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Nominet Compromising UK WHOIS Privacy, Wants To See Gov't-Issued ID
ktetch-pirate (1850548) writes Earlier this week, Nominet launched the .uk domain to great fanfare, but hidden in that activity has been Nominet's new policy of exposing personal domain owners' home addresses. Justification is based on a site being judged "commercial," which can mean anything from a few Google ads or an Amazon widget, to an email subscription box or linking to too many commercial sites, according to Nominet reps. In the meantime though, they want your driving license or passport to ensure "accuracy" because they "want to make things safe."
>UK story
Think of the children!
Oh, won't someone please think of the children!
Operation Just Cause. I Never Trust Phake-Registry Sites. Go With .name If You Want To Hide In Your Shell Rudy.
I wonder how much this has to do with an attempt to comply with statutes against anonymous Internet businesses. Do these statutes have a reasonably rich body of case law yet?
Few will change domains over this.
mine address is in whois for every domain I own; sure there are a couple major shoddy registrars that will put in their address instead of yours for your domains but they completely suck for other reasons.
This is why my only official address is a UPS Box.
You forget that the details being available is where things started, and the option for details to be hidden showed up because of the problems having that information openly available has caused. The "social will" you talk about is not society at at large, it is governments and law enforcement wanting that information out in the open for their own purposes. General society either outright prefers the ability to remain anonymous or could give a crap about the details being shown except in very specific cases.
Having a website in no way equates to driving a car, that is a ridiculous analogy. Your driver's license is not openly available to millions at any given time, and a website is not a large vehicle that can be driven into a crowd of actual flesh and blood people. And if the service provider has monopoly, where exactly do you take your business?
You can opt out of that by not using their services.
The government requires people to either A. purchase specific goods and services from private companies or B. go to prison. Indecent exposure laws require purchase of clothing. Vagrancy laws require owning or leasing a home. And universal healthcare laws require either buying private health insurance or making less than the poverty line.
You do realize that this is just lazying the police even more than they need to be, there was nothing wrong with the Yahoo ID or whatever breaking a law, police get involved and then Yahoo hand over the ISP contact details in turn the police subpoena said ISP for customer data.
This new system is trying to remove the ISP step, not sure THAT is such a good idea especially concerning the fact that Yahoo probably reside in another country which is different to that of the customer, different countries have different data protection laws.
What a fucking boot-licker you are.
>nerd playground
Back when it was a "nerd playground" people used their real names more often than not. Because we didn't have to worry about morons like yourself. Because it was safe to do. Because we didn't have to worry about being pizza bombed or SWATted.
But that's entirely beside the point of idiots like you insisting that we should not have the right in e-space to call ourselves whatever the fuck we want as long as we're not trying to defraud anyone. THIS IS A RIGHT THAT EXISTS IN MEATSPACE you fucking tool.
Why is it that people such as yourself and FUCKING ERIC S. RAYMOND have a fucking huge problem with it? "They" - the people whose boots you are so willing to lick - do not give one flying fuck about you. Yet people like you and ESR want to give them the tools to remove any protections we have out here from criminals, corrupt politicians, police-states, and others. This war against anonymity is fucking odious, orwellian, and frankly fucking offensive as a wet fart on a hard wooden pew in church.
NO. FUCK YOU. IF YOU WANT TO USE YOUR REAL NAME, YOU GO RIGHT AHEAD AND USE IT. THE REST OF US WILL EXERCISE OUR RIGHTS IF WE CHOOSE TO. THE LIKES OF YOU AND ERIC S. RAYMOND AND HIS "HOTGIRL69 PROBLEM" CAN FUCK RIGHT OFF.
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BMO.
So very very true sir. Those who call for an end to privacy, usually have something to gain from it. A functioning society requires elements of privacy, or it will become dysfunctional.
Will the same private registration tricks that work here in The States (Like Domains By Proxy) work over in the UK too?
Well I have to buy water from a private company and I dont have any choice in which company I use. There is no way I can cease to be their customer UNLESS I go to jail and according to the water company they have NO CONTRACT with me.
Tell me How do I not use their service?
They always looked to have avoided the commercialisation of other country/international DNS services, but having known someone who crawled their way into the hierarchy with little knowledge of the system but an excellent politician, I learned that really they're just the same as any Verizon but with less honesty about how they operate.
This aside, the Nominet position has always been to require honest data but to allow people operating non-commercially to hide their information from whois. On the latter, frankly if you add Google Ads to your site then you ARE a commercial concern - the Internet doesn't get to redefine what type of moneymaking counts as moneymaking. On the former, again, it's about honesty: if you're going to allow people to register anonymously, state this, and show the steps you take to make it hard for your customers to be identified. Otherwise only the dishonest will register under false identities, while those trying to be hidden for legitimate reasons (e.g. political) will end up being easy to discover anyway.
Right. The European Union has completely different privacy rules for individuals and businesses. For individuals, there's the European Privacy Directive, which gives Europeans much stronger privacy rights than in the US. For businesses, it's completely different. Online businesses face the European Electronic Commerce Directive, and have to disclose who's behind the business.
That's deliberate EU policy. The whole point of the single European market is to make it easy to buy and sell across national boundaries within the EU. So there are lots of EU rules which benefit consumers and prevent businesses from operating in the country with the weakest regulation.
The .us domain registrar doesn't allow anonymous registration, either. Actually, neither does ICANN. The registrant listed in Whois owns the domain. If that's some "private registration" front, they own the domain. This became a big deal when RegisterFly tanked and people with "private registration" discovered they really didn't own domains they thought were theirs. That took months to straighten out.
In theory you have the option of just not using water. Collect rain or buy bottled - you might need to get a chemical toilet or dig a hole in the garden, but someone might go to such lengths in protest. I didn't even get that: The water company is also the drainage company, and charge for the service of removing the water that falls on any land you own. Unless you can somehow stop it from raining, you have to pay.
Those who call for an end to privacy, usually have something to gain from it.
Except that a lot of people who call for an end to privacy have nothing to gain and actually lose. ESR is one of those people, and I had to drop him from my G+ circles because I just couldn't stand the cognitive dissonance (doublethink, if we're going to use Orwell) any longer.
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BMO
Every single domain should have accurate and verifiable information for the owner, administrative, and technical contacts. The use of services which anonymize or mask domain owners should be prohibited.Whois was intended to enable you to identify the ownership of a domain and who to contact about it.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
I have neither a UK driving license (voluntarily surrendered some years ago) nor a valid passport - what am I to do, given that government issued photo ID is NOT compulsory here!
I did say usually
TFA is kind of long, so I will concede that on this one occasion, I may have merely skimmed it's content. However, as a gesture of good-will, I shall read the *next* TFA in it's entirety, *twice*.
Anyway, from my brief skimmage, I could find no mention of passports or driving licences. Does anyone know what the summary is referring to?
In California, collecting rainwater is actually illegal. The water is owned by the city or state, or whoever, but not the homeowner.
But the whole premise of the argument is flawed. Although people pay for water to be delivered through pipes to their hoses, the largest cost that the bills cover is actually the removal and treatment of wastewater. So, yes, buy all your water in bottles, but then don't allow any water to go down your drains (so no showers and no toilets).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
But that's entirely beside the point of idiots like you insisting that we should not have the right in e-space to call ourselves whatever the fuck we want as long as we're not trying to defraud anyone.
They're just saying you can't use THEIR SERVICES if you aren't willing to abide by the terms they set out, which include using your real, verifiable identity. Often services require a mobile # now for that purpose.
The water rights aren't necessarily owned by the government, but by the people downstream who were using the water before you—maybe a municipal water system, but just as likely a farmer, an industrial plant, etc. By capturing rainwater you would be infringing on their private property rights in that water.
Colorado, in 2009, began issuing permits for residential rainwater collection, in part because of a study that showed that in some locations most rainwater evaporated or was used by plants before it reached a stream.
....for me not being able to go to a web site and use a vehicle number plate to look up the address of the jerk who cut me up in traffic today.
Similar reasons surely need to apply to domain registrations.
Says the Anonymous Coward...
which include using your real, verifiable identity
Pray tell, which ones? None of the ones I use. Even online services that "require" a cell number really don't - they put in grayed out text a clickthrough to skip it, even Facebook.
If you're talking about banking and payment services, they've required your real identity in meatspace for hundreds of years, so it's not the same thing as what we're discussing here. All online services have unenforceable and unconscionable terms and conditions. I can require your first-born male as payment, but that doesn't mean it's legally binding, and such terms should be ignored as a matter of course. I do. If you don't, you're a fool.
The last time an online service required my meatspace identity, it was the Chebucto Freenet back in the early 90s that wanted a photocopy of my driver's license. But that was a different time and you could actually trust admins (that weren't Simon Travaglia) back then. It was also a different time back then when your domain record had your real name tied to it and you didn't have to worry about stalkers, idiots, and loons. Anyone who does that these days not hiding behind even a "paper" company name, is quite frankly a victim waiting to happen.
And lastly, the whole "we require a cellphone" nonsense can be worked around with stuff like this:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/to...
Good fucking luck tying identity to SMS.
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BMO
address is a UPS Box.
Did you mean USPS Box (PO Box)?
Or has UPS begun a private mailbox service?
Or do you live in an actual UPS cardboard box?
Have gnu, will travel.
... everyone who is against this, is also against publishing the names and addresses of political donors, right?
They will have their name changed by the people who favor their right to privacy to Nomonet, whether they see it happening or not. See Ya
You can eliminate wastewater disposal with a bit of replumbing - if you need to, get a septic tank. But how can you stop it from raining?
Somewere I'm sure you can find a place where not only does the water company own the rain that falls on your property, but you've not choice but to pay them to take it away and pay them again to get it back.
UPS bought out Mail Boxes Etc about 10 years back... since then, they've had a mailbox service.
[A] lot of people who call for an end to privacy have nothing to gain and actually lose. [This "Eric Raymond" person] is one of those people, and I had to drop him from my G+ circles because I just couldn't stand the cognitive dissonance (doublethink, if we're going to use Orwell) any longer.
Speaking of doublethink... Are you joking about the "G+ circles" thing? I had to drop go-Ogle into my HOSTS file because I actually do give a shit about my (and others') privacy. BTW, you don't have any "G+ circles" to begin with; everything on go-Ogle's sites is corporate (imaginary) property. Same with Facecrook; the only one who can legitimately say "my Facecrook" is Narc Fuckerburg.
I was told a house without wheels was a step up. Are you suggesting there is something wrong with living in a UPS cardboard box?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
To disclose personal information without the giver's permission or to change its use is a breach of the UK Data Protection Act. Given that their "it's a company" assessment does not need to track with reality, it's just a matter of time before they catch a live one and need to face the music. A classic example is the Stephen Fry who they herald as "first to make the switch" himself - his work is commercial, but the website date may be personal and as such subject to DPA.
Give it time, the digging has already started.
No, I'm not kidding.
I use g+ to follow Linus and others.
Wait, are you one of the guys who started putting X-NoArchive in the text of your usenet posts when DejaNews showed up?
>putting google in 0.0.0.0
There's being judicious about what you post, and then there's paranoia.
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BMO