Hi Richard and all,
-----Original Message----- From: Richard Cox [mailto:lists(a)mandarin.co.nz] <snip>
Gordon Smith <gsmith(a)wxc.co.nz> commented:
Unfortunately there are some in the U.S. that do block all APNIC space, mainly due to the amount of spam originating from China and Korea.
That, plus APNIC's reluctance to accept responsibility for legacy errors in their database.
Well, this is not quite true. APNIC has actually focused a fair bit on improving data integrity in whois over the last few years. To name a few: General improvement of whois data integrity - Clean up of un-referenced objects - Removal of objects unrelated to actual resource info (mar-03) - Removal of resource info not in APNIC range (mar-03) - Modify records that are not RPSL compliant (mar-03) - Reduce amount of inaccurate / out of date records Improving security of whois - Protection of un-maintained objects (sep-02) - Deprecation of 'NONE' and 'MAIL-FROM' (sep-02) - Secure authentication methods (PGP, MD5) - Stop unauthorised changes of records Over the last years, the RIRs have coordinated efforts to transfer the management of early registrations (pre-RIR) from ARIN to the RIR appropriate to the region in which the resource holders reside (http://www.apnic.net/db/erx/). This has resulted in an increase of historical registrations in the APNIC whois over the years - many which have incomplete contact details. In order to prevent anyone to go in and modify these records at their whim, APNIC has locked the records with an APNIC maintainer. We have also implemented processes to handle updates of historical records in a proper manner. In addition to this, after endorsement from the community, efforts are starting this year, to recover unused historical address space. (Many of the early allocations made are no longer in use and are simply left in whois with outdated details.) This will also hopfully reduce the amount of address space hijacking as well as improving the quality of the data in whois. Finally, there are efforts to establishing direct relationships with all resource holders in the APNIC region. This to meet an increased need for a secure manner to validate resource custodianship (which in the future could mean issuing of routing certificates). Again, one of the aims of this apart from clarifying the custodianships is to improve the integrity of the database for allocations made by the RIR as well as for historical allocations. On a general note, it is also worth pointing out that whenever the APNIC hostmasters are contacted about inaccurate contact details in the whois database, they try to look for updated contact details and in some cases contact the resource holders for the correct contact details. (Although this is somewhat difficult if it is legacy space with no internal records available.) If there are other efforts you would like to see APNIC take on, you are encouraged to voice your opinion on the APNIC mailing list. There is a Special Interest Group (SIG) that discussed the whois Database which you can subscribe to here: http://www.apnic.net/community/lists/ You do not have to be an APNIC member to participate in the decision making process. Anyone in the Internet community can express their opinion or put forward a proposal. An archive of all previous policy proposals (including the ones I mention above) can be found here: http://www.apnic.net/docs/policy/proposals/archive.html All current proposals are here: http://www.apnic.net/docs/policy/proposals/ We really do welcome some more participation from New Zealand, so I hope more of you will get involved! Cheers, Nurani ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Nurani Nimpuno <nurani(a)apnic.net> Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) Tel: +61-7-3858-3100 PO Box 2131 Milton, QLD 4064 Australia Fax: +61-7-3858-3199 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- See you at APNIC-19 Kyoto, Japan, 21 to 25 Feb 2005 and APRICOT 2005 http://www.apnic.net/meetings ---------------------------------------------------------------------- * ASIAN TSUNAMI & EARTHQUAKE RELIEF APPEAL Links to tsunami and earthquake disaster relief programs are available on our home page at http://www.apnic.net. ______________________________________________________________________