Comment by jeroenhd
2 years ago
Domain whois is useless, but IP whois is at least kind of useful to check before blanket banning entire IP ranges.
2 years ago
Domain whois is useless, but IP whois is at least kind of useful to check before blanket banning entire IP ranges.
Interestingly, 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.
Some 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.
It'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.
Depends what endpoint you hit, the look up data will likely be sold regardless.
whois/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.