[At-Large] whois, weirds, and slaves

Holly Raiche h.raiche at internode.on.net
Sun Jan 20 03:37:45 UTC 2013


Hi John

We are not going to worry about US history now.  What I am particularly concerned about is differentiated access and privacy. And all I can say is pity about WEIRDS.  I attended the WEIRDS briefing in Tornoto and have reread the slides as they were presented..  What was said then was about differentiated access amongst other things - including, and perhaps primarily, having a standard protocol for WHOIS - that doesn't exist now. 

From what you are saying, the messages given at Toronto aren't going to happen. 

I hope, therefore, at the Beijing meeting, you - or someone from the group - will give a presentation that clarifies what WEIRDS will and won't do so the rest of us don't think that anything is going to happen on the names front - and then try to address the privacy issues in other ways. Meanwhile, as Karl noted. LEAs will still manage to eventually track the miscreants down.  It just won't be as neat, more damage will have been done, and it won't be as respecting of privacy.  Not a very satisfying outcome really.

Holly


On 20/01/2013, at 12:18 PM, John R. Levine wrote:

>> The 2nd amendment was all about the colonists protesting ...
> 
> Colonists?  The Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, a decade after the 
> revolution was over.  The 2nd is about southern militias that put down 
> slave rebellions.  Read about it here:
> 
> http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery
> 
> We can certainly agree it has no relevance to anything ICANN does.
> 
>> What is being developed by the IETF is the WEIRDS protocol which, 
>> amongst other things, will allow differentiated access to Whois data. 
>> This will allow those who want to exercise their legitimate right to 
>> privacy to do so, ...
> 
> Sorry, no, that's not what WEIRDS is doing.
> 
> For one thing, WEIRDS is really about redoing WHOIS for IP addresses.  As 
> the group was being chartered, a bunch of people showed up, loudly 
> demanded that we do names as well, and then predictably disappeared 
> without doing any work.  (Not quite all, one or two guys are toiling away, 
> but given how poorly the names community understands the issues, I doubt 
> there will be much progress.)  So WEIRDS is unlikely to produce anything 
> for names.  We knew this would happen, so the charter specifically allows 
> the IP address work to go ahead while the names spin their wheels.
> 
> Even if it does, the differentiated access is nothing new.  Try looking up 
> six names in a row at Godaddy's WHOIS server, and you'll find that it 
> starts providing much less info in each response, unless you're connecting 
> from an IP for which they've relaxed the rate limits.  The WEIRDS stuff 
> just provides a cleaner way to do what existing WHOIS servers do with 
> per-IP rate limits and CAPTCHAs.
> 
> And please keep in mind that the IETF has exactly zero interest in getting 
> involved in policy disputes, so we'll design a way that a client can pass 
> credentials to a WEIRDS server, but not what the server does with those 
> credentials.  This project is to provide a spec that the RIRs and perhaps 
> name registries can use to do what they do now, but in a way that scales 
> better and is easier to script.
> 
> R's,
> John
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