Slashdot Mirror
Congress Eyes Whois Crackdown
Decius6i5 writes "The Washington Post is reporting on a Congressional hearing in which it was proposed that putting false or misleading information in your DNS whois record should be a federal crime. Texas Representative Lamar Smith is quoted as saying 'The Government must play a greater role in punishing those who conceal their identities online.' The article claims 'Smith and Berman drafted the bill after receiving complaints from the entertainment and software industries that much of their material is made available for free on Web sites whose owners are impossible to track down because their domain name registrations often contain made-up names.' Its funny, I don't recall the RIAA having any trouble tracking down P2P users whose IP addresses didn't have any DNS names associated with them at all. This isn't the first time the issue has been raised in Congress but apparently Congress hasn't gotten any more clued after several hearings."
i run a small, non profit politically based website with a chatboard. many people have come on the chatboard and threatened me with physical harm and worse because of my views.
and now they want me to put my real home phone number and real home address in the DNS records?
WHAT A BUNCH OF SHIT
They don't have to spend a whole lot of time tracking down the false WHOIS record holders.
Just spend a little bit of time trying to track them down. Then cancel their domains. Let them present themselves for identification when they want the domains un-canceled.
A fully validated WHOIS database would make it trivial to enforce punishment against people who use spammers to promote the websites and scams on said websites registered to them.
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