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Suspension of Cogent Access to ARIN Whois
- metaphor 7y agoFYSA Curran clarifies scope of the 6-month suspension a bit later[1]: > ARIN has suspended service for all Cogent-registered IP address blocks. Customers with their own IP blocks that are simply being announced by Cogent are not affected. [1] https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2020-January/105231.html https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2020-January/10523...
- flounder3 7y agoI appreciate the gesture, but what's to keep them from moving their scraper to a third-party cloud provider, or sales folks using a VPN?
- moltar 7y agoNothing. And I think they address that at the end of the message. But hopefully this will be noticed by the higher ups and they’ll take sone action.
- dylz 7y agoUS corp, legal reasons.
- floatingatoll 7y agoRemoving “We didn’t know better” as a plausible excuse is sometimes sufficient to stop abuse. Nothing prevents Cogent from circumventing, but if they do so, that will likely be interpreted as willful violation if they are taken to court by ARIN, who is prepared to do so.
- gruez 7y agoHow does this square with the recent court ruling that linkedin scraping is legal? After all, it's all public data, and I have no doubt that linkedin tried to IP block the scrapers.
- floatingatoll 7y agoUnknown, since no court has ruled one way or the other in the ARIN matter.
- sneak 7y agoI think this is the wrong approach. The data is public. The place to filter unwanted mail is at the SMTP/MTA level, in my view; not at the distribution of already-public data. As pointed out by others, this will absolutely not prevent Cogent from spidering this public data. It will, however, negatively affect legitimate users of the data within Cogent’s IP space. This is the wrong place for a spam filter.
- iso947 7y agoSo it will hopefully harm cogents business and customers will move away. Corporations only understand the bottom line.
- oarsinsync 7y agoIf you're already a cogent customer, you're unlikely to drop Cogent because they spam. There's costs and risks associated with onboarding new transits, and (one of) your current providers being spammy to other people isn't generally likely to drive a business decision. If you're not a cogent customer, you're either not going to become one because of their tactics, or you are going to become one because of their tactics. I guess it's working towards the latter given how long it's been going on for.
- jeltz 7y agoAgreed. I prefer the approach of e.g. .se who have removed all sensitive data from whois and did so long before GDPR even. While it is a bit more work to reach out to domain holders now it is not like it was easy before since people rarely checked the email addresses which they used to register domains.
- vultour 7y agoI wish registrars allowed you to set the details you want published in whois before they put them in (at least mine doesn't). Hours after buying a domain I started getting spam on a very private email, one which I only used for services I pay for. Sure enough I found my account email in the whois details, luckily I was able to quickly change it before more bots got hold of it.
- EB66 7y agoCogent salespeople are the worst in the industry. If your contact information lands in their database, they'll never stop soliciting. At least once a year for the past 6 years Cogent calls my personal cell phone. This continues despite my repeated requests for them to stop calling and to remove me from their list.
- dylz 7y agoI get spam near daily. I actually just got spam from a "new" cogent salesperson _as I was reading the ARIN pdf_. I've told them "don't contact me again" and it's a different person the next week. It's absurd and I'm glad at least something is starting to be done.
- wereHamster 7y agoThe usual reaction in the US should be: sue them. You have the CAN-SPAM act and the Do Not Call Registry… why don't people make use of that to stop the companies from spamming them?
- JohnFen 7y agoBecause actually doing so is difficult, can be expensive, and is largely pointless.
- dredmorbius 7y agoSmall claims. Up to $10k in most jurisdictions.
- JohnFen 7y agoMaybe, but that only covers the court portion. The more problematic portion is gathering admissible evidence. Also, it's not clear if small claims would have jurisdiction with companies that aren't in the same state. Additionally, winning in small claims only gives you the right to chase after the award (the court is not going to collect on your behalf) -- so you still have to go to the time, hassle, and expense of trying to collect.
- scalableUnicon 7y agoRegistrars like Namecheap now offer free WHOIS guard and I see why it is essential.
- benjojo12 7y agoThis is for ASN/IP whois, there is not sanctioned way of privacy/guard there, other then having a generic NOC line/email
- blaser-waffle 7y agonetadmin-general-box@mydomain.net. then let the email filters do their thing. Cogent's behavior is obnoxious but, really, if you have a direct allocation from ARIN you should probably have a mailbox / phone number set up to handle lots of spam -- you're gonna get way more than just Cogent.
- rshnotsecure 7y agoHas anyone seen the network map of Cogent’s? https://www.cogentco.com/en/network/network-map https://www.cogentco.com/en/network/network-map This thing is enormous. This just looks...like the whole internet. Do they fully own those undersea lines too like Google does now with theirs? Or are they leased? I sure hope they don’t turn out to be a front company for a foreign nation’s military lol like I am always on here saying.
- samcrawford 7y agoTheir map is a bit misleading - they only cover North America and Europe well, which is not really "the whole internet". Their coverage in Asia, Oceania, South America, the Middle East and Africa is poor or non-existent. Level3 (now CenturyLink) have better coverage - http://www.centurylink-business.com/demos/network-maps.html http://www.centurylink-business.com/demos/network-maps.html - but even they have poor coverage in some areas.
- walrus01 7y agoCogent does not own the underlying cables. They buy transport from companies like zayo, CenturyLink/level3.
- blaser-waffle 7y agoThis is just (paid) peering and leased fiber, no? How much of it is dark fiber vs. lit?
- t0ddbonzalez 7y agoIf only some GDPR-type legislation existed which made it more difficult for companies like Cogent to misuse contact info in this way.
- techslave 7y agoyour phrasing suggests sarcasm, however no such law exists.
- techslave 7y agoi feel the outrage, however the whois is public data. enforcing some usage restriction is beyond silly. if you actually want to restrict it, require a login to make a query. make those logins cost money so that you have a valid contract.
- shadowgovt 7y agoCorrect. Or have the whois state tie to a channel that can be filtered (such as a voicemail service that transcribes incoming calls). If you can afford to host an Internet service, you can afford transcribing voicemail service in 2020.
- JackRabbitSlim 7y agoCool. Now I'll just go around signing up random ARIN addresses to Oracle, IBM and Google sales mailing lists. Cogent can die in a fire but this is stupid.