Patrick and WG members:
It is indeed true that our Port43 service is being attacked and our customer data is being harvested and abused. This is corroborated by numerous industry news reports and stories shared by our customers. Our first responsibility is to our customers, and to safeguard their personal information. This is impossible in an environment where Port 43 access is unregulated, and we can’t distinguish legitimate users from bad guys. Therefore, we encourage folks to contact us about getting their IPs added to our whitelist.
Our position on this has been clear and consistent. This will be my last communication on this topic since it does not further our work in this PDP.
Sara
sara bockey
sr. policy manager | GoDaddy™
sbockey@godaddy.com 480-366-3616
skype: sbockey
This email message and any attachments hereto is intended for use only by the addressee(s) named herein and may contain confidential information. If you have received this email in error, please immediately notify the sender and permanently delete the original and any copy of this message and its attachments.
Patrick,
Let me first call attention to the fact that I cc’d the leadership team so that they can judge whether my suggestion was ridiculous or not.
Let me call attention to the fact that I cc'd the entire list so the community can be involved in the conversation as well. (as you say "we all have to work collaboratively in this WG")
I am not in a position to determine what the truth is in this situation,
Well, I AM in such a position because IT HAPPENED TO ME.
but, even if you are correct in your assessment, giving Sara a chance to respond to your strong accusation privately
Big companies like GoDaddy will not respond privately - it's beneath them. Believe me, I've tried.
If Sara was interested in responding to my claims, she has had every opportunity to do so, either privately or publicly. I have not heard a peep from her.
would be much more respectful than making your accusation publicly.
It's not an accusation - it's a statement of facts. I welcome Sara and/or GoDaddy to present any evidence to the contrary.
Email communications are very easily misunderstood and/or poorly expressed. I do not know whether that is the case here or not; I am sure you do not believe that is the case, but giving her the benefit of the doubt and asking her to explain further privately would have been a much better approach in my opinion.
As I said, I have no reason to believe she would respond to a private discussion of this matter. I have tried several time to discuss GoDaddy's port 43 restrictions with them and they would not respond to me. GoDaddy is too big to care about the opinions of a single anti-phishing anti-spam anti-abuse advocate that disagrees with GoDaddy's illegal restrictions on port 43 WHOIS.
The fact is that we all have to work collaboratively in this WG.
Which is why this should be discussed on the list as well. I know I'm not the only person on the list that feels this way.
Patrick Klos
Phishcop Admin
Chuck
Patrick,
If you are going to specifically criticize a company by name, please do that directly with that company and not on this list.
Chuck
That's ridiculous.
Sara Bockey, representing GoDaddy, made statements on the list that do not reflect the truth. It is my obligation to refute her claims publicly on the same forum her original statements were made.
Patrick Klos
Klos Technologies, Inc. and Phishcop Admin
On 2/16/2018 5:22 PM, Sara Bockey wrote:
Not only is our decision to mask customer information in Port43 completely unrelated to GDPR, but it results directly from attacks by third parties who harvest and sell our customers’ personal information.
I don't know what precipitated this conversation, but I will jump in here based on my actual experience.
To say "it results directly from attacks by third parties who harvest and sell our customers’ personal information" is a complete lie!
GoDaddy has blocked MANY IP addresses I've attempted to use port 43 WHOIS on with absolutely no due process! And I can say with absolute certainty that I and my IP addresses were not involved in any form of "attack(s) by third parties".
But if I wanted to continue fighting phishing, spammers and other abuses without being forced to use GoDaddy's cumbersome web interface (with their stupid "I'm not a robot" and "Choose all the pictures that have a goldfish in them" games) to process each WHOIS request, I would have to give in to GoDaddy's illegal blocking (restricted WHOIS output) and sign their "whitelist request" to get myself back to business!!!
Given the onslaught of spam and robo-calls our customers have been receiving – often within minutes of registering a domain name—we felt that action was required, if not overdue.
I'm not sure I can see how port 43 WHOIS requests can be used to determine new domain registrations in the way you imply? Maybe you can share how that works??
WHOIS information is still very much available for any & all domain names via our web-based WHOIS tool,
It may be available, but it's quite cumbersome and a waste of good peoples' time!!
However, bulk access by anonymous users is no longer supported.
I didn't know "bulk access by anonymous users" was ever a thing?!? If you were intent on blocking "bulk access", why should that have impacted port 43 WHOIS requests for single domains???
I also note that during this entire process, we have kept ICANN informed of both the attacks on our Port43 systems
Please provide the evidence of my "attacks" that you've provided to ICANN to justify your restricting WHOIS data to any of my IP addresses.
as well as our efforts to mitigate them. Our actions are justified and to imply otherwise is not only inaccurate but does nothing to move this PDP forward.
Your actions were unilateral and (in my opinion) violated your registrar agreement(s) with ICANN. You're allowed to block ABUSIVE behavior, but you blocked many many requests with absolutely no evidence of abuse! How can you justify that???
Patrick Klos
Phishcop Admin