So what's the big deal? Most of Doom 3's target audience had more than 384MB of RAM, GeForce3/Radeon 8500, and a gig-and-a-half processor sometime in 2001.
Expecting to play such a game on a craptacular OEM desktop box, especially one made more than about two years ago, is unrealistic.
Complaints sent to any of them are promptly auto-acked and then/dev/nulled (if they don't bounce) and so the spammers keep on spamming, most likely due to ephemeral pink contracts and the crooked marketing/sales departments that agree to them, who then put pressure on abuse personel and network admins to ignore complaints about the contracted spammers.
Because of this, those large ISPs and backbones end up on blacklists, DNS blocklists, and a wide variety of other filters. For them, the money they make off the spammers seems to be of greater concern than the money they make off legitimate customers, i.e. those who end up with their netblocks on every blacklist because of who their providers are.
If it weren't for rogue ISPs and backbones, there would be little use for blacklists or blocklists. However, those reprehensible companies do exist. And because of their policies on spam, they continue to be blocked. Money gained from spammers guarantees the blacklists' continued existence.
It's all just cause and effect. As much as it sounds like a conspiracy theory, I truly believe that it isn't, after fighting spam, one email at a time, since 1997.
Though I'm sure such people exist, I can't recall ever meeting a single non-Microsoft user over the past decade or so that bought a Dell box just to install Linux or [insert alternative OS here] on it, though I've done it myself on a work-provided box. The only "people" that do this are corporations that buy preconfigured servers with *BSD or something installed on it.
Seriously, why pay Dell $1300-$1500 or more for a box you could easily and quickly build yourself for half that price? Why bother with esoteric junk like motherboard riser cards and OEM-specific PSU plugs, or non-reusable cases?
I can understand corporations buying the brand name so they have something to blame if something goes wrong (I hate corporate philosophy), but this shouldn't affect end users in the slightest...
...unless you're buying a laptop.
But even then, just about every *nix installer these days will conveniently format an existing Windows partition if it's told to. If you're going to pay as much as Dell and its competitors charge for an OEM box, you can afford the additional $100 for the unnecessary Windows license.
The cheaper PC parts get, the more new users.
The more new net users (AOLers?), the more spam.
I recall reading something on news.admin.net-abuse.email a while ago about a company that provided webhosting to businesses, and something like 95% of their new customers spammed. I'd imagine that rate could be applied to new members of online services a la AOL, Prodigy, et al, and probably half that rate for new net users connecting via actual ISPs.
But if the copyright holder so desires whatever domain name has been registered by someone else, then why didn't the copyright holder register it first? Case in point: juliaroberts.com, melgibson.com, kevinspacy.com, et al.
"Cybersquatters" should not be sued and forced to relinquish the trademarked domain name. I would think that making an offer to the squatter would be infinitely more cost-effective than actual litigation.
Eliminating or restricting access to whois is folly, really.
I work for a domain name registrar, which I like to think gives me a better perspective on this issue.
Removing the info already in the whois database would have some technical consequences most likely ignored by congress and friends. They are:
a) Registrar-to-registrar domain name transfers would be slowed to a standstill, because without the administrative contact email gleaned from whois, current ICANN transfer regulations would make it impossible to authorise a transfer. The way the current system works depends on the email listed for the admin contact on domain pending transfer -- an auth request email is sent there and, if the email is responded to, the domain is transferred.
b) Without whois, the only way to verify, pre-propagation, that nameserver changes were succesful would to dig the domain on the box acting as its SOA. Even if you could find out before propagation, how many web-based dig lookups have you seen, compared to web-based whois lookups? 90% or so of domain purchasers have never even seen a command prompt.
c) As previously mentioned, whois is instrumental in ferreting out spam hierarchies.
As it stands now, too much is dependant upon the existing whois database. Change it, and you change the way domains are registered and administered. Most domain purchasers are just barely competent enough (and tons still aren't) to handle their domains using the existing system. Changing it now would be counter-productive, at best.
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So what's the big deal? Most of Doom 3's target audience had more than 384MB of RAM, GeForce3/Radeon 8500, and a gig-and-a-half processor sometime in 2001.
Expecting to play such a game on a craptacular OEM desktop box, especially one made more than about two years ago, is unrealistic.
https://asdfhaulshfhasdf.com -- The connection was refused when attempting to contact asdfhaulshfhasdf.com.
ftp> open asdfhaulshfhasdf.com
Connected to asdfhaulshfhasdf.com (64.94.110.11)
421 Service not available, remote server has closed connection
ftp>
telnet> open asdfhaulshfhasdf.com
telnet: asdfhaulshfhasdf.com: Name or service not known
asdfhaulshfhasdf.com: Host name lookup failure
telnet>
$ ping asdfhaulshfhasdf.com
PING asdfhaulshfhasdf.com (64.94.110.11) 56(84) bytes of data.
^C
--- asdfhaulshfhasdf.com ping statistics ---
45 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 44011ms
No point in going on, I suppose...
The real problem is large ISPs/backbones like UUNet/MCI, Cogent, Comcast, Level3, China Netcom, AT&T, Brasil Telecom, and Above.net (among others) who flat-out refuse to do anything about the spammers to whom they provide connectivity.
Complaints sent to any of them are promptly auto-acked and then /dev/nulled (if they don't bounce) and so the spammers keep on spamming, most likely due to ephemeral pink contracts and the crooked marketing/sales departments that agree to them, who then put pressure on abuse personel and network admins to ignore complaints about the contracted spammers.
Because of this, those large ISPs and backbones end up on blacklists, DNS blocklists, and a wide variety of other filters. For them, the money they make off the spammers seems to be of greater concern than the money they make off legitimate customers, i.e. those who end up with their netblocks on every blacklist because of who their providers are.
If it weren't for rogue ISPs and backbones, there would be little use for blacklists or blocklists. However, those reprehensible companies do exist. And because of their policies on spam, they continue to be blocked. Money gained from spammers guarantees the blacklists' continued existence.
It's all just cause and effect. As much as it sounds like a conspiracy theory, I truly believe that it isn't, after fighting spam, one email at a time, since 1997.
Though I'm sure such people exist, I can't recall ever meeting a single non-Microsoft user over the past decade or so that bought a Dell box just to install Linux or [insert alternative OS here] on it, though I've done it myself on a work-provided box. The only "people" that do this are corporations that buy preconfigured servers with *BSD or something installed on it.
...unless you're buying a laptop.
Seriously, why pay Dell $1300-$1500 or more for a box you could easily and quickly build yourself for half that price? Why bother with esoteric junk like motherboard riser cards and OEM-specific PSU plugs, or non-reusable cases?
I can understand corporations buying the brand name so they have something to blame if something goes wrong (I hate corporate philosophy), but this shouldn't affect end users in the slightest...
But even then, just about every *nix installer these days will conveniently format an existing Windows partition if it's told to. If you're going to pay as much as Dell and its competitors charge for an OEM box, you can afford the additional $100 for the unnecessary Windows license.
It's a simple equation...
The cheaper PC parts get, the more new users.
The more new net users (AOLers?), the more spam.
I recall reading something on news.admin.net-abuse.email a while ago about a company that provided webhosting to businesses, and something like 95% of their new customers spammed. I'd imagine that rate could be applied to new members of online services a la AOL, Prodigy, et al, and probably half that rate for new net users connecting via actual ISPs.
But if the copyright holder so desires whatever domain name has been registered by someone else, then why didn't the copyright holder register it first? Case in point: juliaroberts.com, melgibson.com, kevinspacy.com, et al.
"Cybersquatters" should not be sued and forced to relinquish the trademarked domain name. I would think that making an offer to the squatter would be infinitely more cost-effective than actual litigation.
Congress is apparently neglecting to notice that countries selling ccTLD-based domains usually maintain their own whois databases.
Not entirely surprising, eh?
Eliminating or restricting access to whois is folly, really.
I work for a domain name registrar, which I like to think gives me a better perspective on this issue.
Removing the info already in the whois database would have some technical consequences most likely ignored by congress and friends. They are:
a) Registrar-to-registrar domain name transfers would be slowed to a standstill, because without the administrative contact email gleaned from whois, current ICANN transfer regulations would make it impossible to authorise a transfer. The way the current system works depends on the email listed for the admin contact on domain pending transfer -- an auth request email is sent there and, if the email is responded to, the domain is transferred.
b) Without whois, the only way to verify, pre-propagation, that nameserver changes were succesful would to dig the domain on the box acting as its SOA. Even if you could find out before propagation, how many web-based dig lookups have you seen, compared to web-based whois lookups? 90% or so of domain purchasers have never even seen a command prompt.
c) As previously mentioned, whois is instrumental in ferreting out spam hierarchies.
As it stands now, too much is dependant upon the existing whois database. Change it, and you change the way domains are registered and administered. Most domain purchasers are just barely competent enough (and tons still aren't) to handle their domains using the existing system. Changing it now would be counter-productive, at best.