tallship<p><span class="h-card"><a class="u-url mention" href="https://honk.tedunangst.com/u/tedu" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@tedu</a></span></p><p>Fuckers.</p><p><em><strong>I will always be BT74</strong></em>, going back all the way to <strong>NIC.DDN.MIL</strong> aka, yet another nom de plume of <strong>SRI</strong>, or, as was affectionately referred to as, <strong>"The NIC"</strong>.</p><p>Back in the mid-80's after we introduced <strong>DNS</strong> in 1985 (and even before), you could actually call up Jake Feinler directly over the phone for time sensitive issues of a priority nature. She was always able to get things resolved in a matter of hours - sometimes I'd get a call back in a few minutes from an engineer at SRI to confirm that all was well.</p><p>according to the man pages, you should still be able to a <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/whois" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#WHOIS</a> searches <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/nic" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NIC</a> handles for "NET-...", POCs like my handle above (um... sort of, I'll get to that), etc.</p><p>So I should note, that the <em>NIC Handle</em> I've listed above hasn't actually been searchable for quite some time now (at least ten years). but you should still be able to <code>grep</code> for it (coz I've made certain to still listed that way in my registry records). A simple, elegant system that lends well it's usage to humans, is now being cast aside for something less readable and in many ways, relevant, when you're quickly trying to pull a piece of primary data to reach someone responsible for a contact point (PoC), with respect to themselves, their property, or a <em>"Role Account"</em> that is responsible for a resource and shared by perhaps, several individuals.</p><p>So, the various <strong>contacts</strong> in the WHOIS records are variously, <strong>Registrant, Admin, Tech, and Billing</strong> contacts. In reality (and I've not seen a change in the RFCs on this point, but I don't follow that closely nowadays), the <em><strong>TECH CONTACT</strong></em> is defined as the person or role account responsible for the direct administration of DNS - not neccessarily the same as any other contact role account. <strong>ADMIN</strong> is important too, but not really as important as the TECH contact. In theory and still many times in practice, a remote sysadmin somewhere needs to get ahold of the DNS administrator to report abuse or some other issue, so a WHOIS is performed and voila! - you have a contact point to help fix a technical situation.</p><p><strong>REGISTRANT</strong> is the owner of the <em><strong>domain registration</strong></em>, and as such, might legitimately have a reason to pay a privacy bureau to act as a proxy for contacting (to block stalkers, spammers, whatev), and the <strong>BILLING</strong> contact really has little technical relevance, but unlike the REGISTRANT, is the actual person or role account to interact with when it comes to domain renewals, etc.</p><p>So the ADMIN and at the very least, TECH contacts must (or should) be live phone and/or Fax numbers and email addresses that are searchable and reachable by anyone. In reality, however, after <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/nsi" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NSI</a> started to become less of a NIC, and shed themselves of the <code>internic.net</code> moniker as they commercialized under pressure from the nascent ICANN in order to have their contract renewed, anyone who registered a domain ended up having the fields to all of the contacts being filled out with the same data as that of the* registration owner/admin*, instead of what it should have been for at least the TECH and ADMIN contacts - you can override these defaults, but most will never bother, and have no idea why there are all these various roles in the records. (/me sighs....).</p><p>Okay, so after Jon Postel's untimely passing, the miscreants pretending to be legitimate enough to bootstrap ICANN quickly came to the realization that there's really no such thing as <em><strong>IANA</strong></em> - it was just a pseudonym for Jon, who literally ran pretty much everything we hold sacred today - like, being the RFC editor, and <em>being</em> IANA, managing the AUTH delegations of the <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/cctlds" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ccTLDs</a> and even the DNS root servers (litterally moved one unilaterally once). So IANA was created by these miscreant folks, like <em>Esther Dyson and Mike Roberts</em> - pretenders provocateur. But I digress.</p><p>So now we've got these <strong>RIRs</strong> (which is a good thing, some better than others, but still). <strong>RIPE</strong> still uses NIC-HANDLEs, and so does <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/arin" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ARIN</a>.</p><p>And as I promised, my <strong>NIC-HANDLE</strong>, once and always <strong>BT74</strong>, evolved into <em><strong>BT74-ARIN</strong></em> once that RIR was created. More explanations are in the alt-text accessibility tags for the two attached images.</p><p>So I won't go on further with this historical perspective that just sort of quietly was usurped by commercial pressures in the special interest lobby sector, <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/icann" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ICANN</a>, and <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/wipo" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#WIPO</a>, but anyone who's really interested can check out and read my friend Ellen Rony's book about the <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/domain%5Fwars" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Domain_Wars</a>.</p><p>But just for shits and giggles, I've included a couple of screenies attached to this post:</p><p>- my current, automatically evolved NIC-HANDLE following the formalization of ARIN, from the ARIN website, and...<br>- An explanation of the usage of NIC-Handle's from the current <em>man pages</em> of WHOIS.</p><p>I hope that helps!</p><p>All the best!</p><p><a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/tallship" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#tallship</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/unix" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#UNIX</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/dns" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#DNS</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/foss" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#FOSS</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/systems%5Fadministration" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#systems_administration</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/stanford%5Fresearch%5Finstitute" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#Stanford_Research_Institute</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/arpanet" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#ARPANET</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/milnet" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#MILNET</a> <a class="hashtag" href="https://public.mitra.social/collections/tags/nsfnet" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#NSFNET</a></p><p>⛵</p><p>.</p><p>RE: <a href="https://honk.tedunangst.com/u/tedu/h/4g4vG2g8TH52x5g3PY" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://honk.tedunangst.com/u/tedu/h/4g4vG2g8TH52x5g3PY</a></p><p><span class="h-card"><a class="u-url mention" href="https://honk.tedunangst.com/u/tedu" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@tedu</a></span></p>