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Timothy Brown wrote: I disagree with the view that it is a hack. It's no more a hack than using a DNS feed;

I concur with this. Besides, from the pragmatic side of the "consumer", if it does solve a problem (albeit short or medium term) I don't care much if it's a "hack".

Then we all agree. The Cymru bogon feed is a hack. The completewhois feed is a hack. In fact, any third party feed that puports to identify authentic IP allocations is a hack. The only fix for this is to get the addressing authorities to provide an authoritative feed. That probably means first getting the RIRs to do it and then ICANN to fill in the gaps. As to whether the mechanisms used by bogon feeds are hacks or carefully crafted technology, well, my rule of thumb is that if it can completely automate the process while still allowing human intervention to make judgement calls on all changes to network configuration, then it is carefully crafted technology. I'm afraid that by this measure, using BGP feed as the mechanism is a hack because it involves plugging a 3rd party directly into your routing architecture. A directory service like DNS or LDAP is closer to the carefully crafted technology because it can be plugged into OSS systems that allow humans to validate and release any network changes. --Michael Dillon