ICANN’s Last Call for Whois Comments

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ICANN’s Last Call for Whois Comments

By CircleID Reporter
January 12, 2007 Views: 13,106 Add Comment

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From “Last Call for Whois Comments”, a recent opinion piece by eWeek’s Security Center Editor Larry Seltzer:

“It’s not a good sign when the criminals and the lawyers are on the same side of an issue; there may be no good solution to the problems of Whois service rules.

Who would have imagined that so much business and so much abuse would center around Internet domain names? Certainly not the designers of the system, including those of the Whois service, which reports on ownership and some other data on domain names. But an effort to reform the process is underway, and you have just a few days left to get in your opinion.

Whois, like so much else of the Internet, was designed in an era of hippie trust amounting to naiveté. Of course it would have been better and, like, beautiful, man, if we could just trust users with ownership and contact information for domain names.

But instead, the administration of the Domain Name System has turned into a disaster for everyone except those who abuse it, and much of the trouble stems directly from the free availability of this information. I suspect that one of the earliest sources for spam address harvesting was Whois, and it also provides the foundation for most examples of domain name theft.”

Full article located here on eWeek.

By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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