[DBWG] WHOIS filtering and the "-B" option

[Alan Barrett]

The AFRINIC WHOIS server “filters” results by default.  It seems to delete all fields that contain email addresses.

For example, here are two queries with and without “-B”:

$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net IT7-AFRINIC | egrep -v '^%|^$'
person:         Infrastructure Team
address:        AFRINIC Ltd
address:        11th Floor, Standard Chartered Tower
address:        19, Cybercity
address:        Ebène
address:        Mauritius
phone:          +230 403 51 00
nic-hdl:        IT7-AFRINIC
source:         AFRINIC # Filtered

$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net -- '-B IT7-AFRINIC' | egrep -v '^%|^$
person:         Infrastructure Team
address:        AFRINIC Ltd
address:        11th Floor, Standard Chartered Tower
address:        19, Cybercity
address:        Ebène
address:        Mauritius
phone:          +230 403 51 00
e-mail:         sysadmin at afrinic.net
nic-hdl:        IT7-AFRINIC
changed:        hiba at afrinic.net 20130416
changed:        radha.ramphul at afrinic.net 20160808
source:         AFRINIC

I have two questions about this:

1. Instead of deleting the lines that are “filtered”, would it make sense to replace them with some sort of explanation that the information has been filtered?  For example, like this:

person:         Infrastructure Team
address:        AFRINIC Ltd
address:        11th Floor, Standard Chartered Tower
address:        19, Cybercity
address:        Ebène
address:        Mauritius
phone:          +230 403 51 00
e-mail:         # Filtered
nic-hdl:        IT7-AFRINIC
changed:        # Filtered
source:         AFRINIC # Filtered

2. Is it useful to censor the email addresses by default?  It seems to me that this adds no security (because the query can simply be repeated with the “-B” option), and reduces the usefulness.

Alan Barrett