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ENUM Protocol in Australia?
Master Kai writes "Looks like Australia's thinking about implementing ENUM, an internet protocol that will convert a simple phone number into a URI. The benefits are obvious, use one number to contact you on any communications medium. Your website, fixed phone, fax, mobile (cell) and email address. But at what cost to our privacy? I know that personally I prefer to give out my email address, because I can change it at the click of a button. And what about spam? Not only would spamers have your email address, but your contact numbers too. Eeeep!
Anyway. It looks good nonetheless. Check out the news article , and for the Australian Communications Authority Discussion Paper. "
Gmanske.
Social Security Number is sort of similar...
SSN numbers are assigned to every US citizen, that's pretty much were the similarities stop.
When the SSN system was first put into place the governemnt stressed that it wouldn't be used as an ID number and for social security only.
If you don't belive me I've seen cases, like at Wal-Mart, where they ask for a SSN for something like a fishing license and the people being asked protest because of what I said above.
Have a little faith in the USA, they had the right idea in the beginning.
RFC2396 goes into great detail about URI's and URL's. It covers the (minor for most of us) differences between them.
SSN numbers are assigned to every US citizen, that's pretty much were the similarities stop.
Well, not really. What does getting credit have to do with Social Security. Not much, but yet the SSN now equates more with credit than it does social security. Fact is that the SSN is the number that most peoples lives revolve around (I said most, not all, I know there are people out there who avoid this, but the majority don't). Given that, with a host of other pieces of identifying data, you can be tracked anywhere. Not giving wally-mart your SSN really doesn't have anything to do with privacy, it has more to do with fraud. If you use your real info to get that license, you can easily be cross referenced right back to your SSN, not problemo.
Privacy is the biggest victim in the information society.
Request for Comments doc:
This document updates and merges "Uniform Resource Locators"
[RFC1738] and "Relative Uniform Resource Locators" [RFC1808] in order
to define a single, generic syntax for all URI.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Why is this modded funny? It's not, URI is the correct term.
http://www.foo.com/ is a URL
mailto:bob@smith.com.au is a URI
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
According to the Australian Coalition Against Unsolicited Bulk E-Mail, Australia currently has mild opt-out spamming provisions, most of which are based on a voluntary code of conduct rather than legislation. Perhaps you were thinking of Europe, where there are opt-in rules which could be considered a sufficient deterrent to spammers.
Even so, would Australian laws apply if the spam originated from outside of Australia?
Put simply:
URLs are a (proper) subset of URIs
URIs are the union of URLs and URNs
URLs are names for resources whose name is sufficient to resolve the resource. Eg nntp:<some server>/<message id>. To resolve it look at the URL. You have the protocol, server, and message id so you can just ask that server for the message named by the URL.
URNs aren't URLs. Eg news:<message id>. Resolving this requires knowing, say, a news server and its protocol.
So (as another poster said) mailto:<blah> is a URN since resolving to the actual mailbox <blah> requires more knowledge than the URI gives. http:<blah>, by contrast, is a URL. Resolving that is trivial given this URI.
Probably not entirely correct, but you get the idea. See the RFC above for tortuous detail.
Now IRIs, well...
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