William Allen Simpson wrote:
Some private messages have said that NSI claims the whois contact information is now their "property".
Not only. NSI has said publicly that this is the case. As does the data they return with each whois result :-)
Would it be OK with the rest of us for Rodney Joffe to create a database of all the requests and answers made thru geektools?
Not sure what you mean here. GeekTools SuperWhois is merely a proxy. When answers are returned, they are still subject to the copyright under which GeekTools retrieves them. We don't cache or store them. We just go get the answers, and display them, copyright and all (NOTE: we have received permission to do so). But we do not have permission to store or capture the data. And, as we've already discussed, the data is wrong sometimes :-) 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. CenterGate can provide the repository infrastructure through UltraDNS. UltraDNS already has a whois component that allows a dns user to specify which fields may be seen by the public, and which may not. Some thought has to go in to how the 'net decides who should be able to read something, and who should not. The major cause of complaints, and bogus data (555-1212 phone numbers and no-valid-email@ addresses) is the spam issue. In fact, I believe that this is where the major effort has to be spent assuming that this community really gives a damn about the subject. So, while this discussion is interesting to some, unless the majority of lurkers here care enough to open their mouths and comment, we're just creating noise. So sad.
We would change the Open/Net/Free/*BSD/*nix whois distributions to point at geektools. (Especially as default whois is pretty useless right now.)
whois-servers.net may be more appropriate, and it is already in at least 2 of the BSD distributions for whois :-) -- Rodney Joffe CenterGate Research Group, LLC. http://www.centergate.com "Technology so advanced, even we don't understand it!"