>The tone of "Look it up" (or "do the math" or "connect the dots") is
>unpleasantly superior and condescending. It seems particularly
>inappropriate here, when the issue is HipCrime's (alleged) fraudulence
>and InterNIC's (alleged) incompetence or sloppy work. I see no call for
>expression of such an ugly attitude towards the Ambassador's
>interlocutors (viz. the gentle readers of the robots list), especially
>given that, well, the Ambassador doesn't seem to have looked it up
>himself.
Perhaps you have not been on this list long, or have somehow missed the
antics of Robert X, author of the annoyanceBot in question. If you've
read his posts and visited his web site you would understand the reason
for the general loathing of his methods and the specious logic he uses to
justify them as expressed by so many subscribers to this list and
elsewhere.
While it is true that I am prone to channelling Dorothy Parker when
commenting on Robert X, I never made any negative comments toward the
InterNIC. In my experience they have been prompt and helpful, and appear
to be a hard-working bunch o' folks. My question of whether domain
applications are read by humans was wholly in earnest: Is the process
automated? How does one submit entries with no phone number or last
name? Imagine the potential for abuse of such an automated system: No
accountability, no traceability, no recourse against net abuse.
As for the phrase "look it up", this merely points to one of the
limitations inherent in the narrow-bandwidth of ASCII: The intention was
merely to invite the reader to double-check my lookup, and not meant to
carry inflections which would insult the reader.
I apologize if the tone of my post was inferred to be anything other than
helpful. Robert's bot has come up from time to time on this list, and
it seemed interesting that his domain application contained fraudulent
information. While my personal mail has been generally supportive, I
recognize that such mail is not always representative of the group as a
whole, and apologize for any ambiguities in my post.
Those of you not interested in the geography of San Francisco can skip
the rest:
>> 3) As if his choice of fraudulent addresses, "666", were not amusing
>> enough, the address is completely non-existent. The closest building
>> to that address is the bathroom next to the tennis courts in the
>> panhandle of Golden Gate Park.
>
>666 First St would be found not on the Panhandle, but rather in South
>Beach, at the end of First Street, near the Embarcadero and South Beach
>Marina. I'll walk down there at lunch time and see whether the address
>exists. The zip code, though, is wrong for that address.
The only First Street in San Francisco is indeed in South Beach, but the
sequence of streets intersecting Golden Gate Park indicates that a person
as confused as to believe that First and Arguello intersect might also
believe that Argulello is synonymous with First Street (the next street
over is Second, the next Third, and so on). The map that I used for the
lookup seems to indicate that First Street in South Beach ends somewhere
in the 500 block; the map may be incomplete, and it may be the case that
a "666 First Street" might possibly exist.
But as you noted, even if the address exists the zip code does not match
South Beach, First and Arguello do not intersect (they're not even in the
same part of town), and Robert probably does have both a last name and a
phone number which he has chosen to keep from the InterNIC.
In private mail another reader indicated that they had notified the
InterNIC of this in late November, but to date has not rec'd a response
and the information remains inconsistent and incomplete.
Given the nature of Robert X's interests and activities it seems a fair
assertion that the misinformation shown in his domain registration was no
accident, and this raises a good question for us all as we attempt to
strike a balance between privacy and accountability:
Is Robert X simply smarter than the other spammers who register their
domains using real information? Are those of us who prefer to be
accountable merely chumps?
- Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Software Tools for SuperCard, Director, HyperCard, OMO, and more....
Mail: Ambassador@FourthWorld.com
Web: http://www.FourthWorld.com
_________________________________________________
This messages was sent by the robots mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail
to robots-request@webcrawler.com with the word "unsubscribe" in the body.
For more info see http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html