At 02:17 PM 11/30/98 +0100, Joao Luis Silva Damas wrote: Phone call #4 today. User goes to http://www.checkdomain.com to determine if ubuy.co.il is valid. www.checkdomain.com says the domain is owned by me (Internet Society of Israel). Now try it for xxxyyy.co.at or xxxxyyy.co.ie or any domain for that matter located at whois.ripe.net. This is just one Internet site that has based its site and code on how RIPE works. There very well may be others. -Hank

Dear Hank,

May be (or may be not) the "human engineering aspects" were discussed enough but, please, if things like this affect your work so much, get into the db-wg mailing list and give your input.

The TLD wg was also involved in this and they were actually very much looking forward to have this mechanism in place.

If you still feel that "This needs to be rectified" you can discuss this with the community, although it would have been better to discuss all this when the design was proposed instead of going around the loop again (which, of course, we'll do if users want to).

I'll wait and listen.

Regards, Joao

Hank Nussbacher <hank@ibm.net.il> writes: * At 01:01 PM 11/30/98 +0100, Joao Luis Silva Damas wrote: * * Yes, that may be all correct - from a techno standpoint. What I am * stressing is the human engineering aspect. Up till now, thousands of hits * are sent to the whois.ripe.net every month to determine whether a domain * exists or not. Users have been doing this for years. Suddenly, the output * is different and they do not realize it. I highly doubt that the human * engineering aspect was discussed or analyzed to any extent in the DB WG. -H * ank *