[rpd] Apology

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

Sorry to follow-up on myself, but I neglected in my prior message to mention
one of the reasons that I was, back in 2016, far too eager to jump to the
incorrect conclusion that there was some improper collusion going on
between the party or parties who had hijacked all of those Afrinic legacy
/16 blocks and some unspecified party associated in some way with Afrinic
itself.

At about the same time that I was researching those hijacks, I also became
aware of the fact that some REALLY large quantities of valuable IPv4
address space had all been assigned... via some process whose details were
none too clear... to a Seychelles entity called Cloud Innovation, Ltd.

As I looked into this further my understanding of what had happened there
did not materially increase, and these large allocations remained largely
enigmatic to me, as they do to this day.  I did find a few online postings
and other small snippets of information about these allocations, and some
of those did vaguely hint at some possible impropriety, but nothing which
could even vaguely be called definitive ever turned up.

Nontheless, my suspicion relating to those allocations was not diminished
when my research turned up the fact that the one and only guy... a Northern
European... who had attempted to raise some serious questions about those
allocations had shortly thereafter been arrested on charges of possessing
and distributing child pornography.

For a person such as myself who is pre-disposed to postulate dark conspiracies
around every corner, it all seemed just a bit too convenient.

Anyway, these facts also affected, and in part gave rise to my bad judgement
with respect to my 2016 postings here relating to the spammer hijacks of the
abandoned Afrinic legacy /16 blocks.  It seemed to me at the time that
there were Bad Things going on inside of Afrinic... a notion which I have
for some time now been throughly disabused of.

Notwithstanding the that fact I no longer have any good reason to have
anything other than complete faith in Afrinic, its people, policies and
procedures, because there has been recent discussion here regarding the
use of Afrinic-issued resources outside of the continent, I do just want
to briefly mention a couple of interesting factoids.  (Mr. Alston and
others may deem these to be equally as "spurious" as the other mildly
interesting factoids that I shared here yesterday, and that would be
perfectly OK with me.  I would not argue the point at all.  I eagerly
admit that the following factoids may be worth no more than what any of
you paid for them.)

At present, by my calculation, Cloud Innovation, Ltd. is the registrant
of 2,325,248 Afrinic IPv4 addresses.  My guess is that Cloud Innovation
is most probably the single largest registrant of such resources, possibly
by a wide margin.

At present, by my calculation, Cloud Innovation, Ltd. is using 753,664
of said IPv4 addresses to provide services within the Afrinic region,
some 32.4% of its total assignments.  (All of this is via AS37353.)

(Note: This calculation is based on rather naive assumptions regarding 
the place of service and the declared home country of the various ASNs
that are, collectively, routing all of Cloud Innovation's IPv4 space
at the present time.  The actual figure could easily be either much
higher or much lower than the figure I have given.  As others here have
already noted, determining the actual place of service is, at best, a
technically problematic exercise.)


Regards,
rfg


P.S.  Given the magnitude of Cloud Innovation's holdings, as a longtime and
ardent student of all things spam on the Internet, I believe that I can say,
without fear of contradiction, that the utter and complete absence of any
and all kinds of abuse reports relating to *any* of this IPv4 address space
is nothing less than stunning, as is the near total absence, for many of
Cloud Innovation's blocks, of any meaningful footprint with respect to
historical passive DNS.  Having checked, I can say definitively that 100%
of Cloud Innovation's IPv4 space *is* routed, at present.  Beyond that I
am quite certainly not in a position to be able to comment on any of the
actual uses of any of this space, or alternatively, on the possible lack
thereof.