[DBWG] Malformed changed: fields in route: objects

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

I am attempting to parse the contents of the changed: fields within
the route and route6 objects that are present in the redacted form of
the AFRINIC WHOIS data base that is available via FTP.  (The unredacted
form of the data base is still being pointlessly withiheld from legitimate
researchers such as myself, so I am obliged to work only with the redacted
form of the data base.)

The general form of any given changed: field within the data base appears
to be:

     changed:   email-address date

This simple format would be easy enough to parse with consistant results
if it were not for the two facts that (1) some few nitwits were allowed
to enter email addresses of the form:

     email-address<mailto:email-address>

combined with that fact that (2) AFRINIC's redaction process, via which
the redacted version of the data base is gnerated and placed onto AFRINIC's
FTP server apparently becomes confused by the above style of malformed
email addresses, with the result being that the content of (malformed)
changed: fields become truncated at the @ (at-sign) that appears within
the <mailto:XXX> part of these malformed changed: lines.  Thus, within
the redacted WHOIS data base, the lines in question end up looking like
this:

      changed:        ***@viva.co.zm<mailto:asif

Obviously, it is not pssoble to obtain the relevant date stamp in these
cases, because it has been improperly redacted out by AFRINIC's WHOIS
redaction process.

The affected IPv4 route objects are as follows:

routesum: 102.140.124.0/22 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.120.0/23 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.122.0/23 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.124.0/23 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.126.0/23 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.120.0/24 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.121.0/24 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.122.0/24 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.123.0/24 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.124.0/24 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.125.0/24 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.126.0/24 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.140.127.0/24 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field
routesum: 102.223.168.0/22 [328581] - Missing or malformed changed: field

In the case of IPv6 routes, only the following single IPv6 route object is
affected by this problem:

route6sum: 2c0f:ec88::/32 [328328] - Missing or malformed changed: field

It would be helpful if the hostmaster would correct the form and content of
all of the above malformed route objects.

It would also be helpful if the hostmaster would take whatever steps may
be necessary in order to insure that this type of prooblem does not creap
back into the data base in the future, i.e. by pre-filtering the email
addresses that will ultimately be placed into changed: lines in the data
base and by pre-checking them for reasonable and consistant syntactic form.


Regards,
rfg