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Should Domain-Name Registrations Require A Verifiable Real Name? (blogspot.com)
lpress writes:
The Internet was a major source of news -- fake and real -- during the election campaign. The operators of fake sites, whether motivated by politics or greed, are often anonymous. We avoid voter fraud by requiring verification of ones name, age and address. A verifiable real-names domain registration policy would discourage information fraud.
"I understand the wish to protect the privacy of a person or organization registering a domain name," argues the linked-to blog post, "but there is also a public interest." ICANN already requested comments on this back in 2015, but I'm curious what Slashdot's readers think. Should domain name registrations require a verifiable real name?
"I understand the wish to protect the privacy of a person or organization registering a domain name," argues the linked-to blog post, "but there is also a public interest." ICANN already requested comments on this back in 2015, but I'm curious what Slashdot's readers think. Should domain name registrations require a verifiable real name?
Just two days ago there was an article about a guy who put up what he thought were satirical stories, with the main actors all having HIS OWN NAME.
And people still bought it.
With as little fact-checking as we see today, do you really think a journalist is gonna do a thorough WHOIS lookup on the domain before rushing to post, let alone the average internet surfer?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
the US Supreme Court has already ruled that anonymity is a necessary requirement to protect free speech. And it's easy to see why.
case closed.
This is all you need to know: https://www.eff.org/issues/ano...
It must still be allowed.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
No, it won't work. In the beginning of the Internet, it was done that way, then slowly people realized you can use shell companies since they are also legal names in a legal sense and then people realized it was just as easy to put a fake name and now you can't even see names anymore in most whois lookups.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
People can legally have multiple names (alias), or you can use the name you came up with on a business license. Does not solve anything.
works as well as one that isn't. so, yeah.shakespeare said something like that.
We already know that censorship is evil. The people that aren't convinced never will be. So save your breath...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Domain names are a nickname for an IP address, nothing more. Should you require real name to associate a nickname with an IP address, well, kinda up to each and every single domain name registry, they want a real name, then they get a real name, they don' want a real name, they don't get a real name.
When it comes to fake news, well no one is worse than the multi-national news organisations the very worst example of fake news being Fox News with CNN a close second. So, it is easy, simply make 'NEWS' are protected word, you use that word in your title or identity yourself with that in a substantive sense ie using that nomenclature to attract an audience to generate views and or revenue, than when challenged on veracity you should be required to prove it in court, big or small. Fake news in a corporate sense also means claiming to be a news station when all you produce is celebrity pulp to sell shit, throw in a tiny amount of real news to bring in viewers and censor everything you come across that your main advertisers do not wish the greater public to see. So fake news channels like Fox News and CNN how do you categorise active censorship and not on an individual basis but as a cartel.
Now the main propagandists are just all butt hurt because they have been fucked over by independent media as main stream media could no longer steal an election and nobody much gives a fuck what they write about any more. New York TImes, have not bothered with it in over 4 years, why log into something I could no longer be bothered to read. The BBC went real bad when the 'fake' conservatives took over and stacked it with corporate propagandists from the top down.
In the most absurd fashion imaginable to get more accurate news about any country the last place you go to is that countries news site. So for the US go to RT for Russia, well, you are stuck with the Beeb (BBC) there are still plenty of good journalists in there, etc. Real legislation is required to protect the word NEWS, why, because it is no different from yelling fire in a crowded fire and that is exactly what most of those fuckers have been doing for decades, even lead to war and millions of deaths just in the last couple of decades (US news, you are shite, do not use for anything, except local community news channels which can be quite good and are often far more accurate than the main stream media channels).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The problem with real-name policies is their speech-chilling effect. Better that 1000 bogus sights hide under anonymity than one legitimate individual feels too intimidated to share his views. And before you get all "Don't you think the government can figure out who you are anyway?", I'm not referring to intimidation and reprisal from three-letter agencies. I'm talking about the guy with views on local building ordinances that may not agree with his next door neighbor but doesn't want that neighbor leaving flaming bags of poo on his doorstep if he voices them.
In the US, the same people currently complaining about fake news sites also tend to be the ones who fight voter ID programs. I can't see how a "verified person to has web site" would fly with that crowd.
There's a hell of a lot more 'public interest' in knowing who is behind the SuperPACs that spend orders of magnitudes more money to influence elections, but it's already been ruled that the right to participate anonymously in the political process is still more important.
After those damnable SuperPAC donors shed their anonymity then we can talk about whether to give up anonymity for Internet publishers.
We on the left have a moral duty to correct the thinking of those on the right, and we should not let freedom, truth or justice stand in our way. All publications opposed to our views should be labelled as "fake" and destroyed. All individuals pushing opposing views should be sent for re-education. We must not stop until everyone thinks as we do! We must not let the fascists defeat us!
And then the left were the fascists...
- Shouldn't.
- Couldn't anyway.
- You're still gonna try.
30 years and we still think we can control the internet.
Once the 'Freedom Gang' gets going, everything online will require a real name - and address - so the Patriots can have frank and candid discussions with those that don't seem American enough.
You just know this is where we are heading.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I own a few parody and """troll""" websites, so I'm biased here.
But I don't think the real name or information of a URL owner should be available to the public. To law enforcement, sure, assuming their reasons for wanting such information are valid and come with a warrant.
I'd rather not have my personal email/name/place of work be flooded with "offended" children that can't understand sarcasm and/or satire demanding that I be fired, thanks.
This is impossible to enforce, because ICANN does not oversight ccTLD domains (such as foo.co), neither does it manage gTLD subdomains (such as foo.bar.com). These will be immediate loopholes to a real name policy.
really want some idiot from the internet to drive to your house to settle an argument. DO YOU? Stupid.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
"Perfect Privacy LLC" - if you look up clintonemail.com, you'll see them. I've looked up various site owners and their name has popped up before. When you search for the owner of the domain, instead of the true registrant, you'll find this company. There are probably others like it.
"That doesn't sound good at all. Clinton's private email system added third parties into the equation, meaning that a hacker could effectively snoop on US government mail without directly hacking US government servers. Nielsen explained that the domain Clinton used for her private email service—clintonemail.com—is owned by a Florida company called "Perfect Privacy, LLC" and registered to another private company called Network Solutions. The relationship between the two companies is unclear since some details have been masked." -- Gizmodo
If I ran a site about tennis and one of my users Insulted one of the various touchy members of crap country royalty around the world, I could find myself detained as I cross some border. Minimally, I could see some country like that holding me until I handed the keys over to my servers so that they could sift through them to see if they could identify the person who did the insults. Or they could just charge me.
Then there are the legions of US lawyers. I could use a link to another site and they sue me for IP theft as I linked to their site. Or defamation, or whatever shitbrained law that a US lawyer thinks they can exploit to ruin my life for a few bucks.
These are two problems that took me two seconds to think of. I suspect if you think this all the way through it won't just be sort of a bad idea, but the sort of idea that only bad people come up with.
In today's environment those with alternative views face vicious personal attacks, doxing to spread their personal details and their address on the Internet, along with death threats. Let people have anonymity so they may speak their minds without the chilling fear of retaliation:
U.S. Supreme Court decision in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1995) case: "Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority...It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation—and their ideas from suppression—at the hand of an intolerant society" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymity#United_States
Just like .edu, .gov all require valid certification (to a degree) for ownership, they could simply institute a new TLD where the registry requires ID validation, and prohibits all privacy services for WHOIS information. Enforce a strict contact availability policy, and you have as good of a system as you can pragmatically setup. As an opt-in TLD, no one would be forced to sacrifice their privacy for their current TLDs, and the sites that want to be legitimate sources of information can host their content on their verified domains.
I don't for a minute think this addresses the problem of the masses believing everything they read on traditional .com sites -- and also especially on social networks. But going this route could potentially improve the accessibility of credible information for those that can be bothered to source-check.
to vote in the US. We don't even require proof of eligibility to vote.
Funny because this shows otherwise.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt. When attackers are using scripts to generate five and six digit domain lists for active attack infrastructures, this current system has failed.
That ship has sailed. ICANN realized a long time ago that the registrars make more money with a "don't ask, don't tell" approach to selling domains. Then on top of that the registrars all offer various registration obfuscation services, which makes them even more money. ICANN isn't willing to lift a finger to expose law breakers with domains, why would they do it for anything else?
The amusing part of this is where people pretend that citizens - or the government - of the US have any meaningful influence on ICANN.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
For the past few years, all we've heard from Google, Facebook, et al., is how deanonymization is going to end trolling and make people Take The Internet Seriously. It hasn't worked. In fact, it has consistently failed spectacularly, and made every problem worse. Doxxing is easier than ever, and is a virtually standard part of arguing on the Internet. Privacy has gone to shit, and the demand for phenomenally unworkable "Right To Be Forgotten" laws has increased, without any concern for the fact that we wouldn't need to forget so many things if people were able to simply remain anonymous.
So no, we should not require real names for domains, or for Youtube accounts, or email, or whatever inane thing it's going to be next. I'm very skeptical that we should have a public WHOIS registry at all, because for many years it has been reduced to a useless racket for registrars to sell "domain privacy" services.
I don't think it should be public. That just provides a handle for people to harass the domain owner.
Next I suppose people will want IP packets to have unique machine identities attached, or for print shops to get ID before doing print runs.
Labor unions spend far more than "large-money donors and super-pacs".
If you have a citation that appears to prove that assertion, feel free to post it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
By all means, require a verified real name for domain name registration and opening an email while we're at it. Also for a Twitter, Snapchat or Facebook account.
I have posted satirical responses in blogs and have them picked and reported in other blogs as factual, and had those blogs read by news agencies who actually in one case reported them over the air (nothing to do with the elections). I have had satirical comments I made be edited into wikipedia articles by others. And edited them back out when I found them. (I have had one edit rejected which was to remove content I was the satirical source for) ... We have in America free speech, the right to make parody or satirical commentary and there should not be excessive restriction on them ... When something is traced backwards as news is verified it should be obvious when it cites something non existent, or all the citations trace to one article.
I actually love when RT.com runs as factual, or bases an article upon, an Onion article. Of course anything traced back to RT.com or Sputnik news is fairly suspect in the first place. Maybe instead we should have certain trust individually in valid news organizations and generally mistrust random articles posted on social media. Remember if you say gullible very very slowly, it rhymes with orange.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Or DANE with an EVC
Someone had to do it.
I my state you just state your name, and they already have your address in the roll. They mark the entry to indicate I have voted. So if someone tried to use my name, I'd get to the poll and find out they think I already voted. Or if they showed up after me, the poll workers would have to look into them. Further, if someone who had not voted wanted to know if their name had been used, they could pretty easily check into the matter. How often has that happened, to anyone? Almost never, because it would be stupid to try... especially since poll workers tend to be from the immediate community and just might know the person who you are trying to impersonate.
Then after voting, the same process happens with a different set of poll workers, who are seated at a distance to the first set, for redundancy.
Eligibility verification happens instead at registration time. and when town clerks clean old entries off the lists. This is when it should happen, to keep the polls running smoothly.
Someone had to do it.
Since the process of validating an identity is already something the CA industry is gearing up for, it would be easier to implement this through DANE with stapled EVC PKI certificates. However, as many have pointed out, anonymity itself should not be banned. Misrepresentation of some other person's identity should probably be, but not anonymity.
Someone had to do it.
one can merely just know another person's name and some easy to know other information to vote in his or her place.
One can try, but in my state at least, your chances of being caught are pretty high.
Someone had to do it.
This. And I only had to scroll to 5/6th of the way to the bottom of the comments to find the sensible one. Who says ACs don't contribute?
Someone had to do it.
A little more than a week ago,a guy opposed by all the Wall Street bankers managed to win the White House spending only a fraction of the money his opponent spent. Hillary ran over a hundred million dollars of TV ads that were un-answered by Trump, she had a number of super-PACs dumping all the dirt they could on Trump, including that "grab 'em by the pussy" tape, the stolen tax documents, endless recordings of Trump saying the worst things he has ever said... she dumped her entire war chest on him which was supposed to have been twice the size of Obama's (which was the first to ever spend $1Billion+).
Citizens United is just a left-wing mantra, a progressive talking point. The "money buys the White House" claim is now a PROVEN false meme.
It turns out that voters still matter more than the money of wealthy special interests.
I think I speak for Turkey when I say YES.
It will be much easier to find and jail all the dissidents who make fun of the beloved leader.
Top CDU folks here in Germany (I am living in Munster) now talk about censoring Facebook. If that really materalizes, what YOU can do is:
+ use USENET. No central censorship possible !
+ use Vkontakte.ru. The Russians do apparently not censor so heavily.
+ use RT.COM Comments. Much freer place for comments than any German mainstream outlet. We still have the same media tycoons controlling media here as we had between 33 and 45. They still do whatever the Chancellor wants them to do.
We're looking at this within the scope of the provision of news. While it would be nice to hold someone accountable for what they write and try to pass off as truth, the slippery slope gets awful steep when you create a rule *over here* that can then be applied broadly *over there*.
Anonymity, generally, serves a very valuable purpose in society, and people are constantly hounded that only criminals and perverts want it. Ask anyone living under an authoritarian regime if they're willing to put their name to their criticisms of their regime? Ask them what they think happens to their family if they do. That's not even a contrived example, but one that people live with *daily*.
People want to get rid of anonymity for the sake of honest reporting, but that's not how it'll work: people will continue to operate within their own echo chambers because, by and large, people aren't taught to think critically about what they read. THAT is the bigger problem, not whether someone writes about XYZ while remaining anonymous. The other dimension is that the state wants to take away your anonymity to make law enforcement's job easier. I'm sorry the police have a hard time doing their job, but the cost to my personal liberty that has to be paid in order for the state to pretend it can keep me safer is too steep.
"We avoid voter fraud by requiring verification of ones name, age and address."
No we freaking don't...... I've never once had anyone ask me any more than my name. Not once has anyone tried to verify anything about me. In fact I once went to produce my ID just to show them who I was and they practically had a heart attack and went into damage control mode assuring me that I didn't need any sort of ID.
I say my name, I sign my name and that's that.
So I don't know where all of this false verification news is coming from because it doesn't happen....
I had to show ID when I voted this month, so yes, it does happen, just not necessarily where you live.
Currently, a domain name can be registered with any name at all, and payments can be made in ways that are virtually anonymous. The fact is, that the "WhoIs" feature allows anyone who wants to can find the information that was used to register that website. Because spammers used that information to harvest lots of email addresses, new businesses cropped up to create a layer of identity security; you'll notice the registered name is changed to refer to the entity that holds the information outside the domain-name registration service, and many of us use that to avoid the spam and nuisance problems. You can reach the domain owner, but they have the freedom to not respond.
The difficulty comes when someone has used a domain name for illegal or nefarious purposes. Law enforcement needs the right to find out who owns a particular domain name, but, to protect free speech, they should require a court-ordered warrant for that information (and that should not be a SECRET court, like the certain governments and agencies have; every person, whether common citizen or crook, must have a legal right to defense and representation by a lawyer who argues FOR privacy on behalf of the unnamed defendant). So, the domain name system SHOULD allow ownership to be concealed, and any attempt to reveal that information should be publicly announced, so the owner has the legal right to challenge the legal proceeding through legal representation. That eliminates the "nuisance" suits (e.g., by spammers, from whom the courts could reject the requests), while allowing legitimate needs for access to that information (e.g., so the domain name owner can't engage in on-line crimes with anonynimity) under judicial overview. That would preserve privacy, and the party asking for the information would have to prove in court a legitimate and legal RIGHT to that information.
Further, the legal proceeding should have to take place in the legal domain (e.g., country, and/or state) where the registrant lives, so that the inconvenience of distance or jurisdiction can't be be used as a "dodge" to get that information without defense by the anonymous domain owner.
"We avoid voter fraud by requiring verification of ones name, age and address."
Certainly that's the CONCEPT behind voter ID, but the reality is that voter fraud is easy, substantial, and sometimes decisive. For any election decided by less than 1% of the vote, voter fraud could easily have flipped the election.
I don't see how this solves the concern. Identity and reputation are two different things. Cecil Adams may or may not be a real person, but still one tends to trust him to tell the truth. Trump, on the other hand is clearly a real person, but many more people would question his reputation for spreading only verifiable truth.
49 - Chicago Cubs?!
So that's how they won! I knew it was rigged...
FYI: If you add up all the unions together in that list, they are pretty high up there.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
How does one make a PGP public key "verifiable" without spending loads of money to fly hundreds of miles to key signing parties?
Until ICANN requires those offering registrable subdomains of a domain registered in one of its gTLDs to pass the identity requirement through to their subscribers or risk getting kicked out of Mozilla's Public Suffix List and comparable lists within the ICANN-controlled .org gTLD. If your domain leaves the PSL, your subscribers won't have their cookies separated, nor will they be eligible for a healthy number of domain-validated TLS certificates from ACME CAs such as Let's Encrypt (source).