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ICANN's Plan To End Commercial Website Anonymity Creates Real Problems
An anonymous reader notes that ICANN is closing the comment period for its plan to prevent owners of commercial websites from keeping their personal details out of a site's public-facing registration information. Digital rights groups are taking the opportunity to explain how real harm can result from this decision. The Online Abuse Prevention Initiative posted an open letter to ICANN pointing out the rise of doxing and swatting: "Our concern about doxing is not hypothetical. Randi Harper, a technologist, anti-harassment activist, and founder of the Online Abuse Prevention Initiative, was swatted based on information obtained from the Whois record for her domain. The only reason law enforcement did not draw their weapons and break down Harper’s door was that she had previously warned her local police department about swatting."
Cathy Gellis at Popehat refers to the situation surrounding Charles Carreon, the man who antagonized The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman's webcomic) and issued legal threats to those who called him out. "In that case the critic had selected a domain incorporating Carreon's name in order to best get his point about Carreon's thuggery across, which the First Amendment and federal trademark law allowed him to do. ... Unfortunately, the registrar immediately caved to Carreon's pressure and disclosed the critic's identifying information, thereby eviscerating the privacy protection the critic expected to have, and depended on, for his commentary."
Cathy Gellis at Popehat refers to the situation surrounding Charles Carreon, the man who antagonized The Oatmeal (Matthew Inman's webcomic) and issued legal threats to those who called him out. "In that case the critic had selected a domain incorporating Carreon's name in order to best get his point about Carreon's thuggery across, which the First Amendment and federal trademark law allowed him to do. ... Unfortunately, the registrar immediately caved to Carreon's pressure and disclosed the critic's identifying information, thereby eviscerating the privacy protection the critic expected to have, and depended on, for his commentary."
Randi Harper is a notorious harrasser and citing her in relation to anything (especially harrassment prevention) seriously damages the credibility of your cause.
She seems to know quite a bit about harassment though, harassing people nearly daily gets you a lot of experience.
Are we talking about the woman who doxxed a debt collection agency director?
The one woman who harassed silicon valley ceo and feminist Whadwa?
Who told her ally Claire Shuman to get fucked because she wanted was to fine common ground with the group Harper wants to vilify and put on employment blacklists?
Lmao, ok.
For those people who are unaware what this poster is talking about, Randi Harper set up ggautoblocker, which helps GamerGate harassment victims. The poster seems to think that this is "silencing" people. Of course nobody is "silenced". ggautoblocker just helps other people not to have to listen to them.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
If you have a genuine complaint then make it. Include some actual evidence, not just insinuations and innuendo, and not just links to blogs and imgur. The kind of stuff a respectable journalist might accept, or even better that the FBI might be interested in (since there are claims of fraud and harassment, and active investigations that would accept such material).
The only people making these claims are the ones who are butthurt over the GGAutoblocker and the fact that the GG IRC logs were published.
PS. -1 offtopic and -1 troll are not your personal censorship tools. Don't be cowards with your moderation, post your responses instead.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Are you insinuating that the captured IRC etc. traffic on display there is faked?
No, I'm pointing out that it exposes the GGers. For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, there is a good summary here: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/...
The full log is here: http://puu.sh/boAEC/f072f259b6...
You can search it easily for keywords. I'm still kind of amazed that with all the planning and effort they put into GG they made the obvious mistake of using a public IRC room to organize it all, speaking quite openly about their real motives and how they were astroturfing the hell out of social media with sock puppet accounts.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The ggautoblocker DOES NOT censor! Can you identify a single person who can no longer tweet because they are included in the blocklist? Of course not. Everybody on the blocklist can continue to tweet. ggautoblocker allows people to not listen. That is not censorship.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room