Re: Anti Capitalism?

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

Simon Higgs allegedly said:
> 
> At 12:55 AM -0800 1/3/97, Kent Crispin wrote:
[...]
> > This works fine.  It's easy to add the data to DNS (just a mechanical
> > edit of a zone database file), and it's just a tiny bit of
> > already-written code to extract it.
> 
> How do you reverse map the contact or registrar information from DNS?

Actually, I wouldn't.  Putting the data in DNS is to support one 
purpose:  finding a person to fix a problem when DNS doesn't work.  
As a privacy advocate, I see no reason to facilitate people finding 
every system I might be the contact for, for example.  Or is that 
what you meant by a "reverse map"?

[...]
> > If the data is in DNS the central service doesn't have to do anything at
> > all to support whois.
> 
> I'm not convinced. You have no search mechanism for anything other than
> IP or domain names. How do you reverse map the other fields in DNS? You
> can do this in whois, but not in DNS.

As I said, it is my belief that the only legitimate purpose for 
contact data is problem resolution.  But once it is in DNS it is easy 
to build another database from it, unfortunately:

Dump the zone, grep for TXT fields with the appropriate headers (eg 
"Contact-id: KC125", and build a database from it.  This was Paul 
Vixie's idea about how to support a white-pages directory service.  
He imagined several competing directory service organizations doing 
it. 

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com,kc@llnl.gov		the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   5A 16 DA 04 31 33 40 1E  87 DA 29 02 97 A3 46 2F