Re: [registrars] Teleconference Invitation: Whois

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>]

> This is great stuff - thanks Eric.

You are welcome. It was pre-coffee.

> One point I want to extract and emphasize -  954 is still a peachy (but
> showing its age) standard. Problem is, we don't have any good social
> mechanisms to guide how, where, why, when it should/should not be
> used/abused Any new "standards" that get dropped in our lap will suffer
> this same deficiency. 

So there is draft-brunner-rfc954-historic-00.txt over in the IETF's drafts
archive, waiting to either get deleted, or me to delta it and re-issue it.
I guess I'll do the latter over the weekend, children and spring planting
permitting. The sub-text was "shoot this suffering horse so that fools can't
point to us (IETF) as causing bulk-or-query abuse, its an ICANN problem and
ICANN can solve it (for some value of solve)". I wrote it between jobs, so
I wasn't wearing either the NeuStar (registries) hat or the USA Webhost (a
registrar) hat.

A surprising number of people claim 954 is irrelevant. For the ASO RIRs,
sure. For the ccTLDs, not yet graced with equivalent contractual bumpf as
we, sure. For sub-TLD registries, sure. Personally, I think it, and the
DCA's footprint circa 1985 for MILNET TAC access, are the elephant in the
room (substitute ICANN's IPC for the USDoD's DCA).

I agree that "Whois isn't the problem, we are." That is why I took on the
responsibility for co-chairing a high-liklihood-of-being-doomed BoF in the
IETF in mid-2001, and worked the issue of putting an extensible mechanism
for metadata into EPP -- so we'd have knobs to frob if and when we figured
out the output spiggot(s). 

For the non-technical -- 954 (aka "whois") just says ask-and-answer-on-43. 
It can't be XML-ized. It can't be ANYTHING-ized. The "fix" lies either in
the database and/or its management system (metadata "inside"), or in query
response pre- and post-processing (server selection and output formatting
"outside").

A request to everyone in this Constituency that plans to spend some paid
time on this. Please buy and read Lorrie Cranor's "Web Privacy with P3P",
at least until the words <purpose> and <access> and <recipient> and the 
rest of what really is a sophisticated vocabulary that attempts to be
useful in all three of our basic legal jurisdictions -- the EU, Japan and
Canada, and the US, sinks in. It will help us to understand each other
when we say things like "privacy" and "data protection".

$20 and up, plus shipping and handling, plus an hour or two of your time.
A link to Amazon is below.

Eric

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0596003714/qid=1053701981/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/104-0897498-0731948?v=glance&s=books&n=507846