Nominet Compromising UK WHOIS Privacy, Wants To See Gov't-Issued ID 71
ktetch-pirate (1850548) writes Earlier this week, Nominet launched the .uk domain to great fanfare, but hidden in that activity has been Nominet's new policy of exposing personal domain owners' home addresses. Justification is based on a site being judged "commercial," which can mean anything from a few Google ads or an Amazon widget, to an email subscription box or linking to too many commercial sites, according to Nominet reps. In the meantime though, they want your driving license or passport to ensure "accuracy" because they "want to make things safe."
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In that case, my advice: bring Tony Blair to trial.
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Operation Just Cause. I Never Trust Phake-Registry Sites. Go With .name If You Want To Hide In Your Shell Rudy.
I'm waiting for Operation Just Cause 3. That will be awesome!!!
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Operation Just Cause. I Never Trust Phake-Registry Sites. Go With .name If You Want To Hide In Your Shell Rudy.
I'm waiting for Operation Just Cause 3. That will be awesome!!!
Unfortunately, it will only run on Xbox One and require Kinect.
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Well, it involves a lot of hand-waving...and shouting...
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You're on the train to nowhere...
Laws like European Electronic Commerce Directive (Score:2)
Re:Laws like European Electronic Commerce Directiv (Score:5, Informative)
Right. The European Union has completely different privacy rules for individuals and businesses. For individuals, there's the European Privacy Directive, which gives Europeans much stronger privacy rights than in the US. For businesses, it's completely different. Online businesses face the European Electronic Commerce Directive, and have to disclose who's behind the business.
That's deliberate EU policy. The whole point of the single European market is to make it easy to buy and sell across national boundaries within the EU. So there are lots of EU rules which benefit consumers and prevent businesses from operating in the country with the weakest regulation.
The .us domain registrar doesn't allow anonymous registration, either. Actually, neither does ICANN. The registrant listed in Whois owns the domain. If that's some "private registration" front, they own the domain. This became a big deal when RegisterFly tanked and people with "private registration" discovered they really didn't own domains they thought were theirs. That took months to straighten out.
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address is a UPS Box.
Did you mean USPS Box (PO Box)?
Or has UPS begun a private mailbox service?
Or do you live in an actual UPS cardboard box?
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I was told a house without wheels was a step up. Are you suggesting there is something wrong with living in a UPS cardboard box?
Re:the internet is growing up (Score:4, Interesting)
Having a website in no way equates to driving a car, that is a ridiculous analogy. Your driver's license is not openly available to millions at any given time, and a website is not a large vehicle that can be driven into a crowd of actual flesh and blood people. And if the service provider has monopoly, where exactly do you take your business?
Can't opt out of all services (Score:2, Informative)
You can opt out of that by not using their services.
The government requires people to either A. purchase specific goods and services from private companies or B. go to prison. Indecent exposure laws require purchase of clothing. Vagrancy laws require owning or leasing a home. And universal healthcare laws require either buying private health insurance or making less than the poverty line.
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Those who call for an end to privacy, usually have something to gain from it.
Except that a lot of people who call for an end to privacy have nothing to gain and actually lose. ESR is one of those people, and I had to drop him from my G+ circles because I just couldn't stand the cognitive dissonance (doublethink, if we're going to use Orwell) any longer.
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BMO
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No, I'm not kidding.
I use g+ to follow Linus and others.
Wait, are you one of the guys who started putting X-NoArchive in the text of your usenet posts when DejaNews showed up?
>putting google in 0.0.0.0
There's being judicious about what you post, and then there's paranoia.
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BMO
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which include using your real, verifiable identity
Pray tell, which ones? None of the ones I use. Even online services that "require" a cell number really don't - they put in grayed out text a clickthrough to skip it, even Facebook.
If you're talking about banking and payment services, they've required your real identity in meatspace for hundreds of years, so it's not the same thing as what we're discussing here. All online services have unenforceable and unconscionable terms and conditions. I can require
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In theory you have the option of just not using water. Collect rain or buy bottled - you might need to get a chemical toilet or dig a hole in the garden, but someone might go to such lengths in protest. I didn't even get that: The water company is also the drainage company, and charge for the service of removing the water that falls on any land you own. Unless you can somehow stop it from raining, you have to pay.
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In California, collecting rainwater is actually illegal. The water is owned by the city or state, or whoever, but not the homeowner.
But the whole premise of the argument is flawed. Although people pay for water to be delivered through pipes to their hoses, the largest cost that the bills cover is actually the removal and treatment of wastewater. So, yes, buy all your water in bottles, but then don't allow any water to go down your drai
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The water rights aren't necessarily owned by the government, but by the people downstream who were using the water before you [wikipedia.org]—maybe a municipal water system, but just as likely a farmer, an industrial plant, etc. By capturing rainwater you would be infringing on their private property rights in that water.
Colorado, in 2009, began issuing permits for residential rainwater collection, in part because of a study that showed that in some locations most rainwater evaporated or was used by plants before
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You can eliminate wastewater disposal with a bit of replumbing - if you need to, get a septic tank. But how can you stop it from raining?
Somewere I'm sure you can find a place where not only does the water company own the rain that falls on your property, but you've not choice but to pay them to take it away and pay them again to get it back.
whois already posts it (Score:2)
mine address is in whois for every domain I own; sure there are a couple major shoddy registrars that will put in their address instead of yours for your domains but they completely suck for other reasons.
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awesome that you leave the stalkers the start of the bread crumb trail
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causal ones also less healthy for target by not promoting elevated heart and breathing rates and fleeing. Role of increased mental stimulation in helping staving off neural senescence or senility can't be ignored either
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I'm in the UK, and I use Domains by Proxy.
I work with a school. I occasionally give students the address of my server, as I've a couple of utilities up there I made for use in IT classes (A public-domain* music collection, a utility to make rollover graphics). I can't risk students finding out my home address! I'd get a brick through my window for all the games sites I blocked.
*Only in Europe. Sorry yanks.
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get a PO Box.
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That's fine if you are prepared to pay the large cost for DbP and never want to change registrars. I had some domains at Godaddy with DbP protection. I found that to move to another registrar, I had to first remove the domains from DbP, thus making the whois information public for a few hours during the transfer.
Nominet is typical British hypocrisy. (Score:1)
They always looked to have avoided the commercialisation of other country/international DNS services, but having known someone who crawled their way into the hierarchy with little knowledge of the system but an excellent politician, I learned that really they're just the same as any Verizon but with less honesty about how they operate.
This aside, the Nominet position has always been to require honest data but to allow people operating non-commercially to hide their information from whois. On the latter, fra
Re:Nominet is typical British hypocrisy. (Score:4, Insightful)
I disabled it Then it was "I had google adverts". I disabled them. Then I had 'lots of links to trading sites" and "email subscription module" And then I filed a complaint for being absurd, and so the next morning they published my home address. UK Gov calls a business anything that makes a profit. It also accepts that hobbies can bring in some money, but when it becomes profitable, then it's not a business and is a hobby. Nominet calls a site commercial based on the "I'll know it when I see it" standard, with an extremist mindset.To quote the 'senior Nominet Customer advisor' who was chosen to deal with this case,
It's the same as indecency. What's acceptable to one, may be offensive to another. Should we go to the extremist view, 'skin showing is indecent' to appease the extremists, or should things reflect societal norms? Like 'all skin is indecent', anything involving anything commercial, even at one remove, makes this site commercial' is an extremist view. Does linking to your twitter profile, or a facebook page make you 'commercial'? Just read a good book, and wanted to share that on your site, with a link to where you can buy it means you're a business? Nominet says so. is that normal in the current state of society?
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That quote is by their 'second level' support, who took over the issue at the direction of the acting customer service head, following my complaint.
It was reiterated by the acting head of customer ser
this should apply to all domains worldwide (Score:5, Interesting)
Every single domain should have accurate and verifiable information for the owner, administrative, and technical contacts. The use of services which anonymize or mask domain owners should be prohibited.Whois was intended to enable you to identify the ownership of a domain and who to contact about it.
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That's a nice polemic statement, completely unsupported by any evidence supporting why making the information public is a good idea.
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And, of course, none of those sort of people would ever fib, right?
OTOH, anyone who says anything online has a good reason not to tell every kook and killer in the world where they live.
Go ahead, post your complete and accurate contact info right here. Do include phone number.
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whaa work is so hard
And yeah, who eneds privacy because it makes some 'investigator's job hard. I'm pretty sure we can knock crime on the head if we throw privacy out of the window and abolish pesky things like 'search warrants'.
In fact, let's do just what you say in meatspace - lets lock down cities, and then send squads of cops door-to-door in every town. We'll clean up the 'crime' that's there, and there won't have to do any petty investigating. orangina's all around!
The issue is not fake domain info. The issue is leg
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Yet that domain name is just an entry in a database, pretty meaningless in reality and totally controlled by where an end user DNS points. You can see the day coming, with the end of Net Neutrality where major multi-national ISPs decide that all the domain name money is theirs and route all traffic to their DNS servers and unless you pay them, your domain name no longer exist, it will be in their EULA, that the end user most use the ISPs domain name servers, or pay extra as a result of the extra cost of us
TFA's a bit long - can't find ref to passport! (Score:2)
Anyway, from my brief skimmage, I could find no mention of passports or driving licences. Does anyone know what the summary is referring to?
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Basically, if you have a UK domain, and they can't 'verify' you in the big brother databases, you got to send them ID now.
There's a very good reason.... (Score:1)
....for me not being able to go to a web site and use a vehicle number plate to look up the address of the jerk who cut me up in traffic today.
Similar reasons surely need to apply to domain registrations.
So ... (Score:2)