North American Network Operators Group

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Re: no whois info ?

  • From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine
  • Date: Fri Dec 10 10:28:14 2004

In an earlier episode I pointed out to the list-resident VGRS person that
the dynamic properties introduced for one marketing purpose would have a
consequence in another problem domain, but no point revisiting that issue.

[email protected] (Peter Corlett) wrote:

> There's some awful tinpot domain registrars out there where you have
> to wonder if their whois server is on the end of a dialup link, but
> fortunately I'm not attempting to access those.

The ICANN Registrar agreement has no transactional temporal property
for :43 queries. In fact, quite a few registrars associated with one of
several outsource business models, e.g., the Tucows HRS customers (complete),
the Pool thead customers (partial addr allocation), etc., use common :43
servers.

I've tried to work this problem, but it appears to require cooperation
between isps and registrars, and that's just not happening, and agreement
that persistent (hours or longer) name-to-address associations factor into
the prevelant economic spam business models, and that's just not happening
either as spam-presentation (to the user or the interposing device) is the
problem of choice.  Schemes to exhaust the dotted quad space, or exhaust
the dotted string space (*lists generally) just don't help identify one
asset economic spam schemes appear to require to extract value from the
spam-presentation instances -- a return path that works.

So, call the small registrars names as long as you want, and as long as
you don't want to pay for a service, and spend your money elsewhere on
something that works better, for some value of better.

Cheers,
Eric
<{registry,registrar,isp}_hat = "off">