Contacts wanted: OVH, DigitalOcean, and Microsoft (Deutschland)

Tue Mar 19 06:17:27 UTC 2019

Nikolas Geyer <nik at neko.id.au> wrote:

>I have passed your email on to the relevant team within DO to have a look at.

Thank you, but that wasn't what I requested,  I asked for a contact there.
(I know that this may be hard to understand, but it's like the difference
between giving a man a fish, and teaching him how to fish.  I'm sure that
you would make a fine long term conduit between me and whatever mystery people
you think you have made contact with at DigitalOcean, but really, it would
be best if you would simply introduce me to those people directly.  That way,
if you die or go on vacation, incidents like these won't need to be put on
hold until you get back and resume your role as our designated go-between.)

>I'd like to thank you for your deriding commentary to bring attention
>to this problem.

No problem.  My pleasure.

>I am not sure it is the most effective way to try and engage the wider
>industry on a public list, but each to their own.

I am not sure that there is any other way that a lone outsider can or
could engage either OVH or DigitalOcean in a way that would actually
cause either company to take action on the issues I've reported on.
Complaints from ordinary Internet end-lusers about this, which both
companies must surely be drowing in by now, don't seem to be doing the
job.

In any case, I would be more than happy to have you tell me the "right
way" to engage with any actual live human beings at either of these
companies, especially if you also are able to identify one or more
such receptive individuals by name and email address, which is what I
was requesting in the first place.

>Oh, and additionally, as an Australian citizen with many Aussie and
>Kiwi colleagues working at DO of various religious persuasions; your
>postscript relating this back to the recent terror attacks is abhorrent
>and disgusting. You should be completely ashamed. 

It's pretty clear to me that you have rather dramatically misread my
the aforementioned postscript to my earlier post, and that a fair and
clear-eyed reading of that should be quite entirely inoffensive to all,
with the possible exception of some few people who work in mass media
and/or the "news" business, such as it currently is.

In that postscript, I merely used a recent mass media controversy relating
specifically and only to the social media -handling- of recent events to
illustrate two blatant absurdities at opposite ends of a spectrum, neither
of which itself has anything at all do do with those recent news events
specifically, much less with the race, creed, color or gender of any of
the people who have, most sadly and regretably, been caught up in those
events.

Please consider again the two polar opposite absurdities that I was
actually attempting to call attention to.

One the one hand,  we have TV talking heads, with essentially no technical
knowledge whatsoever, wondering aloud why social media tech companies cannot
do what is clearly technically impossible, and even more absurdly, why they
can't do it in real time no less.

On the other hand, and in contrast to that absurdity, we have the present
example of this spamming operation that appears to be well and truly
ensconsed on the networks of both OVH and DigitalOcean, where even large
multi-billion dollar Internet hosting companies seem utterly unable to
spot even trivial and easily identifiable patterns of bad behavior, in
and among their own respective customer bases, even though, as I have now
illustrated, a single lone unpaid volunteer guy, sitting in his basement
and in his sweaty underwear and a bathrobe -can- easily and quickly spot
the problem, within just a couple of hours in fact, provided that he has
access to a decent quality passive DNS service and an ample supply of
electricity, margaritas and cigarettes.

I'm only kidding, of course.  I don't actually have a basement.

Regards,
rfg

P.S.  Your apparent misreading of my earlier postscript is entirely
understandable and forgiveable in light of the rather unfortunate quip
that I made just prior to that, about sending this specific miscreant
to Guantanamo if his skin color was sufficiently dark.

I seriously regret and apologize for that inartful phrasing, and ask
every charitable person to believe me when I say that that was said
entirely in jest (albeit a bad one), and that if anything, it was
intended to be an expression of my own personal outrage about my own
country's abundant inequity and unfairness when dealing with people of
color, either within our so-called justice system or elsewhere.  Our
justice system should be color blind.  Alas, there is much evidence
that it falls far short of this goal at the present time.