Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
Except that any personal site HAS to have their 'correct info' there, and any hint of 'commercialism' (such as linking to 'trading sites') and that private info - your home address - is now going to be published. I bet no-one can see absolutely ANYTHING wrong with that at all.... like pizza-bombing or SWATing (SO19-ing?) someone. Because that never EVER happens.
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.
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.
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.
--
BMO
I'm in the UK, and I use Domains by Proxy.
I work with a school. I occasionally give students the address of my server, as I've a couple of utilities up there I made for use in IT classes (A public-domain* music collection, a utility to make rollover graphics). I can't risk students finding out my home address! I'd get a brick through my window for all the games sites I blocked.
*Only in Europe. Sorry yanks.
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)"
get a PO Box.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
You're on the train to nowhere...
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?
And to fight Terrorism...
Well, it involves a lot of hand-waving...and shouting...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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!
That's fine if you are prepared to pay the large cost for DbP and never want to change registrars. I had some domains at Godaddy with DbP protection. I found that to move to another registrar, I had to first remove the domains from DbP, thus making the whois information public for a few hours during the transfer.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
In that case, my advice: bring Tony Blair to trial.
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.
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.
--
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?
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.
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.
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.
--
BMO