On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Paul G wrote:
point - they're trying to restrict the practicality of attempting to harvest the data and an open to the public whois server with no access restrictions would defeat that.
I don't know that this is the case, I suspect it's resource management. If the database is getting slaughtered by applications on uncontrolled auto pilot, it's unusable for the rest of us.
well, the OP quoted a portion of the aup that requires bulk whois data recipients to take measures to prevent harvesting, so i presume that arin does care about that and, in fact, that consideration is likely the reason they declined to permit the OP to run *his own* whoisd off of his *local* copy of the data.
If memory serves, that restriction didn't appear until spam became a problem. The verbiage in the AUP is there to give ARIN recourse in the event that some spammer, and it has happened, runs a harvest against domain names or serialized NIC handles to seed a spam source. - billn