Rodney Joffe wrote:
A totally new from scratch database needs to be created. And it should *not* be me, GeekTools, or CenterGate. Or any individual. It needs to be controlled by a body trusted by all. What ICANN should have and could have been.
Trust has to start somewhere. If you, GeekTools, or CenterGate, are not willing to be trustworthy, then I guess we need to find somewhere else. I never expected ICANN to be a trusted entity. It's a stalking horse -- by design. How about Bill Manning at ISI?
whois-servers.net may be more appropriate, and it is already in at least 2 of the BSD distributions for whois :-)
I use OpenBSD, which has the modifications. I had had high hopes for whois-servers.net, but it has not solved any problems. Perhaps I don't understand how it works? It seems to require a domain to register itself in whois-servers.net (for example, nasa.gov.whois-servers.net) and maintain its own whois server. This is pretty much a non-starter for most domains. And it doesn't aggregate information to eliminate single points of failure. What I am suggesting is a set of redundant servers, A.whois-servers.net, B.whois-servers.net, etc., that mirror each other's data, eliminating single points of failure. While I think that Bill Manning's DNS TXT suggestion is clever, and nicely distributed, it requires a lot of effort. I'm suggesting a low effort technique to collect the information that exists. That is, to use the actual whois searches that are done, collecting the results in a new database, accessible by existing tools, or minor modifications of tools. Let's discuss the alternatives, and get busy. WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32