ago
  Although 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 ago
I 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 ago
  So 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.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Yeah, as I said in most way things are better now than they were in the rose-tinted memories of the late 90's and early 2000's. Now if you want to say something on the internet, you can open up a Substack, or a Bluesky, or a Medium, or you can find a niche Subreddit. You don't need to know anything very technical, and that's a good thing. I'll acknowledge that the old web was ugly, even at the time. I guess I just liked how much of it was, for lack of a better word, "custom". Most people were pretty bad at HTML, common web standards really hadn't caught out outside of "make it work in Internet Explorer", and CSS really hadn't caught on, so people glued together websites the best that they could. Most websites looked pretty bad, but they were genuine. They didn't feel like some corporation built them, they felt like they were made by actual humans, and a lot of the time, actual children. I was one of those children. I posted about this a week ago [1], but my first foray into programming was making crappy websites. It felt cool to me that a nine year old could make and publish a website, just like the grownups could. I didn't know anything about style so I had bright green backgrounds and used marquee tags and blink tags and I believe I had a midi of the X-files theme song playing in the background. I guess it's the same sentimentality that I have when I look at a child's terrible drawing or reading one of my old terrible essays I wrote when I was eleven years old that my mom kept around. They're bad, they're embarrassing, but they're also kind of charming. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43297104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43297104
    - pseudalopex 2y ago
      > Yeah, as I said in most way things are better now than they were in the rose-tinted memories of the late 90's and early 2000's. Now if you want to say something on the internet, you can open up a Substack, or a Bluesky, or a Medium, or you can find a niche Subreddit. You don't need to know anything very technical, and that's a good thing. By 1999 you could create a LiveJournal or find a niche forum through Google. You didn't need to know anything very technical.
      - tombert 2y ago
        You could, Xanga as well, but it was still less connected. People complain about recommendation systems on YouTube and Facebook and Reddit, but one thing that they do well is give people more reach that they probably wouldn't have gotten before. I've found so many interesting YouTube videos from people that I haven't ever heard of, just because of YouTube recommending them to me. Stuff like that didn't really exist for quite awhile; for a long time the best you had was aggregator sites like ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com or similar sites.
- _ink_ 2y ago
  Less gate keepey? Big Tech is literally the gatekeeper. Want to see a story without account? Too bad. What to see what events are going on without Facebook account? Too bad. Want to search discord or twitter. Too bad. Big Tech sucks in all user content and then hides it behind paywalls.
  - graemep 2y ago
    This was exactly my reaction. I think a lot of people fail to appreciate that the alternative to big tech taking over was not keeping things exactly the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago, but developing in a different direction. It was the direction in which people expected things to develop: decentralised and democratised. There was a lot of optimism about empowering individuals.
- Aachen 2y ago
  > I think in most ways it's better, it makes the web more approachable to less technical users There's a big gap between looking up someone's contact info using a protocol that many tools and websites implement (anyone can open www.who.is from search results) and the second example of needing an understanding of HTML to make a webpage. I don't think it's gatekeepey to be able to email the human behind a given website, whereas the current internet is full of walled gardens, gatekeepers, and faceless/supportless services (thinking of Discord, Cloudflare, and Google as respective examples) We can have both human-run services and WYSIWYG website builders on the internet concurrently
ocdtrekkie 2y ago
A big part of that is because GDPR basically murdered Whois. It hasn't been useful for many of those last ten years.
icameron 2y ago
And after you emailed them you could finger their address and see when they last checked their email, and their unread message count usually.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  I had no idea this was a thing for email... Wow.
  - layer8 2y ago
    Only for Unix accounts.
  - sedatk 2y ago
    Not just that. People had ".plan" files that could be viewed with finger, and they would post updates there. I specifically remember John Carmack sharing daily news and updates on his account. It was the first form of "Twitter" back in the 90's.
dkh 2y ago
I sometimes use whois multiple times in a day lol. Should it exist? Maybe not, probably not, but that doesn't stop me from using it when I want to try to do some sleuthing. Most of the time though it doesn't work because they have privacy enabled. I did get screwed once with certain TLDs not being able to enable privacy. I had registered a .at domain to use with a video site I had that at the time was reasonably popular and going viral fairly regularly. I hadn't realized beforehand that privacy wasn't possible, but once I learned, I didn't love it, but I wasn't sure if it would matter that much. I was wrong. I was getting calls and emails regularly from random people on the internet who found our content on reddit or whatever and decided to do some sleuthing
- genewitch 2y ago
  How do you hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time?
  - stavros 2y ago
    Well, they did say it probably shouldn't exist. Also, I'm just blown away by how much people here don't consider having fake info as an option.
    - Aachen 2y ago
      That works great until the TLD decides you need to hop through extended verification and fork over an identity card and a recent (3 months) invoice showing the address you signed up with 12 years ago, freezing your domain such that you can't update the information to be your current address even if you wanted to share that with the world (because privacy doesn't exist and GDPR doesn't apply in French-run/France-headquartered AFNIC). There's no time to dispute it or go back and forth: the initial email already comes with the announcement that your domain will go dark if they haven't processed your response after 14 days. Oh yeah, and you need to submit this via plain text email. If you send a link to the pdf scan, so that you can remove it after they've viewed it, that gets rejected (but it will be downloaded by an overseas system, run in the USA, within seconds of sending it), they'll respond that it specifically needs to be an attachment so that it will linger in their inbox forever If you use fake info in relation to WHOIS data, you also need to be prepared to forge an identity document (a pretty bad felony in most countries per my understanding) That said, on most forms I enter fake info because they they have no legitimate use for it anyway and they also can't compare it against anything. Buying a game or event ticket needs my address? For what, linking my purchase to a profile they're building? Nah, fake address it is
bdcravens 2y ago
I use it primarily to lookup info on an IP address.
xeckr 2y ago
My only nitpick is that humans still own domains, but I agree with the overall sentiment and thank you for sharing this perspective. It is fascinating to consider how our experience with the internet is changing over time. Remember phreaking? Having been born in the Netscape era, I certainly don't, but I can imagine that losing the ability to pull that trick off must have felt like a loss to those who were initiated in the art. Thankfully the trend appears to be that new technologies and thus new 1337 h4x are still forthcoming.
0x6c6f6c 2y ago
On the other hand, I did a WHOIS days ago to check up on a potential scam site my partner landed on while working on an e-commerce platform. I hope some alternative exists, people using Let's Encrypt leaves an entry in the transparency log but people don't necessarily need to use that. I haven't researched the alternatives to WHOIS yet but now I'll have to.
- areyourllySorry 2y ago
  did you find anything useful?
flowerthoughts 2y ago
I did a Whois last week to prove to my previous registrar that I'm no longer with them, and that the invoice they sent was invalid. Unexpected use-case, but useful.

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 ago
Although 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 ago

I 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 ago
So 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.
- tombert 2y ago
  Yeah, as I said in most way things are better now than they were in the rose-tinted memories of the late 90's and early 2000's. Now if you want to say something on the internet, you can open up a Substack, or a Bluesky, or a Medium, or you can find a niche Subreddit. You don't need to know anything very technical, and that's a good thing. I'll acknowledge that the old web was ugly, even at the time. I guess I just liked how much of it was, for lack of a better word, "custom". Most people were pretty bad at HTML, common web standards really hadn't caught out outside of "make it work in Internet Explorer", and CSS really hadn't caught on, so people glued together websites the best that they could. Most websites looked pretty bad, but they were genuine. They didn't feel like some corporation built them, they felt like they were made by actual humans, and a lot of the time, actual children. I was one of those children. I posted about this a week ago [1], but my first foray into programming was making crappy websites. It felt cool to me that a nine year old could make and publish a website, just like the grownups could. I didn't know anything about style so I had bright green backgrounds and used marquee tags and blink tags and I believe I had a midi of the X-files theme song playing in the background. I guess it's the same sentimentality that I have when I look at a child's terrible drawing or reading one of my old terrible essays I wrote when I was eleven years old that my mom kept around. They're bad, they're embarrassing, but they're also kind of charming. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43297104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43297104
  - pseudalopex 2y ago
    > Yeah, as I said in most way things are better now than they were in the rose-tinted memories of the late 90's and early 2000's. Now if you want to say something on the internet, you can open up a Substack, or a Bluesky, or a Medium, or you can find a niche Subreddit. You don't need to know anything very technical, and that's a good thing. By 1999 you could create a LiveJournal or find a niche forum through Google. You didn't need to know anything very technical.
    - tombert 2y ago
      You could, Xanga as well, but it was still less connected. People complain about recommendation systems on YouTube and Facebook and Reddit, but one thing that they do well is give people more reach that they probably wouldn't have gotten before. I've found so many interesting YouTube videos from people that I haven't ever heard of, just because of YouTube recommending them to me. Stuff like that didn't really exist for quite awhile; for a long time the best you had was aggregator sites like ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com or similar sites.
_ink_ 2y ago
Less gate keepey? Big Tech is literally the gatekeeper. Want to see a story without account? Too bad. What to see what events are going on without Facebook account? Too bad. Want to search discord or twitter. Too bad. Big Tech sucks in all user content and then hides it behind paywalls.
- graemep 2y ago
  This was exactly my reaction. I think a lot of people fail to appreciate that the alternative to big tech taking over was not keeping things exactly the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago, but developing in a different direction. It was the direction in which people expected things to develop: decentralised and democratised. There was a lot of optimism about empowering individuals.
Aachen 2y ago
> I think in most ways it's better, it makes the web more approachable to less technical users There's a big gap between looking up someone's contact info using a protocol that many tools and websites implement (anyone can open www.who.is from search results) and the second example of needing an understanding of HTML to make a webpage. I don't think it's gatekeepey to be able to email the human behind a given website, whereas the current internet is full of walled gardens, gatekeepers, and faceless/supportless services (thinking of Discord, Cloudflare, and Google as respective examples) We can have both human-run services and WYSIWYG website builders on the internet concurrently

ocdtrekkie 2y ago

A big part of that is because GDPR basically murdered Whois. It hasn't been useful for many of those last ten years.

icameron 2y ago

And after you emailed them you could finger their address and see when they last checked their email, and their unread message count usually.

giancarlostoro 2y ago
I had no idea this was a thing for email... Wow.
- layer8 2y ago
  Only for Unix accounts.
- sedatk 2y ago
  Not just that. People had ".plan" files that could be viewed with finger, and they would post updates there. I specifically remember John Carmack sharing daily news and updates on his account. It was the first form of "Twitter" back in the 90's.

dkh 2y ago

I sometimes use whois multiple times in a day lol. Should it exist? Maybe not, probably not, but that doesn't stop me from using it when I want to try to do some sleuthing. Most of the time though it doesn't work because they have privacy enabled. I did get screwed once with certain TLDs not being able to enable privacy. I had registered a .at domain to use with a video site I had that at the time was reasonably popular and going viral fairly regularly. I hadn't realized beforehand that privacy wasn't possible, but once I learned, I didn't love it, but I wasn't sure if it would matter that much. I was wrong. I was getting calls and emails regularly from random people on the internet who found our content on reddit or whatever and decided to do some sleuthing

genewitch 2y ago
How do you hold both of those ideas in your head at the same time?
- stavros 2y ago
  Well, they did say it probably shouldn't exist. Also, I'm just blown away by how much people here don't consider having fake info as an option.
  - Aachen 2y ago
    That works great until the TLD decides you need to hop through extended verification and fork over an identity card and a recent (3 months) invoice showing the address you signed up with 12 years ago, freezing your domain such that you can't update the information to be your current address even if you wanted to share that with the world (because privacy doesn't exist and GDPR doesn't apply in French-run/France-headquartered AFNIC). There's no time to dispute it or go back and forth: the initial email already comes with the announcement that your domain will go dark if they haven't processed your response after 14 days. Oh yeah, and you need to submit this via plain text email. If you send a link to the pdf scan, so that you can remove it after they've viewed it, that gets rejected (but it will be downloaded by an overseas system, run in the USA, within seconds of sending it), they'll respond that it specifically needs to be an attachment so that it will linger in their inbox forever If you use fake info in relation to WHOIS data, you also need to be prepared to forge an identity document (a pretty bad felony in most countries per my understanding) That said, on most forms I enter fake info because they they have no legitimate use for it anyway and they also can't compare it against anything. Buying a game or event ticket needs my address? For what, linking my purchase to a profile they're building? Nah, fake address it is

bdcravens 2y ago

I use it primarily to lookup info on an IP address.

xeckr 2y ago

My only nitpick is that humans still own domains, but I agree with the overall sentiment and thank you for sharing this perspective. It is fascinating to consider how our experience with the internet is changing over time. Remember phreaking? Having been born in the Netscape era, I certainly don't, but I can imagine that losing the ability to pull that trick off must have felt like a loss to those who were initiated in the art. Thankfully the trend appears to be that new technologies and thus new 1337 h4x are still forthcoming.

0x6c6f6c 2y ago

On the other hand, I did a WHOIS days ago to check up on a potential scam site my partner landed on while working on an e-commerce platform. I hope some alternative exists, people using Let's Encrypt leaves an entry in the transparency log but people don't necessarily need to use that. I haven't researched the alternatives to WHOIS yet but now I'll have to.

areyourllySorry 2y ago
did you find anything useful?

flowerthoughts 2y ago

I did a Whois last week to prove to my previous registrar that I'm no longer with them, and that the invoice they sent was invalid. Unexpected use-case, but useful.