Congress (Still) Looking at whois

bief writes: "A NY Times [free reg., blah, blah] story examines the whois database debate and provides a fair reading of the current situation about the list that which is being abused by 'marketers who regularly cull the Whois database for e-mail addresses and phone numbers to add to their spam lists.' Responses from registrars to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property were due on February 1st, but Chris J. Katopis, counsel to the subcommittee, said that as of last week many registrars had not replied. 'If they're not going to respond to a government inquiry,' he said, 'what are they going to do to respond to an aggrieved individual when something happens?'"

Comments

As Bungie of olde would've said:

[Anonymous Coward]

.blam the .spam !

A very important but missing group in the article.

[MavEtJu]

On one side of the fence are law enforcement agencies, intellectual property owners and marketers.
On the opposite side of the fence are privacy advocates and many consumers and businesses that have registered Web addresses.

And on which site are the network administrators, which use this information trying to keep their network free of unwanted junk (spam, scans, attacks etc) and to alert other people with broken systems?

Two WHOIS databases

[Florian Weimer]

There are actually two distinct databases: one for domain names, and one for IP addresses. The domain name database is not essential for operating the network. However, it is absolutely REQUIRED to have valid contact information in the IP address registry. Otherwise you cannot contact network administrator to alert them of problems. As a result, fewer problems will get fixed in a reasonable time frame, and the overall quality of the network degrades.

Entries for IP addresses have few privacy problems. Usually, not the end user is listed in the WHOIS database, but the ISP. It would be disastrous if misled privacy advocates and policymakers abolished this database.

Not all domains have a "web site"

[satch89450]

If you want to know something about the person who owns a domain, go to their site and find a way to contact them and ask.

Really? Try to contact me, the administrator for satch-test DOT com, modem-museum DOT org, or even jimgalloway DOT com without resorting to the WHOIS database. Or the Slashdot User Information for this ID. :)

Congratulations. Not every name has a "site" associated with it, contrary to your unwarranted assumption. I hold several domain names to which a web site (1) has not been created because I haven't had the time, (2) will never have a web site because it's used only for electronic mail and other, non-Web, Internet applications, (3) used to have a web site but now is gone, and (4) is intended for secure HTTP traffic with draconian access controls so even if you did figure out how to gain initial access you wuould have to be a cracker to get past the authenticaion that protects the content from the eyes of just anyone.

The information in the contact information portion of the WHOIS record for those domain names is real, and the spam traffic level is low...for now.

Please remember there is more to the Internet than just the World Wide Web and P2P file sharing.

Yet another worthy resource down the drain

[frost22]

The wois database once was a worthy resource for internet administration.

Yet another good thing is destroyed by spammers. Folks, frankly, I wonder when will we start really doing something against these subhuman vermin ? The poison every well they touch, the steal other people's resources and they don't bother detroying whatever they use to advance their cause.

Put Spammers to jail !

A whois solution

[MrIcee]

Actually - removing whois in an attempt to curtail spam is backasswards. ISP's use whois frequently to FIGHT spam and abusers. By traceroute(ing) the sender of the spam, or a network abuser - we can tell the up stream providers, etc. A simple nslookup and then a whois usually gives us the phone number and email address of someone to call to report the abuse. By removing (especially) phone numbers and email addresses from the database it will be much more labor intensive to trace down companies and complain about abuse.

A better change would be to return email back to it's pre-attachment days (which would make using it for spam more unattractive - as well as shrink the size of the documents and make the net more secure in general).

Leave whois alone... or make it such that it won't allow datamineing. But don't remove our ability to locate and communicate with owners of domain names!

Shooting themselves?

[leeward]

Seems to me that culling addresses from a whois database for the purposes of spamming would be somewhat self defeating. Maybe I am offbase here, but I would expect that email addresses in whois records would have a far lower than average percentage of people who would fall for spams, and a far higher percentage of people who will complain. And sometimes those complaints actually get spammers nuked (yea I know, rarely).

Still, I would think that if a spammer actually thought it through, they would use the whois database to do list washing, to minimize complaints.