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."
That this means the single largest collection of hacking and spamming sites will now have protection against people finding out who even owns the domains they run from?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Spammers have already laid .ru low. I know of more than a few small to medium companies that flat out drop emails if there's a .ru _anywhere_ in the email. Not just the from or reply to fields. If there's a http link pointing to a .ru domain, they drop it.
.ru's problems right now. Though it boggles me how a TLD trustee can get away with not publishing whois information while still under ICANN's rules.
I try to tell them that just dropping "mail.ru" would be a better longterm strategy, but their minds are usually made up. I think this may be some kind of holdover from the cold war.("The Russian's have internets?! Blockade their commie propaganda!")
Anyway, my point is that lack of whois information is the least of
May the Maths Be with you!
See, for me, this is simply a matter of character. Or the appearance of it. If you don't want me to know who you are, why should I accept mail from your domain at all?
I run the email for a pretty small ISP. When a mail server (or farm) starts going crazy and trying to kill my servers with hundreds of connections per second; the first thing I do is drop the packets from the network. I then check the whois listing to see if it's yahoo! or ebay or something like that and consider unblocking it after I know who I'm dealing with.
When the whois says "NONAME NETOWRK ASSOcIATES" or there simply isn't anything listed, they stay on the drop list. So this is really a handy development. Essentially nothing from .ru will look legit anymore so I can just block all of it, right?
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Estonian servers have been under constant barrage of DDOS attempts since April 26, much of which have been tracked to Russian servers. Now Russians try to obfuscate their whois. Is it just me, or are those two events linked...?
Such a policy is not without precedent. Tonga's NIC has kept registration information private for years.
Then again, Tonga's NIC also has a healthy anti-spam policy, including a provision for revealing registration info for domain names canceled for violating that policy.
But does keeping registration info private really help shield spammers? Who's to say that spammers are providing valid registration info in the first place? They abuse public registration records both ways: they falsify their own info to shield their identities, and they appropriate and abuse the info of honest people doing the right thing.
I am all for private registration records. If Russia enacts their law, they will have the exact opposite policy of the United States. And, damn, will I envy those Russians for it.