Ronald the reason I haven't responded to your previous emails is that you are talking utter nonsense. And as usual the two relevant sentences in your huge, long rants are lost in all the offensive and pointless references. You talk of fanatics, extremists, dictators, alarmists, privacy paranoia, perverts, fetish, fetishizing secrecy, journalists, activists, teachers, ethics, morality, political viewpoint, "old school" view, imaginary imperative, obvious disasters, over-reaction, opinions, pretense, RIPE structures of power, planned agenda of recalcitrance, obstructionism, consistant inaction, institutionalized dysfunction, lethargic EU member countries, opaque wall of stony silence, totally made-up bovine excrement, garbage, absolute horse manure, stealthy secrecy and deliberate opacity baked in, gay rights in Florida, God, Hell, .US registries, UBOs, etc. How on earth do you expect anyone to follow what little arguments you have when wrapped in all this crap. You have managed, in a few long emails, to insult or offend me, other contributors, the RIPE NCC, their legal council, the RIPE community, 20k+ member organisations and the EU with your arrogant, bullying attitude...Ronald is of course right, anyone who doesn't see the world as you do is an extremist, fanatical dictator. Why should anyone fear having their address in this open, public database? If you suffer from it, it's not the database's fault, it's your fault for giving your real address when asked for it. Clearly there are so many options available for you to confuse everyone. As in that video presentation I referenced from Europol when they explained how their investigation came to a dead end at a drop box. So yes great idea Ronald. Lets encourage everyone to get PO (Drop) boxes instead of using real addresses. Guess who is going to be queuing up at the post office tomorrow to register for these boxes using those 'borrowed' IDs from the pub? Probably every abuser across the region, given the way you have so heavily promoted this option across your recent set of rants. You have confused the issues so much that now I will have to answer your circular, repetitive arguments. On Tue, 7 Jun 2022 at 00:36, Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg@tristatelogic.com> wrote:
In message <CAKvLzuG7PPTtQDwx2GoDgULdmLZdz5FzWTwa2pUVQWRqGHfQig@mail.gmail.com> denis walker <ripedenis@gmail.com> wrote:
We are talking about restricting access to one piece of data, the address of natural persons. I accept that a lot of abuse may come from address space held by natural people. I understand that a lot of investigation work is done by companies and individuals. How much of an impact would it be on your activities to not know the private address of these natural people?
Just a second. Let's pause here for a moment and look at this question of the "physical address" information as it relates to WHOIS records.
One of the many things that have, over the past several years, rendered almost all of the information that is now available in *domain name* WHOIS records virtually entirely worthless was the decision, some considerable time ago, by ICANN, to permit the use of essentially anonymous P.O. box addresses in the WHOIS records for domains registered within the gTLDs. Additional commonly used methods of obfsucation in these domain name WHOIS records include but are not limited to (a) the use of "proxy" registrants and (b) the use of addresses of incorporation agents and (c) use of the addresses of attorneys. (I have not surveyed the policies of the various ccTLDs with regards to their level of acceptance of such shenanigans but I have no reason to doubt that even the .US TLD allows for all of these clever methods of "hiding the ball" with respect to the actual physical location of the domain name registrant. Hell! The policies governing the .US domain are crystal clear in prohibiting non-US legal entities from registering .US domains, but the operators of the .US registry demonstratably make no attempt whatsoever to check for conformance with even this minimal requirement.)
So, as I have listed above, there are many different frequently-used ways that any natural person may use to obfsucate their actual physical location when registering a domain name.
This prompts a rather obvious question: Do there exist any policies, rules, or regulations which would prevent a natural person from using any one of the several techniques I have listed above to obfsucate their actual physical location when they generate their RIPE organization WHOIS record?
You just explained how these techniques have "rendered almost all of the information that is now available in *domain name* WHOIS records virtually entirely worthless". Now you are suggesting to use these techniques on the number registry to obfuscate addresses.
And more to the point, is it true or false that, as I have previously asserted, any member can put literally any inaccurate garbage they want into their public-facing RIPE WHOIS records with no consequence whatsoever?
False
If the answer to *either* question is "yes", then it seems to me that enlisting RIPE NCC to embark upon a deliberate program to hide personal information in public-facing WHOIS records EVEN WHEN THE CORRESPONDING REGISTRANTS HAVE NOT THEMSELVES REQUESTED THAT is not only clearly unnecessary, but actually and demonstratably counterproductive.
So it is more productive to encourage people to use a range of techniques to obfuscate their addresses so even the LEAs can't easily find them.
Should a natural-person who actually WANTS to be directly contacted for any and all issues relating to their RIPE number resources have that opportunity closed out, perhaps without even their knowledge or consent, by some small over-agressive cabal of GDPR fanatics acting unilaterally? I think not.
You have, conveniently, ignored contacts. Those wonderful attributes that allow resource holders to be "directly contacted for any and all issues relating to their RIPE number resources". Surprisingly, when there is a network issue it is so much faster to use the phone than posting a letter to their address, especially that PO Box.
As noted above, if any RIPE registrant wants to have their physical address info obfsucated then there appears to be any number of simple alternatives available to the registrant themself to achieve exactly that. Thus, this new push to get RIPE NCC to hide information in public-facing WHOIS records seems to be a solution in search of a problem, and just another misguided top-down enforcement of an extremist view of "privacy", pushed onto the community whether the people actually affected, i.e. the registrants themselves, like it or not.
Yes Ronald, let's really push those ideas that "rendered almost all of the information that is now available in *domain name* WHOIS records virtually entirely worthless".
(Note: I am not intending to pick specifically on RIPE here. To the best of my current knowledge there are -no- policies or rules in -any- RIR globally that explicitly prohibit the use of P.O. boxes, proxy registrants, or the addrsses of associated corporate registration agents or lawyers within public-facing number resource WHOIS records.
Yeah, keep plugging that idea Ronald!!
Nor do any RIRs have any clear policies which would have the effect of requiring there to be -any- clear correlation between what appears in a registrant's public-facing WHOIS records and anything corresponding to objective reality.)
So what harm does it do to restrict access to data that doesn't reflect reality anyway? Thanks Ronald...no problem.
I can only think of three reasons why you would need the full address. You intend to visit them (unlikely), you want to serve legal papers on them or you attempt some kind of heuristics with the free text search in the database to match up resources with the same address.
I agree with this list of possibilities, 1, 2, 3.
Wow you actually agree with me :)
So which of these three are you attempting to hobble?
Never been into hobbling. Not my scene.
Are you in favor of making it harder to serve people with legal papers? If so, why would you do that and who would be the beneficiaries of that?
Are you in favor of making it harder for open-source researchers to search the data base for textual correlations that might provide clues to untoward activities? If so, why would you do that and who would be the beneficiaries of that?
There are other ways to achieve this goal if you have an open mind, but just for the record this type of research is not covered by the purposes of the RIPE Database as defined in the Terms & Conditions. cheers denis proposal author
Regards, rfg
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