Slashdot Mirror
Russia to Halt Public Access to .RU Whois Data?
An anonymous reader writes "A Domain Tools blog post is reporting on a Russian newspaper article regarding a provision of Russian law that would prohibit public access or posting of Whois data for the .RU TLD without written permission. The Personal Data law, which the article states went into effect on January 30, 2007, will require compliance by RosNIIROSa (www.ripn.net) by 2010."
There's absolutely no reason that in the US we must have valid contact information in that database. I use my work address, phone number, and my website spam GMail account on there because I don't want to deal w/the bullshit spam, letters in the mail, etc.
Whoever had the bright idea to mandate that for ending spam didn't think clearly. Perhaps Russia (while not their motivation for this move) is on the right track.
Not just broken by the spammers, though they're in large part responsible for making much info inaccessible, it's also broken by the lack of standards and registrar greed.
Just try to write a tool to automatically parse WHOIS output to get the registration date of a domain (a good heuristic when determining whether a domain is spammy -- a 1-day old domain merits a little more investigation than a 1-year old one). Assuming the info is available at all and not hidden behind some captcha-enabled web page (not just to shield from spammer harvesting, but also to throw sales pitches at you), the date field could be anywhere, and in any format. Hell, I've even seen registrars use MM/DD/YY format, two-digit years no less. Some even use multiple formats. It's crazy insane.
RIPE appears to actually have their shit together, and uses a pretty good uniform format. Bully for RIPE, but that's generally only good for IP WHOIS, and the rest is being eroded as the rest of the WHOIS system decays at the seams.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I do believe that is the goal. It's the Russian embrace of western capitalism. The Russians are looking to attract (and protect) the type of web site entrepreneurs who would be in violation of the stricter U.S. laws. Periodically you will see news items where U.S. authorities crack down on web site operators whose servers are hosted in Russia but the persons behind the operations reside in the United States.
Of course not. There is no legitimate reason why anyone would want to contact the domain owner about some issue with the site or its content.
And your hosting company should just reject all requests and complaints. They are just a hosting company and have no need to get involved with anything else. You pay, they host, right?
If you want to post software, movies, music and child porn that should be nobody's business but yours and the rest of the world can just get stuffed. If someone has a problem with that, they can send you an email.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the prevailing attitude and current practice.
Of course not. There is no legitimate reason why anyone would want to contact the domain owner about some issue with the site or its content.
And your hosting company should just reject all requests and complaints. They are just a hosting company and have no need to get involved with anything else. You pay, they host, right?
You mean like the additional fees that the registrars/hosts get for hiding your personal contact information if you so choose? So this rule should apply only to people who don't want to have money extorted from them?
Dude, do you not know how much of a rip-off all the private registration services (also those not from GoDaddy) are, because they charge you for privacy?
hackerkey://v4sw5/7BCHJMPRUY$hw3ln3pr6/7FOP$ck6ma8+9u6L$w4/7CGUXm0l6DLRi82NCe3+9t5Sb7HMOPRen5a17s0DSr1/2p-3.62/-5.23g3/5
Korea also blocks whois lookups for Korean-owned domains. As a mail server administrator, this made my life easy: whenever I would do a whois lookup that would return a domain under kornet.net's sphere of influence (the registrar for Korea), I would blacklist it out of hand. If I don't know who you are or how to contact you, I don't accept e-mail from your netblocks. It's a rather ham-fisted policy, but it made a huge dent in the amount of spam my users received. And you know what? I didn't get very many complaints from my users >:]
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Actions have multiple consequences, so why can't they have multiple causes?
Inconceivable! If that were the case, then how could we continue to blame videogames for violence, blame WMD's for the invasion on Iraq, and incompetence for that which could be ascribed to malice?!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.