On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Lynn W. Taylor wrote:
> On Wed, 22 Jan 2003 16:11:37 -0500 (EST), Christopher Hicks wrote:
> >(1) visual traceroute
> 1) This is handled by RFC-1876 (in DNS, not Whois)
Which is tremendously under-utilized and deals with host names not domain
names.
> >(2) populating a database with data from an existing domain to allow a
> >user to correct and augment the information when setting up their new
> >customer profile with us. The contact and name server information are
> >both vital parts of this process in my experience.
> 2) Nice, but not strictly required.
Your question was aimed at what the legitimate uses were. This certainly
seems to qualify as one.
> >(3) finding local businesses
> 3) This is a violation of the ToS on every WHOIS I've seen (unless you
> actually BUY the data, which is a different discussion)
You're presuming that I'm planning on doing something bad with this
informaiton.
> >(4) determining what other domains a given person owns. This would be
> >valiable from an OpenSRS reseller perspective as well as for law
> >enforcement and anti-spam efforts.
> 4) Not currently possible in most WHOIS servers (I remember when it
> was), but would you automate this?
Absolutely. It's a simple way to encourage people to transfer more of
their domains.
> >(5) Monitoring whois over time to see what changes. This has become much
> >harder with all of the obfuscation various people do. It used to be that
> >I could say when a given piece of data changed in whois, but now figuring
> >that out requires parsing the morphing record to pull out the individual
> >data points and comparing them individually. Given that the obfuscation
> >doesn't slow the spammers down noticably, but it does make people who want
> >to do interesting and worthwhile things with the data give up or spend
> >inordinate amounts of time working around the foolish obfuscation it makes
> >me want to scream! (Must go kill rollerrats...die! die!...grrr!!!)
> 5) I'm not sure what LEGITIMATE reason one would have for monitoring any
> but their own whois -- and no one else should be able to access this.
> For our domains, they either can't be modified, or I don't care.
Well, we only monitor our own domains, but it's become much harder because
of the anti-spammer garbage. Some of our clients are still using
non-OpenSRS registrars and wish to ensure that their information hasn't
been modified without their knowledge. This seems like a good idea to me.
--
</chris>
"Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance."
- Sam Brown
