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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."

1 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What about the services that will conceal this? by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    "far-fringe-right-wing lunatics" eh? It was your dumbass president clinton that signed in the DMCA.

    Really, any lunatic is a bad lunatic whether that be left, right or anything.

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