spam from cg.ca

[Brandon Sandrowicz]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 01:44:26PM -0400, Darryl Moore wrote:
> I'm yet to be convinced of this. What are they? We have a land registry
> so anyone with a few bucks can find out who the owners are of any piece
> of real estate.
> 
> True, your car ownership is generally private, but your telephone number
> is not unless you pay extra for that privilege.
> 
> What is the rational for keeping this private?

I can think of a number of reasons. First and foremost if you are
hosting a domain that will be used in a way that might prompt people to
want to come after you. Like a forum for battered women, which might
draw the ire of an abusive boyfriend/husband/lover trying to find out
where 'his woman' his hiding.

Think of it another way. Take 4chan.org for instance. To my knowledge
not many (if any) people know the true identity of 'moot' the owner. He
was interviewed for Time magazine and the Washington Post, and they're
not even sure if the name he gave them is real [1]. Can you imagine the
number of people that would like to show up at moot's real doorstep?
Some might just want to take hime out for a beer, while others will
probably want to firebomb his house (much like the 'pro-life' crazies
that bomb abortion clinics).

You're still required to register your real information with the
registrar, it's just a matter of whether or not the public has access to
your info. Or in the case of those 'proxy' services, they have your real
info and just forward on any communications that come to the whois
entry's email/address.

> Put the onus on the other foot and ask why it should be made public?
> Fair enough. At times I've wanted to know what country a particular
> website worked in, which is a fair question in many circumstances. I've
> wanted to contact the owner when neither neither the website was up to
> date or even the CRIA database. (It's amazing what you can discover by
> doing a little bit of cross referencing.)

If the matter is really important, I'm sure you could implore the CRIA
to at least forward on a message from you to the registrant.

> Given that the purpose of a domain name is as a medium to communicate to
> the public, does the public not have some right right to know who it is
> they are communicating with?

A domain WHOIS entry is not a authenticator of indentity.

> If you really want to hide your identity, there are still ways of doing
> it with rented servers, virtual domains, and dynamic DNS, so those that
> really insist upon anonymity can still have it, but in general the
> public's right to know who they are dealing with is met.

How so? How is Dynamic DNS any different than an actual DNS entry with
no public contact information? If I used Dynamic DNS to present my
website to the world, then how does this jive with your statement above
about the public having a right to know who they are communicating with?

You're saying that the public has a right to know who you are, but then
you are saying that you can just use other ways to anonymize yourself.
If your argument is that the public has a right to know, then shouldn't
_any_ form of anonymizing yourself be against that view? Assuming that
they both offer equivalent anonymity, why would one method be any worse
than another?

On that note, how does a rented server and/or virtual domains help
anything if my WHOIS entry has my name, address, email, and phone number
in it?

> As well, we have reverse whois which will tell you who owns a particular
> set of IP numbers. These have not been made private? So what the
> difference between reverse IP, and reverse telephone numbers vs domain
> names? Very little that I can see.

Reverse IP lookup just tells you the hosting company. Most people don't
purchase blocks of IPs under their name. Just in the same way that a
reverse lookup on my home IP will only give you my ISP, not me. Even if I
was paying my ISP for a static IP, to my knowledge reverse IP lookup
just shows who owns the IP block, not who is leasing a particular IP
from the block owner.


[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moot_(4chan)#moot.27s_ident
-- 
Brandon Sandrowicz

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