[arin-ppml] Fraud or not?

[Jimmy Hess]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 12:47 AM, Ronald F. Guilmette
<rfg at tristatelogic.com> wrote:
> % whois -h whois.arin.net AS10912
[snip]
Interesting...
I would suspect that a search formatted like that might only work for
an AS lookup by coincidence.
 if  AS10912  happens to be exactly the same string of an AS Handle.
 Which  in this case it's  not.

10912 is in  a block of AS numbers,  and the  AS handle's  name  for
the block that shows
up in the whois  result as    ASHandle:  AS10910.

Many other AS numbers just show   ASxxxxxxx    as the  AS handle string.
If  the whois match is against the  AS Handle string,  this fact may
lead some whois users making
an incorrect assumption

"Is    WHOIS ASxxx"   a reliable way to  search for the WHOIS record
for AS number xxx ?
Apparently not.

Perhaps less surprising behavior  would be for WHOIS to default to
lookup by AS number instead
of AS handle string,
when the input is   'a  ASxxxxxx'



> #
> # Query terms are ambiguous.  The query is assumed to be:
> #     "a AS10912"
> #
> # Use "?" to get help.
> #
>
> No match found for AS10912.
--
-JH