[Rt4-whois] Offline comments on WHOIS Policy Review Team Draft Report
Smith, Bill
bill.smith at paypal-inc.com
Fri Mar 16 17:20:19 UTC 2012
I respect Mr Sullivan's opinions, and his statements regarding "factual" errors or inaccuracies may be correct, from a purely technical perspective. However, our audience is considerably broader.
I'm all for accuracy, but we also need to consider readability and the scope of our work - WHOIS for names.
On Mar 15, 2012, at 3:44 PM, Olof Nordling wrote:
> Dear Review Team Members,
> Please find some offline comments to the report, received today, for your attention and considerations.
> Very best regards
> Olof
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Sullivan [mailto:ajs at crankycanuck.ca]
> Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2012 4:38 PM
> To: Olof Nordling
> Subject: Offline comments on WHOIS Policy Review Team Draft Report
>
> Dear Mr Nordling,
>
> In my public posting commenting on the recent WHOIS review team report, I mentioned that I found some nits. I'm sending them to you as the staff support for the team. These are some (occasionally very
> serious) technical errors that I found while reading the Whois Policy Review Team report. I didn't include them in my public posting because I thought they might distract from the more substantive issues I wanted to focus on there. But I urge the team to fix these errors; they seriously undermine the credibility of the report. Please feel free to share this mail as widely as you wish.
>
> - The description of domain names in the Executive Summary is
> either completely wrong, or a mistaken and misleading attempt to
> gloss over complexities about the DNS name space. This might not
> matter except that, if people are to take seriously proposals for
> better management of domain name registration data, the details of
> what a domain name is really need to be correct. Rather than
> fixing this, the entire passage might be removed without any harm:
> someone who cannot already recognize a DNS name will probably not
> care about WHOIS at all.
>
> - The introduction of WHOIS at the end of section B seems to
> suggest that WHOIS is for domain name registration data; but the
> WHOIS protocol has also historically been used for number
> resources (as Appendix G states), and that history may be part of
> the reason why the protocol has some of the limitations it has.
> This could be fixed with a minor adjustment to the description.
>
> - The mention of alternatives to the WHOIS protocol in Chapter 5
> (footnote 17, page 44) talks about CRISP. But CRISP is not a
> protocol, and RFC 3707 is in fact a requirements document -- one
> that, if its specification were met, would address many of the
> issues with the WHOIS protocol and permit a better service. The
> IRIS protocol (RFC 3982) was the development that followed from
> the CRISP requirements. The narrow issue could be fixed by
> altering the reference. (At a more substantive level, IRIS was
> what resulted the last time the Internet community determined that
> WHOIS was not the answer to registration data problems, and the
> report might be stronger if it explored why those previous
> attempts to replace WHOIS did not succeed.)
>
> In Appendix G:
>
> - The example IP address is not in any normal presentation format
> for IP addresses, and it is very hard to see how it could be an IP
> address in any of the more obscure ways of writing IP addresses.
>
> - DNS is not only used to translate names to numbers.
>
> - The entire discussion of whois lookup in a thin-registry context
> ignores the way whois referral works, and appears to suggest that
> people who do not know how to operate the tool ought to be able to
> operate it without learning how.
>
> In Appendix H:
>
> - The definitions of A-label and LDH-label most certainly do not
> overlap.
>
> - WHOIS was not originally specified in RFC 954, but in RFC 812,
> published in 1982.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Andrew
>
> --
> Andrew Sullivan
> ajs at crankycanuck.ca
>
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