Package: whois
Version: 4.7.5
Severity: normal

In my environment, I have WHOIS_HIDE set to 1 to reduce annoying legal
messages from whois. Today I noticed that this causes whois lookups to
fail when requesting information from the Dotster (dotster.com) whois
servers.

I can only assume that Dotster (and not any other registrars) did in
fact change their disclaimer recently. Other domains work fine, and
Dotster-registered domains work with WHOIS_HIDE unset.

I am unfamiliar with the implementation of the whois protocol (perhaps
the server asks for the hash of an approved disclaimer text before
proceeding), but I think at least a fallback to whatever whois does
without -H or WHOIS_HIDE turned on (if not an outright slash-&-burn of
the disclaimer out of the results in spite of what the server wants)
would be an improvement.

Transcript of an example failure:

        $ whois geekymedia.com

        Whois Server Version 1.3

        Domain names in the .com and .net domains can now be registered
        with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
        for detailed information.

           Domain Name: GEEKYMEDIA.COM
           Registrar: DOTSTER, INC.
           Whois Server: whois.dotster.com
           Referral URL: http://www.dotster.com
           Name Server: NS1.DREAMHOST.COM
           Name Server: NS2.DREAMHOST.COM
           Name Server: NS3.DREAMHOST.COM
           Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
           Updated Date: 06-may-2005
           Creation Date: 16-may-2000
           Expiration Date: 16-may-2006


        >>> Last update of whois database: Sat, 9 Jul 2005 16:17:07 EDT <<<


        Catastrophic error: disclaimer text has been changed.
        Please upgrade this program.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.13-rc2
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL 
set to en_US.UTF-8)

Versions of packages whois depends on:
ii  libc6                       2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libidn11                    0.5.13-1.0   GNU libidn library, implementation

whois recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information


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