Re: [registrars] ALERT: ProspectMiner

["Tim Ruiz" <tim@godaddy.com>]

Rick,

We've been keeping a closer eye on who's mining our data as well. Another
interesting thing we've found is that it appears SnapNames has been at it.
We found several hundred of their IPs doing low volume queries, evidently
trying to fly under our radar.

When I asked about it I was told that they are "sampling" our data for use
in the Analyst Edition of their State of the Domain Report. I had been
wondering how they were going to get the data they needed to do the renewal
rate analysis. But think about that. Registrars are allowed to charge up to
$10,000 a year for bulk acces to their whois data. SnapNames is going to
skirt around that by mining our data and then charge me $6000 to $7500 a
year for the report? Something's wrong with that picture.

Tim

 -------- Original Message --------
   Subject: [registrars] ALERT: ProspectMiner
   From: Rick Wesson <wessorh@ar.com>
   Date: Tue, April 2, 2002 10:56 pm
   To: Registrars List <Registrars@dnso.org>


   Registrars:

   Your whois is being mined, well you probably already knew that. If you
   happen to have a web interface that allows someone to browse whois via
   the web, a company named update.com probably knows how to mine your
   whois.

   A snipit from their marketing lit...

   You enter a few example companies typifying your market, and
   update.prospectminer searches across the World Wide Web identifying
   all the companies within your specified market.

   update.prospectminer then goes to thousands of "live" online web
   sources extracting key sales intelligence including today´s
   decision-makers and influencers. Only the freshest information is
   delivered.

   You can also use the power of update.prospectminer to update your
   customer database, or other sources such as inbound web leads or
   prospects from marketing events.

   If you want to see more check out http://www.update.com and
   http://www.update.com/products/pm_en.html

   I just filteres several websites mining our whois and placed some
   calls one of which the network security guy found that his marketing
   department had just started running the application called
   ProspectMiner and that what was generating the queries.

   I'm going to place some calls to the update.com folks and explain that
   what theyare doing violates the AUP on just about every whois server
   out there.

   best,

   -rick