North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: NSI Bulletin 098-010 | Update on Whois
Actually, I think this issue dates back to when Network Solutions thought they "owned" the database, and had some plans to sell it. There was a lot of pushback to that idea, which they eventually dropped. But they have still resisted letting anyone else have the full database. I don't think they are actually concerned so much with abuse as they are with trying to maintain or establish a proprietary control over the database. Of course, "abuse prevention" is a good cover for proprietary control. --Dean At 11:20 AM 9/2/98 -0500, Derek Balling wrote: >>Who said anything about usage charges? It looks like the proposed work >>mentioned by David Holtzman is to control _abuse_ of the whois service. >>Otherwise, the load on whois will grow without bounds and we'd >>eventually have to pay more in registration fees. Of course, that's just >>my figurin' and nothing official... > >True, that's what his statement appears to say, however, who is to define >"abuse" of the whois service? > >As an example, a company I worked for a while back wanted to generate, on >their statistics reports for their customers' web sites, who each domain >was who was hitting their page, and who it belonged to (e.g. someone >looking just at "ora.com" might not correlate that to "O'Reilly and >Associates"). What we had then asked InterNIC for was a means of getting >that data WITHOUT using whois. (We knew it was readily available, and >publicly accessible, but wanted to avoid beating on the whois server to get >it when it came time to generate reports). The people we talked to at >InterNIC essentially told us to pound salt. My superior at the time had >mentioned that we had two ways of going about this, the "net-friendly" way, >and the "brute-force" way, and that InterNIC was forcing us to use the >brute force way which could cause their servers undue load. > >Was this company "an abuser" because they wanted to do lookups of a useful >nature? (And yes, they put in caching and such so they wouldn't be querying >every domain every time.) Granted, I would define someone harvesting the >whois database for email addresses an abuser, but since I feel the abuse >use had "valid purpose", that it shouldn't be categorized as abuse. I bet >InterNIC would claim it was though. > >It's a customer service issue... We are all (I assume) customers of >InterNIC. We pay them money for domain name registrations, and they are in >turn supposed to provide reliable whois service (among other things, of >course). If they're finding that load on the whois server is higher than >they expect, they might consider (a) finding WHY it is that high? are there >people like my old employer out there doing whois requests to get a single >field from a number of sites, (b) allow others to volunteer to host the >data and serve up requests. > >Just my $0.02 worth, everyone else's mileage is sure to vary. > >Derek > > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Plain Aviation, Inc [email protected] LAN/WAN/UNIX/NT/TCPIP http://www.av8.com ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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