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ICANN Accepting Public Comments On Whois Privacy
Decius6i5 writes "ICANN is accepting public comments on its three whois privacy and accuracy working groups until July 5th. Some of the proposals from the third working group, on improving whois accuracy, have been described as hostile to internet users. The working group proposes that if DNS Whois registration data for a domain is inaccurate, the domain should be immediately placed on hold, and cancelled if the error is not corrected within 15 days. An article on Circle ID suggests that the DNS Whois system is not the best way to share contact information for networks, and that ICANN should focus its efforts on improving IP Address Whois instead. What do you think?"
The contact information on the web site was my own (!) ... so all I could do was take a look at whois data and send 'em a "WTF" note - it did get resolved (whole summary coming shortly), but having at least SOMEONE to contact via whois was helpful.
Having said that, it does suck that the spammers harvest these Email addresses.
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For example, the folks at gulli.com have made 'GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.CO M' and registered it as a nameserver so that it shows up when you do a whois search for GOOGLE.COM through whois.crsnic.net or other WHOIS servers that try to be helpful when you enter part of a domain name. Not all WHOIS servers seem to do this, but apparently FreeBSD (at least) defaults to whois.crsnic.net.
It's a cute trick, and I'd hate to see it go. ICANN needs to lighten up with regards to their requirements for WHOIS information; spammers and telemarketers abuse the hell out of it no matter how many warnings are put up next to the data. The contacts are less than useful when nobody answers them because they're bombarded with marketing.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I've been reading through the working group papers. It looks to me like the whole thing was written by the goddamn spammers themselves. They want to make it virtually impossible for anyone outside of law enforcement agencies (and we know how good they are at stopping spam) from getting whois information.
... I saw some very convincing looking information from what appeared to be a grassroots organization on an issue I was somewhat interested in. (arguing against a pollution cleanup) Just out of curiousity, I did a whois on the domain, and found out that it was owend by the company that did the polluting ... the "grass" was astroturf.
... you can get in touch with the guy who's got unauthorized copies of your stuff and ask him to take it down, and settle things on friendly terms, without having to pay a lawyer a few hundred dollars to write a letter to say exactly the same thing. Maybe we should all be required to have lawyers walking around with us so that they can pass on anything we might want to say to someone we meet? And lawyers don't like being called "mouthpieces"? Feh!
We need better whois information, not less of it. We need it available to more people. We need more openness, not more secrecy. Openness cleans up problems -- secrecy nurtures them. Nor is it limited to spam and network abuse.
A random example
So people can spam me all they like, they can abuse the resources I depend on, they can attack my servers, they can do whatever they feel like, and with their domain registration information kept an ironclad secret by this new proposal, I can't do a damn thing about it. Oh, wonderful.
Or maybe it was written by the lawyers. One of the criticisms of the current policy by the working group is that it permits person-to-person contact without any lawyers involved. Yes, they actually said that. Gee, how terrible