ICANN is the epitome of malevolent bureaucracy
Over the years I've battled with domain registration hurdles despite, pretty much forever, having had a registration within the system. It's broken; shred the RFCs, they are just being used to extract money and prevent service.
Take a look at the whois information for apple.com; a company who, surely, would want to distinguish administrative and technical queries. This comes from:
https://www.whois.com/whois/apple.com
This is what you get if you copy'n'paste the email addresses (as plain text, without the HTML). I have javascript blocked by default and it is blocked on this page:
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: email@cscglobal.com
Registrant Email: email@apple.com
Admin Email: email@apple.com
Tech Email: email@apple.com
If you use a whois query directly, however (i.e. not a web browser, open a command line and type "whois apple.com"; I did this on a gentoo machine; OpenSUSE on Windows simply doesn't show the information) you get:
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: domainabuse@cscglobal.com
Registrant Email: domains@apple.com
Admin Email: domains@apple.com
Tech Email: Apple-NOC@apple.com
You can see for yourself what they actually display as; the second list, not the first. The HTML reveals that the emails displayed are pictures, here is one:
https://www.whois.com/eimg/2/49/249f6ba0eb9411f5354b2db5f1351bfa006f5f7c.png
Well, ok, you can't see that can you! Clever trick eh? It exploits the ability of PNG images to encode semi-transparent images. The PNG image has two "colors" in it, one is black, the other is transparent. The transparent parts display the word "domains", but only if you view the image over a non-black background.
So why on earth would Apple/ICANN go to such lengths to obfuscate information that is readily available to someone like me who hasn't progressed out of the Bourne Shell?
Because they think they are really clever.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
