Published Sunday, September 21, 1997, in the San Jose Mercury News
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How to uncover the owner of a Web site
Domain-name database available


By Margot Williams
Washington Post

WASHINGTONTALK about taking a page from someone's success:

In recent weeks, two attempts to hijack the home page of the InterNIC --
the official registry of World Wide Web sites -- have come to light.

One pirate rerouted Web traffic to his own site in protest of
InterNIC-designated registry service Network Solutions Inc.'s exclusive
right to register domain names that end in .com, .org and .net.

The other simply took an address that mimicked InterNIC's, changing only
the .net to .com, and offered registration at an inflated price to
prospective domain name buyers who had confused their www.internic's.

These raids against the InterNIC site targeted the Herndon, Va.-based
Network Solution's pot of gold-revenue from registration fees ($100 for the
initial two years and $50 annual renewals) for a piece of virtual real
estate.

However, the impostors ignored other treasures on the InterNIC site,
including directories, databases and education services that provide
valuable information about the Internet to its users. If you've ever
wondered who owns a Web site or wanted to try to reach the responsible
person or organization, this is the place to find out.

The InterNIC's domain name registration database is searchable via the
WHOIS Web gateway (ds.internic.net/wp/whois.html).

Entering a domain name such as whitehouse.gov or whitehouse.com will
retrieve the registry's point-of-contact information, including names,
address and telephone numbers. You also can search the official database of
U.S. military sites (.mil) for similar information.

Be aware that the answers you find here come from the registrants and may
be outdated or even incorrect. For example, when news of the Heaven's Gate
>>mass<< >>suicide<< broke in March, I looked here to find out who had
registered the >>cult<<'s Higher Source Web site. Further checking revealed
that the names probably were faked and the telephone numbers rang to pay
phones. If you look now, you'll find an entry created after the event that
lists David Koresh, Jim Jones and Jack Kevorkian as contacts. Very funny.

Another tool is the WebFinder search form
(www.internic.net/ds/webfinder/WebFinder.html ), which allows you to locate
Web pages associated with organizations from a database of more than 1.6
million entries. Enter the word "university" and the clue "maryland" to
retrieve a clickable list of university sites around the state.

A recent addition to the InterNIC site is the Web DNS Look Up
(ds1.internic.net/cool/dns.html ). If you've ever been frustrated by the
error message "failed DNS lookup," the information in this database may
help.

The DNS (domain name system) translates the uniform resource locater (URL)
-- say, www.washingtonpost.com -- into its real Internet Protocol (IP)
address, which is a series of numbers like this: 208.134.241.218 .

If your provider's DNS server isn't working or if the URL isn't in there
yet, an error message will pop up and you won't get into the site. If you
type in the IP address instead, you will get in -- well, unless some other
problem caused the error.

You can use Web DNS Look Up to find a URL's valid IP addresses or do the
reverse to find the Web address from a mysterious series of numbers.

Along with the directory databases, the InterNIC -- which is is a
cooperative activity of the National Science Foundation, AT&T Corp. and
Network Solutions -- offers both a new guide to U.S. universities on the
Internet and the InterNIC Academic Guide to the Internet, which compiles
and describes types of Internet resources available in topical (mostly
science-oriented) areas and includes users' ratings of the featured sites.

Among the other educational services available are the monthly electronic
newsletter InterNIC News, the "15 Minute Series" of Internet training
materials and a central repository of documents about the Internet's
technical underpinnings.

For keeping up with what's new on the Internet, there's nothing better than
the Net-Happenings mailing list, now available here, too. Last Monday,
there were 54 postings I might have received in e-mail, but I prefer to
browse through the daily and archived postings on the Web.

And for a guide to the best of the Web, check out the weekly Scout Report,
via e-mail or on the Web at the InterNIC. The Scout experts select and
annotate each resource; there's always something new and useful. The Scout
Toolkit gives you descriptions and pointers to software, bookmarks, search
tools and reference guides with the goal of making the Internet easier to
use.

Is there a phone book for the whole wide Internet? Not yet, but when one is
invented, I'll expect to find it at the InterNIC. And I don't mean
www.internic.com.



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