OT: Network Solutions Threatens Your Privacy

From: Vintage Computer Festival <vcf_at_siconic.com>
Date: Thu Jan 8 19:28:08 2004

On Thu, 8 Jan 2004, Patrick Rigney wrote:

> I'm a little steamed. I just received an email from Network Solutions
> offering me a valuable new service: protection of my domain registration
> information from spammers. For the cost of just $5, my WHOIS contact
> information will be hidden so it can't be scraped by spammers and doesn't
> appear in the lists and exports they routinely create from the whois
> databases.

This is akin to the "unlisted phone number" charge I brought up a couple
weeks back. Just as sleazy...

> This "service" seems like a gross abuse of the collected data and a complete
> breach of any ethics with respect to the handling of personal information
> associated with a domain registration.

Another reason why Network Solutions should not be allowed to continue to
register domain names. I don't know why anyone would spend $35 to
register a domain name these days (I can't believe they still charge
that).

> Am I being unreasonable about this?

Not at all.

Suggested alternatives:

http://www.bulkregister.com
http://www.godaddy.com

BulkRegister is decent and charges $12/year as their base rate. Their
management tools are passable and they have a decent DNS service. GoDaddy
is $8.95/year and their currently running a sale on .com domains and
transfers. I've got all my domains currently registered with BulkRegister
but I'm strongly considering moving to GoDaddy because they are much
cheaper. Does anyone know of any problems with GoDaddy?

-- 
Sellam Ismail                                        Vintage Computer Festival
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
International Man of Intrigue and Danger                http://www.vintage.org
[ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers   ]
[ and academia at www.VintageTech.com  || at http://marketplace.vintage.org  ]
Received on Thu Jan 08 2004 - 19:28:08 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:36:45 BST