Whois is one of the historic internet protocols. There are two types of whois databases on the Internet: domain names, and internet numbers (IP addresses, autonomous system numbers). In this talk, we introduce the history of the whois databases for Internet numbers and explain how they are used (and what is ongoing to replace this way of accessing this information).

Spoiler: yes, people still use MD5 to authenticate updates, and still put policy derived from data retrieved over unauthenticated protocols in their router configurations.