[anti-abuse-wg] RIPE WHOIS blocked

Hi Ronald,

After looking into legal requirements for protection of personal data in RIPE NCC's service region, our community decided that there should be a limit on the number of queries with personal data served to each IP Address. Person and role objects are considered to contain personal data (email address, phone number(s), postal address), and queries for these objects are subject to a daily limit.

Once this daily limit for querying personal data is reached, the IP address is temporarily blocked for the rest of that day. If an IP address repeatedly reaches its daily limit, then it is permanently blocked.

By default when querying whois, related objects are also returned (including person and role objects). The '-r' flag can be used to not return related objects, or the '--no-personal' flag to not return person or role objects.

For bulk access to the RIPE Database, split files (per object type) are published on the RIPE FTP site: ftp://ftp.ripe.net/ripe/dbase/split/

Regards,

Ed Shryane
RIPE NCC


> 
> 
> Apparently, somebody @ RIPE NCC thinks that I have been too curious of late.
> 
> How long should it take for this error to go away?
> 
> =============================================================================
> % This is the RIPE Database query service.
> % The objects are in RPSL format.
> %
> % The RIPE Database is subject to Terms and Conditions.
> % See http://www.ripe.net/db/support/db-terms-conditions.pdf
> 
> %ERROR:201: access denied for 69.62.255.118
> %
> % Queries from your IP address have passed the daily limit of controlled objects.
> % Access from your host has been temporarily denied.
> % For more information, see
> % http://www.ripe.net/data-tools/db/faq/faq-db/why-did-you-receive-the-error-201-access-denied
> 
> % This query was served by the RIPE Database Query Service version 1.76 (DB-2)
> =============================================================================
> 
> 
> I have already written to ripe-dbm at ripe.net asking about this and have
> received no reply.
> 
> And anyway, can anyone here explain to me what the point is of limiting
> WHOIS queries based on the source IP address?
> 
> As far as I can see, this only has the effect of slowing down or blocking
> the work of legitimate researchers, such as myself.  Anybody who knows
> anything about the Internet should know that an IP-address based throttling
> system would be almost entirely ineffective against anyone who was seriously
> determined to perform bulk harvesting of the RIPE data base via port 43
> (or via port 80 for that matter).
> 
> It seems that I am being slowed down, blocked, and penalized for the sin
> of having a static IP address, even while any other fool on the planet
> who has a dynamically-assigned broadband IP, or even a dial-up line,
> and who knows how to disconnect an reconnect can easily slurp all of
> the RIPE data they want, with no real limits.
> 
> In what universe is this non-stupid?
> 
> More to the point, who is it, specifically, within RIPE NCC, that has
> the authority to fix this?
> 
> 
> Regards,
> rfg
> 
> 
> P.S.  More stupidity:  Based on the text at the URL provided in the
> error mesage (see above) the goal of the rate limiting seems to be to
> prevent harvesters from collecting too much "contact information".
> OK.  Fine.  But the text on that web page also says that using the
> -r option with the WHOIS queries will prevent such contact information
> from being returned, thus eliminating the issue... or so one would
> think.
> 
> But why then is it the case that once my IP address has hit its head
> against this daily limit, I am not even allowed anymore to even make
> any more ``safe'' queries with the -r option?  I am now locked out
> completely.  Why?
> 
> Sigh.  I guess that I need to go and drag my old 96Kb modem down out
> of the closet, dust it off, and get myself a free dial-up AOL account
> so that I can work around all of this stupidity.
>