[Community-Discuss] Fwd: [members-discuss] Unsolicited Requests

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <D492A07F-F7C7-4611-8C24-D070634E7DF3 at consulintel.es>, 
JORDI PALET MARTINEZ <jordi.palet at consulintel.es> wrote:


>I think it is very clear that one of the candidates is getting support from

> an organization for a campaign to promote him in a very unethical,

>immoral, and in many jurisdictions against the law, because the usage

>of personal data. Further to that, it is clear to me that the usage of

>the AFRINIC mailings list and whois is against the purpose.


Boy oh boy!  I take a few days off to go and work on some other stuff
closer to home, and it seems like I missed out on everything!

I see a lot of accusations flying around.  What I don't seem to see is
any clear evidence to support them.

So, what did I miss?

I see some folks claiming that somebody tried to buy votes. Where are those
actual messages and who sent them?  All I have seen so far is some alleged
email messages from Nishal Goburdhan encouraging people to vote and not
even mentioning any specific candidate(s).

If there's something wrong with that then someone will have to explain
that to me, because my small brain doesn't understand.

If there are messages that were sent BY ANYBODY and that are clearly offering 
money in exchange for votes, then if those are in plain text form, or if
they can be converted to plain text, then I ask anyone making claims about
such things to please post those here WITH FULL EMAIL HEADERS (because as
we all know, emails can be rather trivially forged).  On the other hand,
if any such "bribery" messages exist and can be rendered as screenshots,
from a phone or whatever, then I hope that whoever may be making such clains
will make screenshots, post those to imgur.com or Google Drive, or to any
other such service and that they will then be so kind as to share, publicly,
the relevant URLs.

Separately, my friend Jordi also seems to be a bit up in arms about what
may or may not constitute misuse of public but personal data, e.g. in ways
that might violate either the European GDPR or its counterparts elsewhere,
e.g. in Mauritius.

I personally have trouble getting too awfully upset, anxious, or angry
about this secondary issue, in no small part because like most of the
rest of you, I have been a daily recipient of email spam for about the
past 20+ years.  If I ran the world, then we would catch all spammers
and immediately shoot or castrate all of them. but the global Internet
community apparently feels that my preferred approach to the problem is
a bit too harsh, and that lesser punishments should apply.  Given that
context, and that fact that massive violations of GDPR are taking place,
even within the EU, AND on a daily basis, AND going entirely unpunished,
I have some trouble getting too hot and bothered about the possibilitty
that someone may have spammed to encourage voting generally, or spammed
for their favorite candidate in the upcoming election, particularly given
that this alleged spamming was quite evidently confined to a small scale,
and to a very limited audience.  (If we are going to start killing
spammers, could we please start with the ones that are sending out
billions of spams per week?)

Any claim of buying votes in any RIR election is, in contrast, incredibly
serious however, and I hope that any clear evidence of this will be made
public immediately.

Jordi also wrote:


>I think it is absolutely mandatory at this point that the candidate in

>question is disqualified...


That seems a bit hasty to me.

Let's see the facts and the evidence before we go castrating anyone for
something that they may or may not have even participated in.



Regards,
rfg