WHOIS Running the Internet: Protocol, Policy, and Privacy

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS WHOIS?

WHOIS is a complex topic, as this book explains, but the simplest explanation is that it is a record system for network resources, mostly, but not exclusively on the Internet. WHOIS is one of the most critical and controversial services on the Internet, yet there has been little or no comprehensive documentation. A WHOIS service can be queried to return a WHOIS record, which details who owns or manages an Internet resource. While this service may seem ordinary, WHOIS is one of the most debated issues in Internet policy. In theory, WHOIS is supposed to simply retrieve contact information; in practice, WHOIS varies widely in composition, access, and use. This text covers the universe of topics and issues including the 40-year evolution of the service, policy changes, comprehensive use instructions, service deployment, and advanced coding for programmers. The text is wide in its breadth and attempts to be somewhat deep in each of the major areas, but there are limitations to coverage in a single text.

Unlike computer programming, networking, or hardware development, WHOIS is a disconnected and esoteric discipline. It has many self-taught adepts as well as almost cultish followers. WHOIS is a deep and wide subject without dedicated texts or classroom instruction, a truly strange and hidden world. Welcome, you are about to become a WHOIS sorcerer.

From RFC1177¹ FYI on Questions and Answers to Commonly asked New Internet User Questions (1990)

WHOIS: An Internet program which allows users to query a database of people and other Internet entities, such as domains, networks, and hosts, kept at the NIC. The information for people shows a person’s company name, address, phone number and email address.

Same language in the 1991 version²

In its modern usage, WHOIS has become a bit of a misnomer. A more accurate term would be WHOOWNS, WHOCONTROLS, or WHOISRESPONSIBLE since the original WHOIS identified personal accounts or machines tied to a specific person or entity. The one-to-one concept of a resource on the Internet simply no longer applies in most cases, and the WHOIS record will in fact reveal multiple parties with their hands on a domain name or Internet Protocol (IP) address.

Performing a domain WHOIS query lookup on wiley.com returns this data:

John Wiley & Sons, Inc Domain Administrator 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030 US Phone: +1.3175723355 Email: [email protected]

The IP address for wiley.com is 208.215.179.146. A WHOIS query lookup on this address returns this data:

Name  John Wiley & Sons Handle      C00546298 Street      432 Elizabeth Avenue City  Somerset State/Province    NJ Postal Code 08875 Country    US

These are two very simple examples of a system, which provokes intense concerns about cybercrime, invasion of privacy, and even the survivability of a single global Internet.

The term WHOIS can refer ambiguously to a service program, a database that stores WHOIS records and the WHOIS record itself. The original reason for having these records and making them publicly available is simple: every node on the Internet is capable of passing traffic to another node, which is what makes the Internet work. If one node has functional problems, it threatens the overall operation of the Internet so other administrators must have the ability to contact the owner of a node experiencing a problem somewhere in the chain.

WHOIS as a protocol concept essentially started in 1971 with the creation of Finger, a program that allowed users on a network to retrieve details about other active users on the network. This was most likely the first time it became possible to remotely create a live online connection. An updated version in 1977 called Name/Finger actually introduced the term Whois as part of the program function. Being able to see who else is on the network and retrieve information about those persons is a fundamental pillar of the Internet, but one also seen as contributing to the decline in personal privacy. There were so few participants on the early network that sharing contact information was not considered controversial. As the network steadily grew, some started to see the public availability of this information as a threat. However, it is generally acknowledged that allowing unaccountable parties onto the public network is just as dangerous. A balance must be found between security and privacy. To address this, a sizable portion of the text is dedicated to this debate.

Following the precise path of the growth of the Internet, WHOIS has experienced changes and even mutations. Unknown to most, there is in fact no single WHOIS database or standard for the Internet. There may be as many as 1500 public WHOIS databases, each with its own rules, formatting, and level of service. The number of WHOIS records currently in existence may exceed 200 million. WHOIS is a massive pile of data with names, addresses, phone numbers, and network resources that explains who owns what is on the Internet.

WHOIS records have long been required for IP addresses and for Internet hostnames. When domain names became available for public consumption, the WHOIS controversy exploded. Criminals began deliberately falsifying WHOIS records, shady marketers exploited the publicly available contact information, and noncommercial domain owners feared for their privacy and safety.

The future of WHOIS is up in the air. There are parties who want to see it banned completely or have access severely restricted. Conversely, the demand and growth of the data is increasing, which calls for better management and more technical tools. Presently, we are at crossroads in the history of WHOIS.

While WHOIS existed in various formats for several decades, the formal documentation used for our current Domain Name System (DNS) was released in 2004 in Request for Comments (RFC) document number 3912.³ This standards document admits to problems with the security and data formats with the expectation or disclaimer that the data is "intended to be accessible to everyone."

It is important to understand how WHOIS fits in with the overall structure of the DNS.⁴ WHOIS records are not required for the DNS, meaning there is no technical requirement for the WHOIS record to exist, be reachable, or be accurate for a domain name to resolve. However, a variety of networking services depend on WHOIS, for example, the firewall analyzing program fwlogwatch⁵ calls WHOIS as one of its functions, the -W switch.

What does and does not have a WHOIS record:

example.com—Does

frediessubdom.example.com—Does not

example.com/utils/homepage.html—Does not

ns1.example.com—Does

[email protected]—Does not

Email addresses do not have WHOIS records, but the domain name that serves the mailbox does. So for each email address, there is one unique WHOIS record for the attached domain, no WHOIS record for specific email addresses. Twitter addresses and Facebook pages do not have WHOIS records but twitter.com and facebook.com do. The raw IP addresses behind domain names have WHOIS records as do nameservers and the major Internet providers who sponsor the architecture of the DNS. Specific services may have internal functions called WHOIS. For example, Internet Relay Chat⁶ (IRC) has the commands WHO,⁷ WHOIS,⁸ and WHOWAS,⁹ which provide information about different account holders; these are not usually considered part of the common WHOIS lexicon. WHOIS has multiple definition and uses, including:

WHOIS record

WHOIS service

WHOIS server

WHOIS database

WHOIS query

WHOIS program

While registration data is casually referred to as WHOIS, the more accurate term might be Domain Name Registration Data (DNRD), but few outside the industry use this.

I.1 CONVENTIONS USED IN THIS TEXT

All material is intended to be thoroughly sourced with examples and links to additional information or original material—but be warned; the source documents may even be more obscure and difficult to understand. The examples cited are meant to be simple and straightforward. Italicized sections are typically literal command strings intended to be typed at a terminal or shell prompt. While the term WHOIS is featured in many different ways (whois, WhoIs, etc.), the convention here is to use WHOIS for general concepts and whois for specific instructions and coding. In some instances, the capitalization may be from the original context of a cited document.

People tend to regard WHOIS as a single system, but nothing can be further from the truth. The results of a WHOIS query are limited by what the specific database has, what the specific server allows access to, the used account’s level of access, and the functions of the WHOIS client being used.

The way domain owners are described varies within the industry. The official term is domain registrant as no one really owns a domain. Domains are leased for periods of 1 year typically and must be renewed. The colloquial term domainer is often used to describe the population of domain registrants in a political context, whereas registrant is used to describe their specific relationship with the registrar. Another simpler description is domain customer. All term may be used in this text, but generally refer to the same type of person or entity.

The official term describing what a registrar does for a registrant is sponsorship. However, domain name registrars do not like this term. Sponsorship is what appears in the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Registrar Accreditation Agreement (RAA) contract, but registrars are concerned that this term implies a much more active type of oversight than they are required to provide.

Some records returned by WHOIS queries can be exceedingly long. If we have shortened the records for brevity in the text, it should be indicated clearly or terminated with an ellipsis (…). Specific commands list in the flow of discussion are in bold. Italicized block citations are typically from documentation, memorandum, or texts. If these italicized blocks are in quotes, they are usually from a single person or attributable to single person. Single italicized lines without quotes are literal command expression to be typed on a terminal or command prompt. Example system responses are indented in a different font.

I.2 FLOW OF THIS TEXT

The goal of this book is to provide a comprehensive overview, with a certain amount of depth through its coverage of WHOIS history and WHOIS use, as well as its greater role the DNS. The full picture is seen in WHOIS programming, WHOIS server details, the complex body of WHOIS policy development, and finally the future of WHOIS. All of these topics are deeply interwoven. The history helps explain why WHOIS has been structured as it is and why some of the problems are a result of those initial decisions. Historical issues have influenced how the services were developed technically and how they are used by various consumers of the data. The WHOIS imprint on the fabric of the Internet’s DNS through the servers that implement policy and technical decisions are all dependent factors in the body of WHOIS.

I.3 WHOIS FROM VERSUS WHOIS ABOUT

It is important to understand that it is possible to both query WHOIS from a service and about a service. Registrars and registries are services that host WHOIS service but also have their own WHOIS records that provide contact information for the registrar or registry company itself.

The term WHOIS can refer ambiguously to a service program, a database that stores WHOIS records as well as the WHOIS records themselves:

Contact/owner record for an Internet resource

Database holding Internet contact/owner records

Query of the database holding Internet contact/owner records

Server hosting the database Internet contact/owner records

Service listening for queries of the database Internet contact/owner records

Client program querying the database Internet contact/owner records

The entire scope of all services and policy concerning Internet contact/owner records

In the early days, a single failure on the network could stop all the data from moving. The immediacy of having a technical contact in WHOIS has shifted to security and policy needs. With multiple routes available on the Internet, and more coming all the time, this brings new threats of abuse on the network on even grander scales. The use of WHOIS may have shifted slightly, but its need has become greater.

I.4 ORIGIN OF THE TERM WHOIS

While we can trace the origin of the WHOIS protocol to specific people, events and code finding the exact origin of the term may prove a little difficult. The who am i command and related used is familiar to UNIX users,¹⁰ but the use of WHOIS predates even UNIX. Different documents state that WHOIS was already in common use on systems prior to widespread UNIX deployment.¹¹ The use of whois as a command on Internet Relay Chat (IRC )does not appear until 1988.

Often capitalized, WHOIS is not an acronym. It literally means who is. At one time, it was possible to type whois * (The asterisk * is a common wildcard system code, meaning it can be replaced with anything.) and retrieve all the profiles for everyone on the network. But where did it come from? "Certainly someone coined the term,"¹² wrote Ken Harrenstien about the origin of WHOIS. Harrenstien wrote the original WHOIS specification, and everyone I talked to said if anyone knew the origin, "it would be Ken. However, at the time, preserving the specific source of the term was not likely a priority. Ken surmised that his suspicion is that it first started being used at the MIT AI lab, which is where I first encountered the name."¹³

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was famous for the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS). In the late 1960s, ITS was where great strides occurred in computing. One of the utilities on this system was called who. who could be used to call up a list of active usernames and the terminal names they were using, but nothing more. For those familiar with Windows NT administration, it would be similar to the net view DOS command, which retrieves a list of machine names connected to the network. who did not tell you anything about the account holder or even where the terminal was located. In 1971, another program called finger was paired with a database to extend the utility of who by providing information about the users found with who. finger would later be combined with the name program to create the precursor for today’s WHOIS. The name/finger combination documentation in 1977 refers to the term WHOIS to describe the function, but the actual command switch was /W.¹⁴ Since this new process all ran on the ITS system, we must assume it was not new to developers at this point. Over time, WHOIS became the prevailing term for the function of seeing the record previously supplied by finger. To follow the logic, if who gave us a list active users but no further information, the follow-up question would likely be who is a particular user. Some RFCs assigning port number 43 refer to the service as Who Is,¹⁵ but obviously the space in the command would cause problems, especially, in earlier systems, so it follows that the term would be contracted.

Unlike many other early commands and future UNIX commands, Who is pretty straightforward, as compared to grep. There are some with the same sort of expected meaning like which (shows which version of a program is being used by virtue of the pathname), whereis (searches for files related to a utility), and whatis (describes a command). The one-letter command w combines features of who and finger with some additional features for more powerful searching on the local network. Even more specifically, whodo can retrieve a list of processes being run by which user. These commands check the system utmp¹⁶ file (and others), which record user activity. There is also a whom command that is used for examining email headers.¹⁷ However, most of these conventions appear long after WHOIS starts creeping into official Internet documents.

It would be difficult to make a direct connection with Internet WHOIS, but the first real use of the term in communication may have come from teletype machines as documented in the chapter on history. Long before the Internet sparked into being on October 29, 1968, remote signals were sent without electronics, and the recipients needed to identify the sender.

I.5 WHY WHOIS IS IMPORTANT (OR SHOULD BE) TO EVERYONE

Anyone who uses the Internet for any commerce or communication needs to understand there is an underlying record set documenting who controls websites and Internet resources. We all share and access the same Internet. How do we identify who controls a resource on this network? Specifically, within the context of a responsible party, for the purpose of addressing technical issues but also in the larger and more subtle context of ensuring a trust relationship on the shared network. Ensuring that a node on the network functions properly and is not passing traffic in a way that disrupts the network is part of that trust foundation. This becomes even more crucial when online transactions come into play. In this world, transaction has a few meanings, which need to be clarified. In networking, a transaction refers to a very literal transfer of data and has similar use in database programming. However, in the context of our trust relationship, transaction is used to refer to the exchange (sometimes unauthorized) of personal information or money. The fundamental reason for accurate and accessible WHOIS is to offer a layer of protection to users and consumers. WHOIS keeps the Internet democratic.

I.6 WHAT KIND OF USE AND CONTACT IS PERMITTED FOR WHOIS

There are concerns and accusations that WHOIS is being abused, or at least overused, but the records exist for a reason. WHOIS contact details may be used for any lawful purpose,¹⁸ which would include research and questions related to online investigations. Registrars, ISPs, registrants, and users engaged in illicit activities may claim that storing or using WHOIS data is a violation of privacy or harassment, but this is merely a tactic. There are limitations on the use of WHOIS data, which includes mass marketing,¹⁹ but this is inapplicable to data gathering in an investigation and contact in relation to the domain name. For example, contacting a domain registrant to ask if they have a valid pharmacy license for their domain is a completely legitimate use of WHOIS data. Illicit registrants will often accuse investigators of spamming them, but routine contact in connection to the use of a domain name is perfectly acceptable.

Registrars will often insert language into the headers of WHOIS records, which contain additional restrictions on the use of WHOIS. However, these conditions are frequently not supported by the registrar contracts. Specifically, the contract states: "Registrar shall not impose terms and conditions on use of the data provided."²⁰

I.7 WHERE IS THE WHOIS DATA?

In terms of domain WHOIS data, ICANN does not accept or store WHOIS data. All data is stored in individual registrar or registry databases in addition to the WHOIS escrow at Iron Mountain. The Iron Mountain escrow is not a database that can be queried, and ICANN does not have access to it. The purpose of the Iron Mountain escrow is to provide a recoverable repository of WHOIS data in case of catastrophic failure or if a registrar refuses to turn over their database upon contract termination, which has happened. There is no single WHOIS database. Because of the number of possible office locations, virtual data storage, and off-site backups, the data exists in various states and levels of availability. Some registrar WHOIS servers are even run from small home offices. WHOIS records are not a single record; rather, they are field entries in a database, and in some cases, the results displayed in a query may have come from more than one database. This is why the records will appear different depending on how the record is retrieved or where it is retrieved from. The WHOIS files produced by queries are merely the text output of a database query.

I.8 IDENTIFYING REMOTE COMMUNICATION SOURCES

WHOIS is not a unique or new situation. The problem of identifying persons, devices, or broadcasts on a network predates even the creation of the modern Internet. We can point to the Imperial Wireless Chain²¹ and the common telephone system.²² Consider examples of communication and source identification, which predate even any kind of wired or wireless transmission, namely, lighthouses. In theory, every lighthouse has a different paint pattern for daytime identification and flash lights at different intervals in the dark.²³ While lighthouses keep ships from running aground, they also provide a critical navigational tool; the external stripes, color, or checkers are not just for quaint appearances. This is called a DAYMARK in sailor lingo.²⁴ Compare these two lighthouses from Bodie Island, NC,²⁵ and Cape Hatteras, NC,²⁶ respectively. They are very close to each other in terms of location and similar in construction. The variation in pattern distinguishes them for ships in the area.

FIGURE I.1 Bodie Island Light Station.

Courtesy of U.S. National Park Service.

FIGURE I.2 Cape Hatteras Light Station.

Courtesy of U.S. National Park Service.

Communication is not just about transmitting information but also validating the source of that information. The role of lighthouses in civilization stretches back to ancient times. Two of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were lighthouses: the Colossus of Rhodes²⁷ and the Pharos of Alexandria.²⁸ Even more than sources of information, these structures were bold statements identifying the peoples who built them. The reference to lighthouses is not just a convenient comparison. Different types of signaling towers are directly related to the development of long-distance communication technologies that lead to the Internet. In the second century BC, the Greek statesman and historian Polybius created a tower-based signaling system, which employed an alphabet substitution system encoded on a grid, a Polybius Square.²⁹ The original purpose of the code was not encryption but to reduce messaging to a very simple character set that could be translated by the remote recipient. The square was a 5 × 5 grid with the letters of the (Greek) alphabet placed in ordered rows, here in English:

The ancient Greek alphabet only had 24 letters so we have omitted J to make it fit the 25 squares. Now, each letter can be represented by two digits, so 52 23 34 24 43 is WHOIS. By using two sets of five torches on a tower, messages can be quickly transmitted.

FIGURE I.3 Polybius Torch Signalling, Hulton Archive.

Copyright Getty Images.

Polybius was not just a communications scientist but also a political philosopher. For the purposes of this text, he serves as a kind of spirit guide on both counts.

An even better modern comparison in communications is radio. Like the Internet, radio waves are a shared public resource. IP addresses and domain names must be unique, just as specific radio frequencies can only be used by one broadcaster at a time within a specific range. Radio stations frequently give out the call letters (WXYZ or whatever) and broadcasting location. This is not just for promoting the station; it is a requirement of their license. In order to prevent clashing of signals, the airwaves are regulated; otherwise, the broadcast with the most powerful signal would simply control the frequency. This has serious implications beyond not being able to hear your favorite music. The frequencies of all radio emitting devices are regulated to keep them from interfering with other equipment or interrupting emergency frequencies of say the police. For example, there have been many cases over the years of military equipment interfering with remote residential garage door openers near air force or naval bases.³⁰ The Federal Communications Commission³¹ (FCC), similar international agencies,³² and private DXers³³ constantly try to track down unknown signals.

I.9 GETTING DOCUMENTATION

One of the main goals of this text is to bring together the rather large but disparate collection of information about WHOIS. Work on this book began out of a lack of texts dedicated to the topic. Much of the public information is incomplete or out of date. In researching, it was found that research for this text revealed that the the standard list of WHOIS servers, often embedded in extensively used code, was at-least 10 years old. The bug-reporting technical email in the VeriSign WHOIS client, [email protected], was rejected because the account address no longer exists. The ICANN has the largest oversight of WHOIS but a surprisingly thin webpage describing the subject.³⁴ However, the information does exist, often because of dedicated technical experts, noted in this text; have kept their own records; and are willing to share it. Here, we have pieced together a picture of WHOIS from a diverse selection of practitioners.

One series of documents that contain a wealth of information about WHOIS are the Internet development memorandums called RFC. This format of memos started in 1969 specifically for proposing Internet standards or creating discussions. The very first RFC, most appropriately, is called host software and describes the function of Interface Message Processors³⁵ (IMP), which was a gateway between networked machines. This first memo was written by Steve Crocker who has more recently been serving as board chairman of the ICANN. There are now over 7000 RFCs maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force³⁶ (IETF). Many of these memos define or refer to WHOIS and form the basis for the current implementations. These documents also document proto-WHOIS implementations or WHOIS-like attempts to record and obtain network resource information. While considered the authoritative documentation for the Internet, RFCs were not the only standard documentation. Internet Experiment Notes (IEN) were documentation for a related Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Internet project, which were eventually merged with RFCs. The last IEN was issued in 1982.

Some of the most interesting sources of information come from the WHOIS programs and servers themselves. These are the in the form of Help or MAN (for manual) files often stored within the WHOIS program itself. Calling these files may require experimentation since they are not all called the same way. In a Unix-based system, any native program can be detailed by typing man ; in our case, man whois would return a detailed and interactive instruction set for the program. Help files on various systems, and ones accessed on remote servers, may be retrieved with whois?, whois help, whois --help, or whois –h. This depends on the information source and software used. Some may have no help file, and the irony is that you need to access the help file to know how to access the help file. Sometimes, you can access the help file by making mistake and sending a bad query to the program. In the cases cited in this text, we will attempt when possible to demonstrate access to the help file. Unfortunately, many of the help files for WHOIS are out of date and poorly detailed. Many of the functions documented in WHOIS help files are 10–20 years old and have been disabled or are no longer accepted by the remote servers.

NOTES

1 http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/rfc1177.pdf

2 http://tools.ietf.org/pdf/rfc1206.pdf

3 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3912

4 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1034

5 http://linux.die.net/man/8/fwlogwatch

6 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812

7 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459#section-4.5.1

8 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459#section-4.5.2

9 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1459#section-4.5.3

10 http://linux.die.net/man/1/who

11 http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc742

12 Harrenstien interview

13 See note 12.

14 See note 11.

15 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1700.txt

16 http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man5/utmp.5.html

17 https://www-01.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/#!/ssw_aix_61/com.ibm.aix.cmds6/whom.htm

18 http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registrars/raa/ra-agreement-21may09-en.htm#3.3.5

19 http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registrars/consensus-policies/wmrp

20 See note 18.

21 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1913/aug/08/new-marconi-agreement

22 http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Plain+old+telephone+service

23 http://www.us-lighthouses.com/faq.php

24 http://pharology.eu/Daymarks.html

25 http://www.nps.gov/caha/planyourvisit/bils.htm

26 http://www.nps.gov/caha/learn/historyculture/movingthelighthouse.htm

27 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/501620/Colossus-of-Rhodes

28 http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/455210/Pharos-of-Alexandria

29 http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Polybius/10*.html#45.6

30 http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/06/fort-gordon-radio-upgrade-causes-garage-door-havoc/

31 http://www.fcc.gov/

32 http://transition.fcc.gov/mb/audio/bickel/world-govt-telecom.html

33 http://www.dxing.info/introduction.dx

34 http://icannwiki.com/index.php/whois

35 http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1.txt

36 http://www.ietf.org/download/rfc-index.txt

1

THE HISTORY OF WHOIS

Through the development of the Internet, in general, we see the development of WHOIS and its concepts as a necessary component. While the need for a clear record set for the network seemed a fundamental technical requirement, it was not simple to construct and manage. Throughout history, questions and discussions about the meaning and use of these resource records began to emerge. It is clear that various policy issues were on the minds of the early RFC authors, which sometimes portend future conflicts.

1.1 IN THE BEGINNING

In 1982, this dry sentence launched the Internet’s model of record access for the next 30 years and beyond:

The NICNAME/WHOIS Server is an NCP/TCP transaction based query/response server, running on the SRI-NIC machine, that provides net-wide directory service to ARPANET users.¹

Where the SRI-NIC machine sits or what SRI stands for is not explained or footnoted in the document. Anyone reading it at the time would have common knowledge of its meaning. NIC of course stands for Network Information Center or Controller. Understanding what is behind these acronyms opens a door to the history of the Internet. SRI stands for Stanford Research Institute. In 1982, SRI-NIC, and its related machines, was the Internet. Many readers may be more familiar with the ARPANET as a precursor to the Internet. The ARPANET was a government-funded initiative to connect networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard, Xerox, the RAND Corporation, The Pentagon, and a dozen other entities. However, we see from this memo that the location and coordination of the record set for this nascent network was at Stanford. The machine referenced would hold the contact information for all the hosts and directories on the ARPANET and respond to requests for that information. So what is the real difference between NICNAME and WHOIS, as they are used synonymously starting with the title of RFC 812? In the Unix services file (/usr/etc/inet/services), different ports are assigned for different network traffic. Port 43 lists whois as the service name and nicname as the process or program.² This is a common snapshot of that file with the Port 43 lines highlighted, compared to the entries for FTP and Telnet that have no alternate identities:

ftp            21/tcp telnet        23/tcp smtp          25/tcp        mail #Simple Mail Transfer whois          43/udp        nicname whois          43/tcp        nicname ...

It is in this context a subtle distinction. The whois accepts requests through Port 43 for nicname. The RFC from 1982 is often marked as the beginning of WHOIS by researchers like Milton Mueller,³ a professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies and one of the major figures in the WHOIS policy debate. However, here we can push the origin back several years and may be even more.

1.2 THE SANDS OF TIME

In our introduction, we made a brief reference to lighthouses and the role they have played from ancient times, not just in warning ships of the coastline but also in the self-identification of the information source. The concepts in play in computing and networking have a long lineage. We often take our advance technology for granted, not understanding that generations past worked at these ideas long before they became real in our time. Our modern communication technology is an amalgamation of human achievements from prehistory, just out of reach, until now, due to a collision of mechanics and electricity in the last century.

The idea of building a network and passing information across the network did not spring into being 50 years ago. Humans have been tackling this problem since ancient times without computers or even electric power. The need to identify sources of information that could be passed through a network became a challenge as soon as the ancient networks began. Two of the best examples come from the Roman Empire and can still be seen (and even used), namely, roads and aqueducts. The Romans were distinguished from other ancient civilizations by the permanent lines linking cities and settlements. The testament to the Roman road was not just in its construction, but more so in its regulation, maintenance, and use. Roads had to be up to a certain size and standard and separated for specific use. Like modern network technology, the Roman road consisted of layered construction materials each with its own function.

1.2.1 Seals

The Roman roads were of course used for travel, commerce, and messaging. Just like the Internet today, where any host can pass traffic, messages carried on ancient roads could come from anywhere. How would a recipient identify the source of a message? Since ancient times, systems of seals or impressions have been used. Older seals were made from clay and more recently wax. The sender would have a signet ring or special cylinder with an official mark impressed in the seal, which would serve as authentication.⁴

1.2.2 From Signal Fires on the Great Wall to Telegraphy

Another great construction feat of antiquity that can still be touched is China’s Great Wall. Stretching over 8000 kilometers along China’s northern border, its military defensive and border control are well known, but its use as a network is not. A system of fires, cannon, drums, and flags were used to pass information rapidly, not only up and down the wall but also to and from watchtowers outside the wall. Beyond simply warning of an