Verisign contacted us to get IP addresses for our whois queries, they say information will be limited to include non personal info shortly... Steve On Mon, 11 Feb 2002, Scott Francis wrote:

Apologies for starting a new thread - I seem to recall one recently regarding somebody who was having difficulty making more than X requests per Y seconds to the WHOIS servers (receiving disconnects). Received a spam recently from 212.171.42.117 offering the contents of .com/.net/.org/.edu on 4 CDs (reported to the usual sources - spamcop, abuse@domain, abuse@upstream, and in this case, abuse@internic.net (see below) ).

My annoyance at receiving a spam is fairly limited - I have become used to it by now. However, I am curious - the WHOIS servers (some of them, anyway) contain a statement in the connect message that explicitly prohibits commercial use of the registry. And IIRC that earlier thread, too many connection attempts from a single location in a certain amount of time would cause a disconnect (presumably to thwart this very type of datamining).

==== "By submitting a WHOIS query, you agree that you will use this Data only for lawful purposes and that, under no circumstances will you use this Data to: (1) allow, enable, or otherwise support the transmission of mass unsolicited, commercial advertising or solicitations via e-mail (spam); or (2) enable high volume, automated, electronic processes that apply to Network Solutions (or its systems)." ====

Is NetSol/VeriSign serious about enforcing this? Are they willing to blackhole abusers? One would think it would be a trivial matter to engineer the servers such that more than X attempts per Y seconds either results in a block (temporary or permanent) or flags the activity for later review (a la IDS). Perhaps I am vastly oversimplifying such a task.

I sent my concerns to NetSol's abuse department already, but I hold little hope of that achieving anything of lasting significance. I was really hoping to get either "been there, done that", "try X" or even "this is off-topic - stop polluting the list" from those of you that have been down this road before.

-- Stephen J. Wilcox IP Services Manager, Opal Telecom http://www.opaltelecom.co.uk/ Tel: 0161 222 2000 Fax: 0161 222 2008