RBL quandry - opinions hereby solicited

Tue Nov 17 05:48:19 UTC 1998

I would agree with Rodney, the data needs to be current and
acurate.  In fact I thought I read somewhere that it was required.....
Back to reading stuff again to verify.

At 10:00 PM 11/16/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Mike Reno wrote:
>
><snip>
>
>> As
>> most hosting providers leave the Organization information alone, anyone
>> with a VALID reason to contact the owner of the domain could use snail mail
>> or ask the information operator for the phone number.  If the owner of the
>> domain has his/her number unlisted .... guess they want to be left > alone.
>> NSI does use snail mail to send out invoices.  It's not as if these
>> precautionary steps being taken are resulting in any serious problems that
>> will bring the world to an untimely demise.  If the domain owner wants to
>> move his domain, he can FAX an authorization to NSI on the Organization's
>> letterhead.  That is a very common practice as domain owners are not in the
>> habit of updating their contact records which results in a failure to
>> approve modifications based on 'Mail From'.
>> 
>> Business is business.
>
>Mike;
>
>I think there is a basic misunderstanding here about the basis of whois.
>This is *not* netsol's database. Yet.
>
>It is a database of contact information. I don't give a rat's ass who
>the billing or admin contact for a domain or network is. I care about
>the technical contact. If 'they' (or the collective we, actually) use
>valid dns data, I'd even live with that. I have no problem using 'dig'.
>But we all need a way to reach a 'responsible party' in the case of a
>real problem.
>
>We've been in the middle of a project that has been looking at whois
>data, and dns data, to identify valid contacts for networks and domains.
>Guess what? If it was even close to accurate you'd never see people
>posting urgent requests to nanog asking if anyone has a good number for
>xyz because there is an attack/failure/bogus announcement screwing up
>others, and the listed contacts don't work. Go call Telco information,
>and ask for a listing for the network operations center for any of the
>networks, large or small, and I'll bet that you can't find a single
>instance of a number that lets you reach a warm body who knows what the
>hell you mean when you ask a network question.
>
>Maybe someday Netsol will own the intellectual property in the .com .net
>.org etc. databases. But for now they don't. And if they allow people to
>register bogus data, they aught to be tarred and feathered. Not becauase
>it is bad business practice, but it;s bad Internet practice. If the
>problem is spammers, solve that problem. Don't get rid of the data we
>all need. Or at least find an alternative (maybe I should work on
>that... hmmmm?).
>
>Sheesh, am I the only one who thinks valid contacts are important? I'm
>sure that Sprint and MCI and GTE have good numbers for each other... but
>wouldn't it be nice to be able to get to someone clueful at Exodus today
>while these dns hackers are in the middle of whatever they're doing, and
>track them down then and there? Whack-a-mole is fine for carnivals, but
>on the net today, you have to whack-em-once. It's too expensive to just
>chase them.
>
>/rlj
>CenterGate Research LLC
> 