[anti-abuse-wg] AS24940 Hetzner -- non-role contact wanted

In message <DB7PR06MB56438B99D23B236E688EA3C4943E0 at DB7PR06MB5643.eurprd06.prod.outlook.com>, 
Brian Nisbet <brian.nisbet at heanet.ie> wrote:

>This is an open mailing list for the RIPE Anti-Abuse Working Group where a
>variety of matters, including policy, are discussed.
>
>It is not, nor hopefully will it ever be, a closed list with vetting etc.

Brian's open-mindedness is heartwarnming, however if Scott Richter were to
one day wander in here, using a mysterious alias and posting from a domain
that has nothing that could be seriously called a web site, then my hope would
be that someone, at least, would cry foul.  And if no one else did, than I most
certainly would.  I don't like sock puppets, whether they be Russians trying
to influence elections, covertly, or stealthy South African providers of bulk
email services.  If there are "ringers" being sent in, here or elsewhere, with
the goal of influencing discussions without disclosing their actual interests,
then that's quite clearly a violation of the RIPE Code of Conduct, as well as
an affront to everyone here.

Since Brian is apparently perfectly OK with having exactly such sock puppets
around, it now falls to me to make plain the actual business interests of our
resident troll, Mr. Andre.

It is only a very short set of steps, starting from the domain main.me, and
its WHOIS history, as provided by the whoxy.com web site, to find out, despite
his/her/its various efforts to prevent it, that our Mr. Andre is directly and
irrefutably associated with (and presumably here representing) the following
commercial enterprise.  This commercial enterprise, as you can all see, offers
bulk emailing services:

    https://nkosi.co.za/

It's not at all clear from the minimalist description of the services offered
which IP addresses or domain names are being used for these bulk emailing
services.  But given that Mr. Andre chastized me, just recently, for my
purported failure to "move packets in the RIPE region" I think that it is
a safe bet that he is doing so himself, and perhaps even from the network of
Hetzner, a network which he has held himself up to be an authority on.  (How
did he come to believe that he knew so much about Hetzner unless he was either
a Hetzner customer or a Hetzner supplier?)

I think that the members should take these facts into consideration when
evaluating the opinions of our Mr. Andre.

I am compelled to point out also Mr. Andre's own published written opinions on
the proper definition of spam.  Mr. Andre's preferred definition appears to
allow for "one time" invitations to be blasted to everyone in the universe.
Nonetheless, in Mr. Andre's considered opinion, "Email Spam is not the same as
Spam Abuse" and a "... one time request should not be considered spam abuse.":

    https://ascams.com/email-marketing/

Leaving aside Mr. Andre's opinions regarding the proper definition of the
term "spam", I am compelled also to point out that this mailing list is by
no means the first one that he has trolled and disrupted.

In April of 2016, he also injected himself into the Linux Autralia "linuix-aus"
mailing list, where he proceeded to inform the participants that he had
invented the "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem" (FUSSP - see
https://www.dmuth.org/fussp/) and that he would be more than happy to share
it with Linux Australia if they would only allow him to plug his magical and
wonderous black box spam filter into Linux Autralia's email infrastructure:

    http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2016-April/thread.html

For some reason, the various fans of open source software on that mailing 
list were less than enthused about the proposed closed-source "ultimate
solution" their spam problems, and thus, Mr. Andre and his proposal and his
mysterious black box "solution" were quite appropriately derided, laughed
at, and encouraged to go elsewhere.  (Mr. Andre, of course asserted that
anyone and everyone who didn't immediately buy into his miraculous new
anti-spam invention were quite certainly "bullies".) After that, Mr. Andre
either was forcably ejected from that mailing list or else he himself elected
to quitely slink off, never to be heard from again....

... until some months later when he resurfaced, in October 2016, of all places,
on the mailing lists of the Philladelphia Lunix User's Group (PLUG) where he
took it upon himself to correct the ill-informed views of every member there
who thought that it might be time to start blacklisting some entire highly
spam-ridden TLDs.

It's not really clear what personal interest our Mr. Andre might have, or
might have had, back in 2016, in preserving the unfettered ability to send
email from such sterling TLD's as .XYZ, but he obviously had a burning interest
in this one issue, and spent considerable time explaining to numerous other
mailing list participants, ad nauseum, exactly why and how they were all stupid
and "bullies" if they did not elect to agree with his views on this issue:

    http://lists.netisland.net/archives/plug/plug-2016-10/maillist.html

Lastly as some of you may have noticed, our Mr. Andre, unlike EVERY other
participant here on this mailing list, has quite obviously been reluctant to
share with any of us his surname.  I don't even need to speculate about why
that might be and/or who or what Mr. Andre may be hiding from.  I'll just
leave that as an exercise for the reader.  Use your imagination.

The bottom line is that Mr. Andre is here under false pretenses, in violation
of the RIPE Code of Conduct, and is directly associated with a commercial
enterprise that provides bulk email services.  He's published his views about
the proper definition of spam on a web site that he appears to own and operate
himself, so nobody needs to have any doubts about what those views are.  Even
if we generously overlook all of that, Mr. Andre's past propensity for dropping
in and disrupting mailing lists (primarily by his insistance on endlessly
debating a number of perfectly ridiculous notions) is every bit as evident as
it is also a matter of public historical record.

The (Co-)Chairman and the rest of you can continue to feed this troll and
provide him with additional entertainment.  I myself will decline to do so
regardles of what further falsehoods or perfectly idiotic assertions he/she/it
may make here.


Regards,
rfg