Today we’ve had further proof that The Register, aka el reg, is sliding further down the slippery slope into the toilet. Kieren McCarthy has posted a scaremongering article claiming that the .org top level domain has disappeared down a nice big black hole, due to incompetence by the new .org owner, the Public Interest Registry. He bases this article apparently solely on the evidence of a blog entry by Simon Perry, whoever they are :)

Now, a problem with this “breaking news” is that doing a whois lookup on a .org domain on the whois.crsnic.net server has been ‘broken’ since VeriSign completed the handover and transition to PIR. This is actually by design, and doing a whois on the crsnic.net server actually tells you this!

$ whois randomdomain.org

Whois Server Version 1.3

Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.

No match for "RANDOMDOMAIN.ORG".

>>> Last update of whois database: Mon, 19 May 2003 06:05:55 EDT <<<

[standard VeriSign legal blag snippage]

The Registry database contains ONLY .COM, .NET, .EDU domains and
Registrars.

That’s the critical bit. VeriSign, who manage that server, don’t store whois info for .org anymore, PIR do! And it’s been this way since January! Any decent whois client will have been updated by now — if you’re running Debian, the whois included with the sarge release is up-to-date:

$ whois randomdomain.org

Found referral to whois.opensrs.net.

Registrant:
[snip]

Domain name: RANDOMDOMAIN.ORG

[snip]

Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 01-Mar-2003.
Record expires on 31-Mar-2004.
Record Created on 31-Mar-2001.

Incidentally, whois lookups, while handy for finding out the details of a domain, tend to be incidental if the actual nameserver lookup mechanisms are still operational, which they are, and always have been. On the same system where I can’t get a result on a whois of randomdomain.org, the host lookup works just dandy. Birrof research next time wouldn’t go amiss, gents.