* Carsten Schiefner:
Florian,
Florian Weimer wrote:
of course, I can't speak for every DNS operator, but DENIC denying the transfer of the .de zone has no other reason than data protection, ie. making the harvesting of contact data of some 9 million plus domain name holders by just piping the zone through the whois impossible. Your claim is absurd. The real privacy issue comes form forced publication of WHOIS data. As a member of the DENIC executive board, you certainly know that, so please stop spreading such misinformation.
it's interesting that you appear to know what I "certainly" know...
Don't tell me you haven't been briefed on such issues. 8-/ Anyway, I have moved the discussion to a more appropriate list. Just to make myself clear, I understand that publishing zones in a ready-to-process manner might not be in the best interest of everyone. For example, if an ISP A suffers a significant outage, a competing ISP B might sift through zone data, enumerate all domains served by ISP A's name servers. When that ISP is back again, ISP B uses the imprints for said domains (that is. if there is a web server) to gather postal addresses of ISP A's customers, making them an offer to switch (by snail mail, of course, otherwise it would be spam). Incidentally this is one of the reasons why I don't publish all the zone data I've recovered, but this is not really related to privacy concerns.