Posted by speckx 21 hours ago
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding their statement but unless something recently changed this is not true. The .US TLD does not permit whois privacy services. The full legal name and address of the registrant will be shown in my experience and I could not find a registrar that would deviate from this.
Are they offering delegation of sub-domains of some domains they purchased perhaps? The example they gave did not suggest this if that is so. If that is the case then whois does not really apply unless they are giving different answers in their whois for sub-domains assuming their whois would be queried.
That is why I opted for .org for a small town that I operated not for official purposes as per the banner a website for in my spare time. When using a .US one can register it in the name of a company or the city can register it themselves through their own government to avoid a persons personal information being listed. Ensure auto-renew is enabled when assisting a city government as people come and go. Pay as far in advance for as many years as possible.
That is true and would explain my confusion on this matter if they have some list of apex domains they are dynamically creating sub-domains for. Honestly if this is the case I would avoid participating in this. This puts the control of the domain (sub-domain) in their hands for your city. Cities and states can already use sub-domains of their countries .gov domain structure which I realize is full of its own issues but that's another topic all together. Cities can also get citystate.gov in some states but I don't know how that process works.
This project would likely be shut down the first time someone complains to their government about one of the sites.
But the one that really shocked me was https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ - which seems to still be up and running?? I wonder if the login page for webmail (ISP-provided email was a thing! And even hosting space!) still works.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...
The website offered to sell unlimited dialup for me, in Ohio, using a local phone number.
I Googled that number, and it appears that it may belong to another (related? different?) time machine: https://www.panix.com/dialup/
[1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.
It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.
I'm not interested in dialup data services at all at this point in 2026. I have no remaining means with which to use such a thing. The last cell phone I had that could act like a modem got retired in 2009 and the last time I had a dialtone in my house was 2010.
But if I had to guess, then I'd guess that these time machines are still operational.
Yikes, no!
Of the "hackers" to get there before me, I'm happy it's them!
I checked www.whois.us and oakland.ca.us is administered by locality-support [at] about [dot] us
Try sending them an email?