[gnso-rds-pdp-wg] Now open: 18 January Poll on Purpose

[Rob Golding]

RE the connection between created/generated data and input-by-user data - and whether generated data is "personal" (or can be used to identify a person) ...
My credit-card number is generated data, automatically created, and it absolutely is "personal data" :)

Michele wrote:
> If you want a domain name to resolve on the internet you need certain data
> elements to be available to everyone.
> That’s a technical reality.

As the Cheshire Cat said ... "I'm not crazy. My reality is just different than yours."

And I think we are drifting into a reality where we are conflating Domains and RDS - can these things be found out (where appropriate) another way than a whois lookup - absolutely - a resolving domain name will have entries in a zone file on a nameserver 

RDS being _required_ for anything to "work" however is a complete fallacy, not a technical reality
 - an RDS is not in any way needed for the functioning of the internet, resolving of domain names and so on - that's simply not how it works.

no-rds-test.astutium.com
.                       517344  IN      NS      a.root-servers.net.
.                       517344  IN      NS      b.root-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      c.gtld-servers.net.
com.                    172800  IN      NS      d.gtld-servers.net.
astutium.com.           172800  IN      NS      ns1.astutium.com.
astutium.com.           172800  IN      NS      ns2.astutium.com.
ns1.astutium.com.           14400   IN      A       80.76.218.199
no-rds-test.astutium.com.           14400   IN      A       80.76.211.1

No "whois" (RDS) was accessed at any point to determine the current IP address - The port 43 was actively firewalled  and that new dns entry still resolves, still pings - i.e. still works

> On 2017-01-25 21:06, John Bambenek wrote:
> 	Regardless of the privacy implications, if someone who wants to look
> up a hostname and can't find can't figure out what the authoritative
> nameservers are for the domain, DNS quite simply will not work and with it
> the internet is down; go home.

Plenty of RDS failures happen - with some registries/registrars their whois is down more than up, and the internet still works, the domains still work and so on
 - domains resolve based on the nameservers of the domain returning an appropriate answer, neither the nameserver details nor the answer are retrieved from any RDS, and the inclusion (or not) in RDS will not be changing that in any way

It's _convenient_ for non-techies to use the "current RDS" (whois) to see what the nameservers *might have been at some historical point-in-time* [with caveats about why that data is incorrect as often as it's correct] but that is (in my experience) because explaining how to "nslookup" or "dig" or "whatever" often takes longer than "go to internic.net and type ..."

> 	You could deprecate displaying it in whois but any DNS client would
> easily be able to retrieve the data because the resolver still has to know what
> to ask for.

Indeed, in fact as the resolver method is more reliable, more accurate, faster, necessary and so on - why are we duplicating it in WHOIS at all ?!?

Rob


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