Alex Goldman

I'm mad on your behalf.

And, like...

I understand that we live in a cynical world of people who are all struggling to get by and are willing to screw each other over to do so.

But around matters of death, it just feels really nasty to me, you know?

Yeah.

Can I ask you a question?

If you don't feel comfortable answering this, feel free not to answer.

How do you think that your friend would feel about all this?

Well, I guarantee you that someone out there knows what's going on.

So give me a couple weeks, and I'll get back to you on this.

Okay, so in the past, I could figure out exactly who was behind these websites using a specialized search tool called a Whois lookup.

All I have to do is go to a website called whois.sc and then enter the URL of one of these websites, and the search tool would come back to me with the name and contact information for whoever it was that registered the domain.

But as I mentioned in a previous episode, that tool is now largely ineffective for tasks like this.

In 2018, sweeping policy changes were made to the internet, and as a result of those changes,

all new website registrations are automatically set to private.

So now when I do a Whois lookup on a site like Memoir News 360, it no longer shows me who registered that domain.

It just tells me that the information is private.

So unfortunately, I can't just call one of these guys and ask like, who are you and what is this operation you're running?

Fortunately, I don't have to because someone else already did that.

How are you doing, Joe?