Is this actually a significant problem anymore? No doubt front running was a pretty significant practice historically, but I haven't run into the practice in quite some time. At the peak of tasting practices more than 9 in 10 domains were given back during the cooling off period. That number has dropped dramatically since the rules were changed.

While I'm sure a bit of front running must still go on, it's hard for me to believe it happens to the average joe much if ever. In that light the rules that page lay out sound pretty over the top, and I'm generally a pretty paranoid person. I'd only worry about front running today if I was a known high value target, one who buys or holds a lot of domains. If that was me, I'd just take some mild precautions. Don't use my registrar to search for domains, clear tracking cookies before searching. The implications that you can't trust your ISP DNS system, search engines and certain whois services sounds like '06-'08 logic to me.