At around a similar time-frame, maybe a bit earlier.. the domain registrars were booming because people wanted their own domains. It was the pre-consolidation era before all those little sites died off one by one and went to places like geocities, livejournal, myspace, fb and related.
So the registrars all had web-based tools to do record lookups on contact info, business reg against domains and so, the basic whois records. Plus you could check to see if a domain was available, with the option of hosting it with them.. which they obviously wanted as a followup & ongoing piece of business. Well some anons found that this registrar was quietly registering domains that didn't exist before they were queried.. so amazing, you could then buy it from them!
All algorithmic of course.. so I wouldn't be at all surprised if people wrote some scripts which iteratively try to query all possible 3 letter domains, then all 4 letter domains, then all 5 letter domains..
Shady stuff was always part of the picture even among the 'respectable' names. Of course, its essentially an open secret now that the worst online crime is fb/google/twitter/youtube, but then it was just less spoken of.
At around a similar time-frame, maybe a bit earlier.. the domain registrars were booming because people wanted their own domains. It was the pre-consolidation era before all those little sites died off one by one and went to places like geocities, livejournal, myspace, fb and related.
So the registrars all had web-based tools to do record lookups on contact info, business reg against domains and so, the basic whois records. Plus you could check to see if a domain was available, with the option of hosting it with them.. which they obviously wanted as a followup & ongoing piece of business. Well some anons found that this registrar was quietly registering domains that didn't exist before they were queried.. so amazing, you could then buy it from them!
All algorithmic of course.. so I wouldn't be at all surprised if people wrote some scripts which iteratively try to query all possible 3 letter domains, then all 4 letter domains, then all 5 letter domains..
Shady stuff was always part of the picture even among the 'respectable' names. Of course, its essentially an open secret now that the worst online crime is fb/google/twitter/youtube, but then it was just less spoken of.