On Wed, Sep 29, 2004 at 01:24:37PM +1200, Juha Saarinen wrote:
what side effects do you think accrue from the effect of turning off or anonymising whois? (both good and bad)
Good, it may make spammer harvesting of email address a bit harder, and perhaps also help prevent abuse like domain squatting/hijacking. Dubious that it would though, and it would create more hoops for legitimate registrants to jump through as well.
Bad, it'd make the registrants anonymous. I bet if .nz were to anonymise whois, spammers would register all their throwaway domains here. If you don't give out any whois information at all, it'd be hard to keep details like nameserver records accurate.
How about restricting access to whois information via a registration-required web interface, rate limit access dependant on GeoIP location, and make it difficult for scripts. Increase the cost of massive data mine, but still allow reasonable (*) access to information. For example the Companies Office in NZ, and I've had a few whois queries point to web interfaces instead. (*) I've use whois info to inform people of viruses main times. Nicholas