Re: IETF-51 WhoisFix BoF Announcement

On 2001-08-01 14:04:13 -0700, Randy Bush wrote:
> 
> conjecture: the dominant *legitimate* use of whois today has not been
> mentioned.
> 
> nerd logic:
>   o spam scrapers are not counted, as they are not legitimate in my book
>   o other uses of domain and addres whois lookup are not automated
>   o the one big automated use is router config builds using the routing
>     registries

I'm not sure how legitimate it is, but a *lot* of anti-spam and firewall
software use the RIR Whois servers to find information about the
operators of networks trafficing abusive data.  We get tons of mail from
badly written programs that do this, so I conjecture (and hope) that
there are some well-written programs that do this.

Another automated use is the misguided attempt to map IP addresses to
country (or other region) of origin.  This happens in every concievable
way, from folks downloading the list of networks from FTP, to executing
a Whois query for each HTTP request, to searching through the entire
Internet by /24.  While I don't think this is legitimate, some people
have built entire businesses on this idea.

And of course there is research into things like how efficiently various
portions of the IPv4 Internet are assigned.

-- 
Shane