Re: [ga] whois.txt, ala robots.txt, as a standard ?

[Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com>]

Ram and all former DNSO GA members or other interested parties,

  I agree that throwing the baby out with the bath water, as you
say is a very bad idea.  However your use of that phrase is in
our members view, and mine, to far in the other direction.  That
being that Personal Privacy and security is superior to
operations personnel use of Whois data to find or track
abusers.  There are far to many other tools and methods
that are also better suited to address those concerns than
requiring as a quasi-standard that Stakeholders/registrants
to provide their personal and private information for
Whois data purposes as part of their Domain Name
registration.  Indeed to do so invites frauds, spammers,
unwanted marketing queries stalkers, and terrorists to dupe
those registrants with that very same personal and private
information.  It's simply too dangerous in a world of
growing terrorist threats and increasing fraudulent corporate
behavior to allow for such to be a requirement as displayable
data in a Whois query.

  Unfortunately Afilias is one of the several abusers of registrants
that ICANN has unfortunately allowed or "Accredited" as a
registry.

Ram Mohan wrote:

> Ross,
> Interesting thoughts and an interesting premise.  The problem is, that the
> groups you mention here (marketers, IP folks, etc) are not the only people
> who utilize Whois information.
>
> System operators (including technicians, systems administrators responding
> to abuse, etc) often depend solely on information found in Whois to
> determine next courses of action for serious network and other related
> issues.  This is not just a marketing/bulk messages problem ... there is
> real and legitimate use of this information (which was one of the original
> goals of having such a service).
>
> Your premise is also that all individuals provide accurate information.  We
> know (you definitely do, as a registrar) that some of the most egregious
> violators make sure that they provide _false_ information.  Giving
> individuals the sole right to provide information about them seems to swing
> the pendulum too far one way.
>
> Having said that, I was one of the team who worked with PIR to suggest the
> "OrgCloak" service -- which would allow individuals to cloak personal
> information from the general public for reasons of privacy.  I advocate the
> protection of individual's private information from general purpose
> data-mining and public abuse.  However, your suggested solution provides a
> wonderful shelter for every spammer, DDoS violator and domain-slammer to
> hide behind.
>
> The Whois Task Force is working on providing meaningful recommendations
> that, among other things, addresses the issue of Bulk Whois.  The IETF
> Provreg group is debating adding a <privacy> element as a standard part of
> the de-facto standard domain protocol (EPP).  Let's be careful not to throw
> the baby out with the bath water.
>
> -ram
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> Ram Mohan
> Vice President, Business Operations
> Chief Technology Officer
> Afilias (http://www.afilias.info)
> e: rmohan@afilias.info
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Ross Wm. Rader" <ross@tucows.com>
> To: "'George Kirikos'" <gkirikos@yahoo.com>; <ga@dnso.org>
> Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 1:47 PM
> Subject: RE: [ga] whois.txt, ala robots.txt, as a standard ?
>
> > These are interesting thoughts George, but I really believe that we need
> > to completely disengage from the current system and its implications and
> > start again from scratch. This proposal and those in development
> > elsewhere seem to place an emphasis on fixing the mistakes of whois
> > rather than creating a system that works.
> >
> > Let's start the re-engineering with a very basic question.
> >
> > Marketers do not need more rights when it comes to my personal data. The
> > trademark, copyright and patent lobby do not need further rights when it
> > comes to the protection of their interests. Individuals need a very
> > basic mechanism that provides marketers and anyone else who wishes to
> > use this very personal data with a means to ask the individual for
> > permission to use the data. Once permission has been granted, then the
> > individual can provide that information to the marketer.
> >
> > Full stop.
> >
> > Thefore, the basic question is, how do we do this? We can't even begin
> > to start fixing the problem until we acknowledge that customers have
> > lsot control of their data. The first step towards a solution lies in
> > giving that control back.
> >
> >
> >
> >                        -rwr
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > "There's a fine line between fishing and standing on the shore like an
> > idiot."
> > - Steven Wright
> >
> > Get Blog... http://www.byte.org/
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: owner-ga@dnso.org [mailto:owner-ga@dnso.org] On Behalf
> > > Of George Kirikos
> > > Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 1:39 PM
> > > To: ga@dnso.org
> > > Subject: [ga] whois.txt, ala robots.txt, as a standard ?
> > >
> > >
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > I was reading through the latest WHOIS task force updates, at:
> > >
> > http://does-not-exist.net/final-report/final-report-feb03-030201v0.html
> >
> > and a thought came to mind. Just as there is a "robots.txt" standard for
> > webcrawlers like Google, how about having a whois.txt standard that
> > folks can optionally use on their websites?
> >
> > For those who don't want to put in anything beyond the standard WHOIS
> > output (i.e. for privacy, or to avoid spam), they can leave a blank
> > whois.txt on their website or omit it entirely. For those who want
> > "enhanced" contact details, and want to be easily found, they can
> > supplement what's already in the standard WHOIS.
> >
> > For instance, they can provide additional contacts, WHOIS in different
> > languages, contact info for various countries, etc. This can also assist
> > in the goal of WHOIS accuracy -- in case the registrant is unable to be
> > reached from their existing WHOIS info, the registrar can try the info
> > in their (by default) http://www.example.com/whois.txt
> >
> > Perhaps someone clever can even think of an XML format or something for
> > this enhanced WHOIS, to allow standard tools (like other WHOIS servers,
> > such as www.betterwhois.com or www.uwhois.com, etc.) to parse it. Folks
> > like Alexa, for example, who already supply contact details at:
> >
> > http://www.alexa.com/data/details?url=icann.org
> >
> > (type a different URL, to see if that domain's contact info is correct)
> > can crawl the web to get the contacts automatically, instead of mining
> > the WHOIS, optionally for those who want to be found easily.
> >
> > Sincerely,
> >
> > George Kirikos
> > http://www.kirikos.com/
> > --
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>
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Regards,

--
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 129k members/stakeholders strong!)
================================================================
CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng. SR. Eng. Network data security
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com
Contact Number: 214-244-4827 or 214-244-3801


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