On Fri, 6 Jun 2003, Ricardo G Patara wrote:

I'd not consider this as a problem, but actually this is a privacy mechanism in place to avoid data mining.

That is all very nice, but what about those who run central whois redirection service where requests come in from users & systems and one central server then does actual lookup? My completewhois system hardly the only that does it, there are probably two dozen or more systems like this - geektols, uwho, numerous spam reporting systems, dshield, mynetwatchman and other central intrusion systems, etc. Besides that all other RIRs - ARIN, RIPE, APNIC have methods to prevent data mining, but I do not have problems with query limits at ARIN (not for last year), RIPE or APNIC but LACNIC where I do by far the least number of lookups (on the scale of 1:20 less then RIPE or 1:50 to ARIN) I'm hitting the limits immediatly. Obviously pataroo who did only lookups by ASNs also hit the limits and they did not even program for such an event which resulted in all those segfaults. Besides that I'm even more concerned that this came as absolute surprise to me, no announcement anywhere at all, I'm on am at anuncios and there was nothing sent there about changes to whois and nothing on website and as far as I could tell it was not discussed at politicas either. And even worth you're doing these limits and providing no way to get the data by any other means then whois as your bulk whois policy is still 2 months away from being implemented - you could have aleast waited these two months! Please think about removing the limits for the next two months until bulk whois is ready! Or at the very least monitore the situation and adjust the limits (to at least 5 times what it is now probably), possibly talk to ARIN or RIPE on how they deal with data mining! -- William Leibzon Elan Communications Inc. william@elan.net