a heretical view on whois: [ by whois, i do not mean the irr. the ripe db confounds the two. ]
back in the day, when some anomalous behavior hit one of my servers or services, i used whois (yes, i still have a paper copy of the last edition of the manager's handbook somewhere) and wrote or called to warn that their system appeared to be compromised. folk were responsive and appreciative. as the malicious incident volume grew, this did not scale along many dimensions. folk found the inbound report load excessive and of poor quality. reporters were having so many incidents that reporting them was not worth the time. extrapolate to today. i no longer care about whois, either for domains or addresses. i also do not have a telephone book. so feel free to take it away. randy
