nanog mailing list archives
Re: Big List of network owners?
From: Tom Vest <tvest () pch net>
Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 17:41:50 -0400
On Oct 28, 2004, at 2:56 PM, Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu wrote:
On Thu, 28 Oct 2004 14:17:14 EDT, Tom Vest said:operators. For those 3000+/- you can be reasonably confident that theirwhois data is correct; the other 15.5k actively routed ASNs (much less the routed netblocks, and less still the idled ASNs and netblocks) are anyone's guess...Certainly matches up with what my gut feeling was telling me....And of course, the irony is that those 3K ASNs will probably exchange billions of packets with us on total autopilot, and I'll almost never need to find the owner, but the fact that I'm unable to identify who's *really* responsible for a given specific /24 makes an address in that /24 all the more desirable to the sort of people who will end up making me look for the /24's owner, when I'd much rather never have had any conscious knowledge of that particular /24 beingroutable at all...
That irony may disappear soon, but perhaps not in a good way. Observing the general policy trend across the registries, it seems that all are moving toward a system where publicly available contact information for any/all assigned numbers is optimized for resource management, while preserving maximum flexibility for anonymous operation. That is to say, operators may eventually provide visible whois entries that include only a workable email address (e.g., ASN54321 () genericemailservice com) and a cell phone number. So long as these contacts are sufficient to request/remit annual registry renewal fees, the whois requirement will be satisfied.
Opinions vary as to whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Some advocates suggest that anonymity will help mitigate some security issues, although it seems to me a little incongruous that security through obscurity is advocated in this sphere at the same time that it is ridiculed in other contexts. Anyway, during the ARIN public forum last week there were repeated suggestions that the "scope and purpose" of whois database be clarified once and for all, at least at the institutional (ARIN) level. I for one would hate to see operator identity (i.e., as you say "who's *really* responsible" for a given number) disappear from that that "scope and purpose," especially without considering that change and all of its implications very very carefully.
Tom
Current thread:
- Abuse Ticketing Systems James Baldwin (Oct 28)
- Re: Abuse Ticketing Systems Paul Khavkine (Oct 28)
- Re: Abuse Ticketing Systems John Kinsella (Oct 28)
- Re: Abuse Ticketing Systems Todd Mitchell - lists (Oct 28)
- Big List of network owners? John Underhill (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Joe Abley (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Valdis . Kletnieks (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Tom Vest (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Valdis . Kletnieks (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Tom Vest (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Randy Bush (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Lucy E. Lynch (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Randy Bush (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Scott Blomquist (Oct 29)
- Big List of network owners? John Underhill (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Randy Bush (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Gary E. Miller (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Alex Bligh (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? John Underhill (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? Gary E. Miller (Oct 28)
- Re: Big List of network owners? John Underhill (Oct 28)