Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by blep_ 1175 days ago
I'm bored, let's try it:

I chose three domains, and for each of them, did a whois query from a local terminal then looked them up on Namecheap. All three are domains I can imagine someone registering (i.e. not just keyboard mashing).

They have these SHA1 hashes (echo -n '$domain $salt', all salts are the same string):

3ded27709bfcbba44ce893262f531c595ee82f72

78eb52058b915fde23df7289250146e4a6622a9e*

e5db7a02eec8ce2b351a5955d84cc6daa561a41f*

These three I did not whois first, and only looked up on Namecheap:

8d59b003b9261bbb7f8268d8f56fbebb1574688f

68a87269d6011110c43ec6bb928ca008de4fcb6e

fa636723fb66d2fb4e93b317f185eb058149e53b*

I will check them again sometime tomorrow and report back (and reveal the domains then).

(I have four domains registered with Namecheap, no other allegiances of any sort. I was not logged in while testing this.)

* Edit: Well, this is embarrassing. I posted this, then closed the Termux session on my phone where I was hashing them... without saving the hashes. Apparently that doesn't write to .bash_history. I recovered three of them from memory by brute forcing words I'd used against a list of TLDs. I'll update again if I remember any of the others.

If this sounds incredibly suspicious to you given the entire point of this comment, I don't blame you. I encourage people to try the same experiment on their own anyway, especially sometime when this isn't in the news.

Archive link of this comment from before I edited it: https://web.archive.org/web/20230329003044/https://news.ycom...

1 comments

3ded27709bfcbba44ce893262f531c595ee82f72 ionicbutts.net

8d59b003b9261bbb7f8268d8f56fbebb1574688f another.domains

68a87269d6011110c43ec6bb928ca008de4fcb6e bleppr.com

Salt was "monosodium glutamate". One of the ones I forgot was "quadrangular" or a similar word, but I couldn't find it by brute force.

As of right now, none of these are registered. I did kind of screw this up, might be good to try again another time and against more registrars (and maybe not post about it in advance in a thread where the CEO is known to be watching). But currently I don't see any evidence that this is happening, at least not with Namecheap and not for every domain.