On 5/2/2012 6:46 PM, Antony Van Couvering wrote:
The study seems flawed to me.
1. Why if it has to do with Port 43 are unreachable websites considered a fail? That would make sense for web-based Whois, but not for Port 43.
A Registrar has to provide both a web based whois lookup AND a port 43 direct look-up facility. I agree the wordign is rather obscoure for the two registrars:
• Two cases were attributed to either a website failure or distributed denial-of- service (DDoS) attack which contributed to the inability to access port 43 WHOIS servers.
2. Why is rate-limiting considered a fail? This is put in place by responsible registrars to prevent scraping of Whois data by spammers.
It is not the rate limiting which is considered a fail, rather too severe rate limiting. We need to also note that many countries have invisible proxies which causes an incorrect statistic on an IP address. I myself have done a look-up and on the first look-up I encounter a "rate exceeded" error.
Antony Derek