Sander Steffann wrote the following on 27/05/2014 13:18:
Hi Denis,
At RIPE 68, we again raised the issue of how the blocking mechanism works in the RIPE Database. Currently it is all or nothing — if a user queries for too much personal data, we block their access to everything. We often find that this causes issues for legitimate users of the database. This is a recent example of the requests our Customer Services department receives:
"This is the outgoing NAT IP for a vast shared hosting cluster. We can't control the type of queries our customers run, there are over 250,000 websites, a tiny fraction might use RIPE but those customers are using RIPE database for a good reason and need to be able to query it. This is why I'm asking for a blanket allow.”
Clearly we cannot whitelist any IP address for unlimited access to personal data. However, the option to only block access to personal data objects when the limit is reached would be a great help in these situations.
Sounds like a logical plan. If people ask for too much personal data, stop giving them personal data :) No reason to let them continue to ask for things that wouldn't have affected the rate limiter anyway.
Rate limiters should only apply limits to whatever they are measuring the rate of :)
Just what things should a rate limit limit if a rate limit could limit things? Doesn't really work, however I think the right approach has been outlined here. What we're interested in is restricting access to personal data, not to the database. Brian