This is a most tech rant, so some of you probably won’t care about it at all. But it’s also a privacy rights rant, so I suppose there’s something for everyone. I might even mention kittens. All right, I just did. Moving on…
There’s a service on the Internet called Whois. You can think of it like the phone book for the Internet. Basically, it stores the registration data for owners of millions of web domains (like mine). This can be a very useful tool for various reasons. Since it lists things like phone numbers and addresses for domain owners, it can be useful for tracking down pirates, spammers, and other problem-causing website owners. The IP address side of Whois has helped me many times identify the people who spam my blog so I could report them to their Internet service provider.
But there are some out there who want to do away with Whois entirely. They call themselves privacy advocates, but I have a feeling most of them just don’t like the idea of the law being able to track them down for doing illegal things. Privacy advocates can be like that sometimes. Anyways, the whole thing annoys me. A large group of these people are pushing to remove the Whois requirements placed on domain registrars (the companies you pay to get a .com, .net, .whatever) so people don’t have to put their contact info on a publicly accessible database. This will make it much harder to find the owners of illegal websites, as you can no doubt guess. What torrent site owner is really going to put his name and phone number on the Internet if he doesn’t have to?