Re: Thick vs.thin (was: [ga] Casting stones)

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr>]

On Wed, Aug 07, 2002 at 07:50:00AM -0700,
 William X Walsh <william@wxsoft.info> wrote 
 a message of 26 lines which said:

> > Care to explain  or is it just FUD?
> 
> Makes it easier for them to cover their tracks, Stephane.  Makes it
> that much easier for them to hide from the consequences of their
> actions.

Yes, that's what I thought, you do not understand the difference
between privacy and secrecy. So let me explain.  

Privacy does not mean I advocate completely hiding the social
information by shutting down the whois server.

Privacy means that *some* limits (which have to be defined) are set to
the (mis)use of personal data. For instance, in France, transferring
(in bulk, not in detail) personal data to a country without sufficient
protection, such as the USA, is illegal. Unlike what even many French
believe, it is not forbidden to have a public whois, just that *some*
things are regulated (the registry may go further and add other
protections for its customers).

> Some antispam services automatically block all domains under TLDs
> which do not have a public whois server available that provides full
> contact information, for this very reason.

Pure bluff. This would suppress mail for most African and
Latin-American countries (which typically do not have a whois for
practical reasons) but would allow .COM (whose database is public but,
for this very reason, highly unreliable) to spam everyone. BS.

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