Re: Phone book
>Domains should be exactly the same. You want a public advertisement of how to reach you, you permit your contact details to be known. You want a private IP address, that's your problem : you don't need a domain.
Not so. In many cases, I do need a domain, even if I don't choose to publicize it to everyone. Not all systems support directly accessing IP addresses, although most do. Many systems see that as a security problem, as many scammers use the same strategy, so I'm now facing my users seeing warnings or blocks on the way. There's also the obvious fact that susansmith.com is easier for people to remember than 109.251.39.28. I don't see any reason that my information needs to be known for those benefits to accrue to me. I put my info in the phone book for my and others' benefit. I put my information in the whois database for exactly the same reason. Except I get no benefit because it opens me to spam, my nontechnical users get no benefit because nobody checks it, and my technical users get no benefit because I already put the contact information that they should be using on the site. So what if the site is basically useless to those who aren't planning on using it? Maybe those people don't need to contact me.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
