<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Andre, Andre Koopal wrote: <blockquote cite="mid20051026155456.GH27127@asoserve0.ams.ops.eu.uu.net" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 05:25:04PM +0200, Daniel Roesen wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 12:21:09PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">2 - "e-mail" field of the IRT object Why would you want to hide the "e-mail" field of the IRT object by default (forcing the use of -B to get it) ? </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">Because of morons writing scripts which send mail to every address they see. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">Those morons will just add -B to their scripts. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap="">Which reminds me, why is the hint to use -B in the output of whois. That makes it very easy to find out. </pre> </blockquote> IIRC, the idea was never to hide the attributes filtered by default. The idea was to avoid people doing: $ whois -h whois.ripe.net 1.2.3.4 | grep @ And e-mailing a bunch of useless addresses. We include the comment about -B because this was the first time that the default output of the Whois server was changed to modify the contents of objects. I thought it was very important that people be able to know how to get the original, unmodified objects. A few data points: <tt>Date Total queries -B queries Total IP's -B IP's 2005-10-23 2139305 58973 2.8% 45069 1143 2.5% 2005-10-24 2237340 72880 3.3% 51970 1346 2.6% 2005-10-25 2569724 170948 6.7% 49852 1521 3.1% 2005-10-26 2562303 98482 3.8%</tt><tt> 52478 1526 2.9%</tt> A relatively small percentage of queries actually uses the -B flag, and these queries come from a relatively small percentage of IP addresses. I also looked at the counts of objects returned, and found them to be roughly similar. (The number "-B" queries is actually an overcount, because I just looked for "B" anywhere in the query string, but a quick look shows that almost all occurrences of "B" are for the flag. The number of IP's is an undercount, because we get a lot of queries from <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.ripe.net">www.ripe.net</a>, and I didn't convert these to the original client IP address. This is for both the total and the -B.) The message that I take from this is that when you put data in the database, you can assume that most users will get the default output. -- Shane </body> </html>