IRD's swoop wasted effort

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

The IRD might have saved itself the trouble of requesting a CD-Rom of web addresses from New Zealand registry Domainz by simply looking on the net.

Internet industry sources confirm that anyone with the technical knowledge could download the entire registry of .nz domain names in around 20 minutes. But there is an even easier option (at New Zealand Internet Connected Organisations website).

Unlike the Domainz site, which limits queries to one specified web address at a time, this site delivers brief details on multiple sites with a simple keyword search.

Not only would this information be useful for the Inland Revenue in investigating non-compliant web operations, but it also enables businesses to check on the internet plans of their competitors.

For example, when the Business Herald visited the site it found that entering the keyword "Carter Holt Harvey" promptly yielded 30 registrations, including two as-yet-unused placeholders. One is intriguingly named www.projectcrimson.co.nz, while www.mychh.co.nz, could be the future home of an e-procurement system, perhaps.

Entering the name "Telecom" was even more fruitful, yielding 277 sites. While the site shows you only the first 200 results of any query, carefully altering the search criteria may deliver the portion.

Netsite is the creation of Mark Davies, network manager of the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences at Victoria University. He said an interest in statistics prompted him to start it in 1993.

The lists are automatically generated monthly by interrogating the "authoritative nameservers" that are maintained by internet service providers and universities to route web requests to the correct server and then processing the results.

Mr Davies deliberately limited searches to 200 listings to stop people downloading the whole registry.


Links


New Zealand Internet Connected Organisations

Domainz