Hi, and thanks for bringing this up. This isn't particularly directed at you, I'm sure you can see...
So now, instead of having a chance to get rid of shared passwords/passphrases, everybody needs to have one, because of the way objects are filtered.
I'd say that's the wrong direction to lead people.
Of course, the other solution is to just get hold of all the people with an auth: MD5 line and make them take it out, that way you can get the full object without authenticating on the webupdater.
Do you need to specify any special options to whois to get the auth: lines from the maintainer object? We have a maintainer object where I'm pretty sure that all the auth: lines are of PGP- style, but whois is still not displaying those lines. Trying to use https://apps.db.ripe.net/webupdates/search.html it asks me for "password". What password?!? No, I have not used webupdates before, and have no particular desire to start using it now. Is there no way around this? I really, Really, dislike this change in behaviour, since we are now effectively cut off from updating our maintainer object -- we keep no local copy of the object, and want to use the one stored in the RIPE database as the authoritative data source. Now we can't do that. Argh! Regards, - Håvard