[At-Large] New Whois Access Audit posted

[Derek Smythe]

On 5/2/2012 6:46 PM, Antony Van Couvering wrote:
> The study seems flawed to me.  
> 
> 1. Why if it has to do with Port 43 are unreachable websites considered a fail?  That would make sense for web-based Whois, but not for Port 43.
> 

A Registrar has to provide both a web based whois lookup AND a port 43
direct look-up facility. I agree the wordign is rather obscoure for
the two registrars:
> •  Two cases were attributed to either a website failure or distributed denial-of-
> service (DDoS) attack which contributed to the inability to access port 43 
> WHOIS servers. 


> 2. Why is rate-limiting considered a fail?  This is put in place by responsible registrars to prevent scraping of Whois data by spammers. 
> 

It is not the rate limiting which is considered a fail, rather too
severe rate limiting.

We need to also note that many countries have invisible proxies which
causes an incorrect statistic on an IP address. I myself have done a
look-up and on the first look-up I encounter a "rate exceeded" error.

> Antony
> Derek