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Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majo
by foresto 5mo ago
Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majority of its useful namespace to squatters.
Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoFrom TFA: Will WHOIS requests leak my address? Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
- lftl 5mo agoHrmm... I just tried this from my personal .us domain I've had for 23 years and it shows all my info.
- foresto 5mo agoThat was clearly not true for domains directly under .us when I last read their rules, roughly a year ago. I suppose it might be true for .city.state.us subdomains, but those fail my first criterion (they're not short), and are themselves a privacy hazard since they substantially narrow the search space for personal info about the domain owner. So it doesn't refute my criticism.
- xahrepap 5mo agoThis is definitely not true for general .us domains. I registered one a year or two ago. And assuming my normal default Whois privacy was being applied (I clicked through too fast. Wasn’t paying attention) I noticed my mistake after the spam bots started hitting me up for their web design products.
- anonu 5mo agoThere's almost no real privacy online in the US. When I search for my name my phone number and almost every address I've ever lived at it is publicly retrievable - on multiple sites. Even with a private WHOIS I get spam from various companies via my registrar asking to speak to me about making a website.
- ZeWaka 5mo agoIt's worth sitting down for an hour and filing a bunch of information redaction requests.
- EduardoBautista 5mo agoThere are services that will submit this information to hundreds of sites for you. I used incogni and it seemed to have a positive result. https://incogni.com/ https://incogni.com/
- edot 5mo agoMight help with phone numbers, but addresses are trivial to find and cannot be removed, if you own property in the United States. Every county publishes property records, searchable by name. Unless you own your house with an LLC, if someone knows or can guess the state you live in, they can 1) search on the property records website of the top 10 counties by population, and if that fails 2) expand to searching other counties until you pop up. Not sure how to mitigate this, other than the LLC method.
- ZeWaka 5mo ago
- yieldcrv 5mo agoyou can literally write anything in the whois though registrars have forwarded me ICANN notices about having info verification for 10 years and nothing happened nothingburger
- foresto 5mo agoGood luck in your gamble.
- righthand 5mo agoICE getting 4th jobs enforcing WHOIS registration data soon.
- reaperducer 5mo agoyou can literally write anything in the whois though Can confirm. I have a domain that's had outdated whois information since 2006. Nobody cares. Even when it was up to date, it never got any spam, I suspect because the contact information was in a country that wasn't valuable to spammers.
- majorchord 5mo ago"you can literally drive as fast as you want on the highway"
- ranger_danger 5mo ago> you can literally write anything in the whois though It's still fraud though. And there are multiple ways that might trigger an investigation into the validity of your contact info, such as abuse reports, court cases or failing to renew. Some people with axes to grind have been known to get domains of people they don't like taken down just by complaining to the registrar.
- marysol5 5mo agoI have a .EU domain, of which I'm no longer eligible thanks to Brexit, but the WHOIS is just some junk to make it "valid".
- 5mo ago
- NetMageSCW 5mo agoYes, I have a 3 letter .us domain that I’ve had for a while. Hard to get a three letter domain in any other popular TLD.
- ranger_danger 5mo agoThere are still many thousands of three-letter domains for (third-party) sale on .com/net/org though. Sedo.com lists a handful of .net domains that are under $100. Most are more than that though.
- foresto 5mo ago> for (third-party) sale Many of us find it unethical to give money to scalpers. > a handful of .net domains that are under $100 And this is why.
- coxley 5mo agoYeah... my .com renewal lapsed due to an expired credit card, and it was snatched before I realized it. They've always wanted $2k for it. Even if I was OK paying in principle, that's too much for a personal blog that gets one post every 4 years.
- marysol5 5mo agoI had a domain that I was just using for e-mail, just to catch everything and not link directly to me. Then lent the A record to host an archive of something, which got linked around a load of places. So had "SEO Value" suddenly. Did the same, the renewal failed because the card had expired, and now squatters have been sat on it, probably getting all my spam and resetting my credentials on random websites for the last 10 years.
- account42 5mo agoLesson for everyone else reading this is to not let your domains lapese. You can also pay ahead (up to 10 years for most registries) so there really is no excuse - and that tends to provide some protection from price hikes as well, or at least give you more time to react.
- KPGv2 5mo agoPeople running WHOIS against kylesmith.com might discover that it's owned by someone named Kyle Smith. I'll actually offer my take: domain names under the US TLD are a shared, public good, and no one should be allowed to anonymously own a shared, public good.