On 12/18/2009 03:05 AM, Patrick Vande Walle wrote:
In many European countries, for example, there is a legal obligation that web sites carry a page listing the contact details of the publisher. For my ALS, this is http://www.isoc.lu/l-association/coordonnees and it even includes the association registration number.
As one who makes a strong distinction between the web and the internet I find such a legal obligation to be somewhat different than "whois". Particularly in that at least the rule you mention gives the website owner control of exactly what is published and at least there is a log created of what IP addresses (and browser and referrer record and timestamp) fetched that page. "whois" pertains to domain names (let's leave out of the dicussion the separate "whois" for IP addresses.) That rule about website contact information pertains to that different abstraction of the HTTP[S] based web. At that level of domain names it has been suggested that a solution better than "whois" is to us DNS itself. In particular it has been suggested that people set up "whois.example.TLD" TXT records in their zone files sort of like this:
whois.cavebear.com. 172800 IN TXT "fax-number: +1.831.xxx.xxxx" whois.cavebear.com. 172800 IN TXT "address-3: USA" whois.cavebear.com. 172800 IN TXT "phone-number: +1.831.xxx.xxx" whois.cavebear.com. 172800 IN TXT "other-stuff: This site is operated by Karl Auerbach" whois.cavebear.com. 172800 IN TXT "address-1: xxx xxxxxxx xxx" whois.cavebear.com. 172800 IN TXT "address-2: Santa Cruz, CA 95060-1500" whois.cavebear.com. 172800 IN TXT "company-name: CaveBear"
(Some people have suggested a bit more structure for the text.) Regarding the history of "whois" - back in the early 1970's there weren't a lot of us on the net. There were various "handbooks" (such as the ARPAnet handbook) that were paper, and later electronic, listings of our names, work addresses, and email addresses. It was sort of like a roster for a club. It wasn't created for the purpose of reporting technical issue. The purpose was much more broad; the purpose was to allow us to collaborate on anything from technical issues to ordering pizza. The important point was that there was an implicit assumption that we were all colleagues. We've lost that assumption as whois grew from what was in essence a club roster into a worldwide database of personally identifiable information. --karl--