RE: [vps-mail] Installing new Perl modules - solved!

[Marjolein Katsma <tfyj8lv02@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 15:08 2003-12-22, John Oligario wrote:
> The script 'WP Whois' doesn't care about the way you tested, ie ns.xs4all.nl
> as it is removing anything for the CNAME area and giving you the main site
> name.  I tried it with sites I know which do not have a CNAME and WP still
> thinks that there is a site located at that location, however going to
> anyone's browser will return a site not found, etc, depending upon how your
> error sections are setup.

Hmm, I'll have to delve in the code a bit; it looked to me as though it's 
doing a DNS lookup first and then feeding that to the whois server.


> There is no need to find out which whois servers to use, as that is all in
> the background, Verio handles that on all the VPS servers and more.
>
> One thing to consider on utilizing the WP Whois, go to their disclaimer,
> http://grove.ufl.edu/~bro/cgi-bin/ShowTrash.cgi?whois.crsnic.net which
> states that you can not access their database except to register domain
> names, etc, so if you are collecting information from them in any manner
> other than what they state, you are at a potential lawsuit.  Better off to
> modify Godwin's script for what you want to do, (by the way his script works
> well!) and then you are not using anyone else's server which could go
> against you.  Way too many lawsuits creeping up on people.

If Verio handles that in the VPS servers, as you say, then that to me means 
nothing but a different interface to the very same whois servers, which 
must be queried to get the information. If used for the same purpose, I 
cannot imagine that using Verio's interface would be any more or less 
lawful than using the WP Whois proxy interface - ultimately you get the 
same information from (probably) the same server for the same purpose.

The purpose is also certainly not any high-volume use but in fact exposing 
the antics of the (quite unlawful) 419 scammers.

Cacheing the data would actually help to make the use of the whois servers 
as low-volume as possible. Another aspect is that essentially what I'm 
doing is gathering historical data: I need the whois data for some 
addresses in a particular (419) email as they were valid at the time; a 
year on, the whois data may have changed but the changed data would be 
useless in relation to that same email. I may send them (and other 
registries that have similar usage conditions) a note to ask about such 
historical use though... Quite a lot of the whois data I have (manually) 
gathered so far does not come from Verisign's whois (as you can expect when 
you know what the 491ers' methods are).


> For the program to create a link to an email address, all it is doing is
> taking any email address you input and then giving it back to you as a link,
> it again does not care whether the email address is valid or not.  And,
> sending things out that way, could be considered spam, but that is another
> story in itself.

I merely stated that the program _can_ create such links, not that I 
intended to expose such links (as links) on the website. But the email 
addresses are there anyway, and (with most registries) publicly available. 
(For my own private whois use though, the email links could be handy.)


--
Marjolein Katsma

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