Privacy Advocates Bemoan the Problems With WHOIS

An anonymous reader writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting that net privacy advocates are spurring ICANN into scrapping WHOIS. The advocates complain that the system doesn't do enough to protect domain owner information from spammers and fraudsters, and compare the problems to those being experienced on a broader scale by email users. 'WHOIS, much like e-mail, is an age-old Internet relic that comes from a time when the Internet was almost considered a network of trustworthy users. E-mail has, quite clearly, some massive problems coping in the modern age, but it's still here. It stands to reason, then, that WHOIS won't be going anywhere any time soon. Just like e-mail, it's prone to abuse. But again, just like e-mail, it's too useful to axe.'"

Comments

Whois is useful?

[morgan_greywolf]

For what? These days, everybody is registering private domains through people like DomainsByProxy. Whois is becoming more and more useless. Might as well chuck it.

Re:Whois is useful?

[mwvdlee]

And what kind of method is DomainsByProxy using to check domain name availability?

Even "Heroes" agrees

[Kelson]

In one episode last season, Ando showed up at Niki's house, having been able to find her because she listed her home address on the WHOIS record for her website.

(The unspoken moral: use a PO Box, or some guy from halfway around the world will drop in on you unexpectedly.)

for plenty of us

[CarpetShark]

Speak for yourself. I use whois every day. It's invaluable.

Re:for plenty of us

[hackstraw]

Speak for yourself. I use whois every day. It's invaluable.

Really? Can someone elaborate on its usefulness? I gave up on it years ago. (also, I simply don't need to know this info anymore)

When I was a SPAM vigalante, I would do whois lookups, and usually the information was clearly bogus. Often, if the info was not bogus, it was outdated. And I've heard from many people that are legitimate people doing legitimate things with their hostnames that would never give real information for whois lookups because they simply don't want to be the target of SPAMers or whatever else could come from having any personal information laying around for some random person to have fun with.

I would never put accurate or relavant info into a whois lookup, and I don't expect anyone else to do so either. Nothing good can come from it, unless maybe you hold the killer domain and you hope someone will try to buy it from you.

I also lie about any personal info to protect my privacy, unless there is something explicity beneficial for me for someone else to have relevant info. I also tell all of the door to door sales people trying to sell me some crap for my house that I rent. They immediately say "Oh", and walk away. I also pay extra to have my phone number unlisted.

I'm still on some lists, but not that many. And the fewer the better.

Re:stalker "found" me thanks to WHOIS

[LiquidCoooled]

Wouldn't it be more likely that the stalker got your address from his girlfriend?
Afterall you just said she came to your house to check out the computer.

What could be used for business accountability ?

[damn_registrars]

I would say the best use of WHOIS is when you need to contact the owner of a business domain. Like many others I've seen boatloads of complaints from people here about their own private domains and how badly they hate WHOIS.

To those private owners, I could care less if their home information is available through WHOIS, as long as they aren't selling illegal merchandise through said domain and pumping spam for it all over the world.

However, when international criminals register domains to sell pirated software / bogus pills / etc ... I do believe WHOIS is still useful. When you can obtain the WHOIS information for the criminal domain, it gives you someone to contact about that activity. People who care enough to do this have managed to progressively change the policies of registrars who were frequently used by spammers for nefarious purposes.

And further investigation into WHOIS data can lead someone to even more critical information, as well. Being as the WHOIS record contains information on the DNS servers that are resolving the domain, a person who wants to really dig deep can find where those were sold as well. A little hint: the spammers often use only a short list of DNS servers for a large number of their domains.

So in summary, before people rally around ICANN with pitchforks and torches to demand the demise of WHOIS, I ask you please consider a solution for the applications where WHOIS is still useful before insisting that it goes away completely.