Tuesday, March 8, 2005

Loss of anonymity?

In response to this, I'll
add:
  1. YOU GAIN the a better chance at tracking down
    spammers and domain thieves
  2. YOU GAIN a better ability to
    contact owners of misbehaving network systems
  3. YOU GAIN a
    little peace of mind by forcing domain owners to cut back on their own
    abuse.

Personally, I don't like how it was done but I do
like the fact that "something is being done". The current situation
which allows certain spammer-oriented Registrars to operate makes
running even a simple blog like this (on someone else's site) a constant
battle with jerks and assholes trying to earn off of your volunteered
work.

The author of that article needs to take a few civics lessons
too. There is no right to operate a website anonymously. Anonymity is
something you might gain by making traceback difficult but it is not a
Constitutional right.

Neither does the First Amendment guarantee the
right to speak anonymously. The First Amendment prevents the government
from censuring your speech. It does not prevent the government from
holding you responsible for what you say, nor does provide any guarantee
of anonymity that would allow you to avoid that responsibility.

In all
9 of the authors examples, he claims that anonymity is lost. What
actually occurred was a return to responsibility. The anonymity that
"you" are losing was a temporary side effect of the relaxing rules. For
those of us that used Registrars that kept to the rules, our info was
posted and is readily available. Spam and malicious code has reached
record levels and unless we (as a society) start tightening the rules,
the problems are only going to get worse. We're about to move to a
different network protocol (IPv6). How about we leave some of the
problems behind?

Apologies for the rant. I'm tired of tracing crap
back through Gandi and similar.

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