WHOIS Tells All

This most often comes up when someone is suffering content theft. Invariably, someone will see their hard written prose on some scammy person’s site, and want it taken down. This is, sadly, harder to do than we’d like. Basically you have to find the site owner, contact them, ask them to take the stuff down, hope they do it, and when they don’t, go up to their webhost. I’m not going to get into the copyright issue, and just assume you know not to attack someone over links to your site (not illegal), rss feeds pulling excerpts from your site (ditto), or quotes (really?). If you don’t know what is and isn’t copyright/content theft, then you’re not ready for this yet.

Assuming you are, how do we do find out who owns a site?

First, remember that when you see “Powered by WordPress” in a footer of a site, it is not, in fact, hosted by WordPress. This site says “Powered by WordPress” but it’s hosted by Liquidweb. Now if you see “Blog at WordPress.com”, then yes, it’s hosted by WordPress, and you can easily report the site. The same is true of Blogger, who also has a way to report copyright theft. Many of these ‘hive’ hosts do that.

LiquidWeb doesn’t, though. So, pretending for a moment that I’m a dirty thief, how do you find out who I am, my email, and get your content removed? And when I don’t answer, where do you go next?

Start With WHOIS

Your first tool is called ‘WHOIS’ and does exactly what it sounds like. It tells you ‘who is that.’ Network Solutions has a free whois lookup tool and if you were to search for Halfelf.org you’d get the following:

Registrant ID:bf39ab1b08df1394
Registrant Name:WhoisGuard Protected
Registrant Organization:WhoisGuard
Registrant Street1:11400 W. Olympic Blvd. Suite 200
Registrant City:Los Angeles
Registrant State/Province:CA
Registrant Postal Code:90064
Registrant Country:US
Registrant Phone:+1.6613102107
Registrant FAX:+1.6613102107
Registrant Email:28a9f8aa493149b1a58ff9b4c51e0bcd.protect@whoisguard.com

It goes on and on, but you may notice none of that is actually … me. That’s because I pay a wee bit extra a year for my host to hide my personal information via whoisguard. I do it becuase I had some idiot track me down to call me about how I wasn’t updating my website enough (a different site), and I now have a restraining order against him.(This is a true story, and yes, he called my house. I no longer have that number for a reason, and frankly if you even think about doing that to someone, get a grip! It’s harassment. For the full story, buy me a drink.) Now that said, the last line I listed is Registrant Email and that email actually works! It’s a real email that will forward messages to me.

So step one with these things is email that address and hope the person answers. But when a week goes by with no reply, what next? Sadly, some people never check those emails, or they think you are spam, and ignore it. Thankfully, WHOIS will still save you! Scroll down to the name server entries!

Your nameservers are what translate your domain to the server IP address, and, as a rule, they have to point to where your server really lives. Generally speaking, a nameserver will give away either the registrar (i.e. who you registered your domain with) or the webhost (who you host with).

Mine are:

Name Server:NS1.IPSTENU.ORG
Name Server:NS2.IPSTENU.ORG

Doesn’t really help, does it? I mean, that just says ‘ipstenu hosts ipstenu!’ Here’s what I used to have:

Name Server:NS1.LIQUIDWEB.COM
Name Server:NS2.LIQUIDWEB.COM

That would have been much more explanatory. Thankfully you can use Who Is Hosting This? and run a search for any domain (like http://www.whoishostingthis.com/halfelf.org), even if they have their own name server, and you get this:

Well thank goodness we have some information! Look up LiquidWeb, and you can contact them. “Hey, this evil Half Elf is stealing my stuff!”

I prefer Who Is Hosting This to ‘Who Hosts’ becuase if you look me up on the latter, you get this:

Not useful (though accurate). If you keep getting nested domains, you have to keep digging until you find the end of the rabbit hole.

Really the best thing is always going to be whois, and once you get used to looking at it, it’s really not that scary. At the same time, I strongly suggest people invest in Whois Guard, or some other ‘protection’ to stop annoying people from getting their personal information. You don’t need the hassle of being listed in a phonebook.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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