[Community-Discuss] Blog: A Comprehensive audit of the AFRINIC WHOIS Database

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <9dd03dbe-f868-676f-6367-e11dc315864c at gmail.com>, 
Sunday Folayan <sfolayan at gmail.com> wrote:


>> That last part is simply incorrect.  There is no such thing as an abandoned

>> legacy block in the AFRINIC region for which the legitimate owner, or

>> the legitimate successor in interest cannot be definitively determined.

>

>That there is no abandoned legacy block in the AfriNIC region, does not 

>mean that the statement is not correct. Valid cases may just be 0, that 

>is still Ok.


I only wish I knews what point you were trying to make.


>> I wish that AFRINIC management and/or the AFRINC Board had had the good

>> sense to consult with either myself or with Jan Vermeulen before they

>> elected to incorporate the above erroneous assertions into the Overview

>> of the Audit Report.

>

>Why should AFRINIC consult with you, beyond the whistles you have 

>already blown and what is published?


I don't know.  Perhaps because they might learn something?  Perhaps
because if they had asked me I would have told them BEFORE they wrote
up this report that there are -ZERO- legacy blocks for which a current
rightful owner cannot be found?


>Doesn't that suggest that you want to trade some of these information? I 

>hope not!


That comment is beneath you Sunday.  I'm giving you a fair opportunity
now to retract it. 

I have dedicated countless hours of my time to pursuing and finding the
truth about what has happened in the AFRINIC region, and I dare you or
anybody else to point to a single dime that I have made from all of this
time and effort that I have invested.  I did this selflessly, with -ZERO-
compensation of any kind, and for the good of the Internet community as
a whole, and for the AFRINIC community in particular.


>Why should you be trusted, above any other person including those who 

>may make a claim to *any* of the blocks?


Because I have researched and found the historical evidence that makes
the true, legal, and rightful ownership clear in each case.

I am not seeking to have anyone trust me, or believe in me anymore that
Galileo Galilei was asking members of the Catholic clergy to trust him
regarding the motion of the planets.  They did not need to trust him.
They only needed to use their own eyes and look at the evidence.  Likewise,
I only suggest that AFRINIC should look at the actual evidence before
issuing silly and false statements like "the legal owners can't be found".

I have all that evidence.  I have had it all for more than a year now.
In all that time, management has never asked to see it, and did not ask
to see any of it before just throwing up its hands and declaring the
problem of finding the real owners insoluable.... which was a rather
spectacularly dumb thing for them to have done, since that statement
can be so easily proven wrong.

Just a reminder: Did I ask anyone to "trust me" when I proved that Ernest
was crooked?  No.  I didn't need to.  I had the evidence.  All in Black
& White.  I also have the evidence that proves who owns each and every
stolen legacy block, again in irrefutable Black & White, and from
multiple mutually-confirming historical sources in each case.




>> In point of fact, my detailed and extensive investigations into the histories

>> of every single one of the stolen legacy blocks have persuaded me, based

>> on clear evidence in each case, that there are -zero- such blocks under

>> the authority of AFRINIC where the original registration organizations

>> are "defunct" in the sense of being both dissolved AND having no legitimate

>> and lawful successor in interest.

>

>... and those successors are still into operating real Networks, and not 

>pivoted into journalism or Tourism?


That comment is also beneath you Sunday.  I give you an opportunity to
retract that also.

But to be clear, yes, none of the companies that my research has determined
to be the rightful legal owners of legacy blocks are in any way involved
in the journalism or tourism business.

If you have doubs about this, then why don't you ask some of the many
organizations that I personally have reunited with their stolen legacy
blocks... some of which were stolen under YOUR watch I might add.

Here are just a few of those:

     City of Cape Town (South Africa)
     Columbus Stainless (South Africa)
     Sasol (State-owned oil company - South Africa)
     South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (NECSA)


>Their words, your words, anybody's words. What do we believe?


I understand that as a man of the cloth you personally are obliged to
believe in all sorts of historical fantasies for which no proof is
either offered or available.  But my hope is that you have not become
so divorced from reality by years of religious indoctrination that you
are no longer even able to admit that there might exist such a thing
as actual proof of something here in this life, and in the Real World.

I have already done everything I humanly could to present the world
with hard anhd irrefutable proof when it came to Ernest and his deceitful 
betrayal of his employer and the entire AFRINIC community.  And it appears
that quite a lot of other people, at least, even if not you, were able
to accept, and did accept that proof, and they did subsequently act on
it.  So even if you personally find that you are only able to believe
in the things that you find in scripture, the rest of us out here in
the real world do accept other kind of proof and other kinds of evidence.
(And, I might add, even the Catholic Church eventually apologized to
Galileo Galilei, and admitted that he had been right all along, even
if that apology came about 400 years too late to do Galileo any good.)

Anyway, it is a wate of yout time, of my time, of everyone's time, and
of electrons for us to have a long debate here about epistemology, the
nature of truth, or the nature of hard scientific evidence, so let's
just skip that and I'll say again that  am *not* expecting anyone to
look only to "my words" as either evuidence or proof of anything.  I made
the case against Ernest based on *documents* and the documentary case
was airtight.  I likewise have *documentary* and other evidence showing
exectly who the current rightful and legal owner of every single legacy
block that has been stolen, with the help of AFRINIC, actually is.


>> In a similar vein, it is just plain wrong to assert that it is "no longer

>> practicable to trace down the" legal successors in interest...

>

>Should they not be the ones coming forward and laying as much claims as 

>they can, including having their lawyers chase the squatters and the 

>thieves all round the 4 corners of the globe?


I am sure that this is Mr. Cohen's position and preference on the matter,
however I did not expect a former AFRINIC board member to be advocating
for that viewpoint, perhaps to the benefit of Mr. Cohen.

My answer to your question hwoever is no, if the rightful legal owners
of each block can be reasonable determined based on hard documentary and
historical evidence... which they all can be... then AFRINIC has a moral,
ethical, and also, in my opinion, a legal obligation to restore
control and ownership of those blocks to their respective rightful and
legal owners (which may include the heirs and successors of the original
registrants).

If you find a wallet in the street with money and a man's driver's license
in it, and if the driver's license clearly provides the man's address,
do you think that it would be either moral or ethical (or even legal)
for you to simply keep the wallet and all of the money therein, rather
than returning it to the man at his address or taking it to the police?

Is this what they taught you in Sunday School, Sunday?


>I just do not get the reason why AFRINIC should be after the rightful 

>owners of legacy blocks that are not within its administrative and or 

>service oversight.


It is not necessary to "go after" anyone.  Nobody is either asking or
expecting AFRINIC to book long distance flights to the Americans or
Europe and then rent a set of bloodhounds to chase down individuals
like in some Sherlock Holmes novel.  The only thing that AFRINIC needs
to do is to correct the WHOIS records to reflect the current rightful
and legal owners of each block.  This could be done for all of the
stolen legacy blocks in one day and easily before even the mid-morning
coffee break.  THIS IS NOT HARD.

And it is my assertion that AFRINIC has an overriding moral and ethical
responsibility to correct these relevant WHOIS records, especially since
it was quite clearly AFRINIC that, either due to incompetence or malfesance
or both, allowed these same WHOIS records to become screwed up in the
first place.

Is there really no one on this list, or in the whole of the AFRINIC
region, whose mama taught them to take responsibility for cleaning up
their own messes... the ones that they themselves made?

I really don't think that this sense of responsibility is in any way just
a white european thing.  I believe that mamas in every country on this
globe teach their children this same lesson of personal responsibility.
It therfore seems more than a bit strange to me that the AFRINIC board
and management should need to be reminded of this ancient, universal,
and simple lesson of personal responsibility.  Clean up your own messes.
This is not in any way a novel or radical concept.


>I also do not see why AFRINIC must come to ask you, before you make such 

>information available, granted that your pursuit is altruistic in the 

>first instance.

>

>What am I missing here?


You are perhaps missing the fact that throughout this entire epic fiasco,
it has been my research that propelled the ball forward, and that has
revealed the awful truths behind all of these shenanigans and all of
these easily avoidable institutional failures.

Eveyrthing that I have said about these matters, going all the way back
to 2016, when I first tried, unsuccessfully, to ring the alarm bells,
has been proven true, and has been borne out by mountains of evidence,
the majority of which was found my me and as a result of my hard
investigational work.  Would you now claim that I am anything other
than a qualified, and indeed distinguished authority on these matters?
Who else then would it be simply prudent for AFRINIC to ask when it
comes to the topic of the rightful current ownerships of the various
stolen legacy blocks... blocks that *I* was the first to identify as
having been stolen?


>> AFRINIC has now compounded that original error with another one, i.e. an

>> apparent utter failure and/or unwillingness to do the kind of open source

>> historical research that I have already done, and that would allow each

>> and every stolen legacy block to now be returned to its lawful and

>> rightful owners, each of which CAN BE DEFINITIVELY DETERMINED, contrary

>> to the false assertions made in the Audit Report Overview.

>

>Wow!


Wow indeed.  One would have hoped that, with this epic and man-made disaster
within AFRINIC already having been the subject to press reports everywhere
from the Americas and Europe to as far away as Japan, the AFRINIC board
and management would have tried rather harder to clean up the mess both
completely and in a timely fashion, being, as this all righfully is,
a colossal and a global embarassment.  But they have done neither.  It
tookd them a full year to "investigate" and even now that that is done,
they are still allowing the international interloper and carperbagger,
Mr. Cohen, as well as the international interloper and carperbagger,
Mr. Mehta, to continue to enjoy the fruits of their criminal plunder.
The AFRINIC board and management have failed to restore to their pre-
fiddled states the various WHOIS person records associated with the
stolen legacy blocks, perhaps because nobody within AFRINIC ever saw
fit to make and retain historical backups of the WHOIS data base that
would have allowed such restorations to occur.

These multiple institutional failures are without precedent in the whole
history of the Internet, and some of them, at least, are still ongoing,
even as we speak.  So yes... Wow!  Wow indeed!


>Kindly publish a minority report.


To what end?  It is already obvious to me that neither the board nor
management wants to hear anything I have to say.


>It will:

>

>1. add to the body of facts available,

>

>2. obviously help outline the points where AFRINIC failed.

>

>3. Clarify your motives to a number of us.


Point #3 is also beneath you, Sunday.

My motives are now what they were a year and a half ago, when I started
working with a journalist to get all of this dirty laundry out on the
table.  And they are the same also as they were back in 2016, when I
first raised the alarm... which was ignored... about all of these thefts.

My motives can be summed up quite simply:  I object to the existance of
thieves, crooks, spammers, and scam artists on the Internet.  And I will
spend time and effort to get them off.  Lots of time and lots of effort.
I have no other motives.  If you believe that you have found any others,
then post your evidence.  Until such time as you do, I would encourage
you not to question either my ancestry or my motives, and I will not
question your's.


Regards,
rfg