Text 11626, 50 rader
Skriven 2008-02-27 14:41:05 av Jeff Bowman (1:229/500)
Ärende: Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act
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Since I know many of you are technically-minded and are directly affected by
this sort of stuff, I thought I'd bring it up.
 
It seems everyone's favorite republican, Ted "Tubes" Stevens, is at it again. 
This time he has fellow republiclown Olympia Snowe, and a democrud, Bill
Nelson, to help him out.  http://tinyurl.com/ytwvrf
 
In a nutshell, when not trying to build bridges to nowhere or telling everyone
how the internet isn't really a big truck, Ted's decided to fight against
phishing.  The Anti-Phishing Consumer Protection Act is to outlaw, you guessed
it, phishing.  But let's skip over the fact that phishing is already illegal,
and that it's usually just dumb people like himself who get tricked by it, and
get to some of how he plans to implement this.
 
As most of you know, when you register a domain name, you fill in your name,
address, phone, and email address. Then anyone can run a "whois" command, or
use one of the many websites that offer such functionality, and can see all
this information about who owns the domain. Like with many aspects of internet
technology, there was a time when this particular aspect was safe and useful to
have that information so easily available. Well not many people want that
information out there now, with all the identity theft and general harassment
that's not too uncommon these days. So for $10 a year, I can pay a company such
as Domains by Proxy, Inc to mask my info, yet still provide a means to contact
me by email from my whois info if necessary (it just gets routed through them).
I use this service explicitly for keeping my info private.
 
Well 'ol Ted and his buddies have decided that under their proposed bill, that
this would be illegal.  It would also be illegal to fill in incorrect
information, which is something else people are known to do when they don't
want to broadcast their personal info.  Doesn't this just sound like a great
idea?  Fight phishing by forcing everyone's personal information to be publicly
available.  I feel safer already!
 
As I already pointed out, phishing, the act of tricking people into providing
personal information for nefarious means, is already illegal.  Why we need to
pass yet another law to remove more of our privacy rights is really beyond me. 
Looks like it's time to write some senators, or this is one of those stupid
kinds of things that would get passed by other people who have no idea what's
really going on, and/or don't realize how much it affects the average citizen
more than the bad guys.  The bad folks are just going to use false information
if they're up to no good anyway.  And it's kind of hard to impose or enforce
this outside the country.  Though I don't think Ted has grasped the fact that
the internet isn't just an American thing anymore.
 
Besides, if someone is doing something wrong, they can just issue a warrant to
a company like Domains by Proxy and get the person's contact information, no
problem.  I mean, you guys remember what warrants are, right?

--- D'Bridge 2.97
 * Origin: FyBBS (1:229/500)