[AusNOG] Inappropriate commercially sensitive discussion threads on AusNOG mailing list

[James Paussa]

On 13/11/2010 7:12 AM, Kevin Karp wrote:
> 1. The discussion was devoid of any technical merit or consequence
There were some non-technical contributions but my sole post was to 
advertise more specific routes, poor SNR yes, devoid no.
> 2. The thread involved a matter that was of a purely commercial and
> legal nature between the parties involved
Only if there wasn't any route poisoning, and Skeeve made every effort 
to keep them separate.
> 3. The names of apparently innocent third party organisations were
> brought into the thread for no apparent reason or benefit
Those transit providers have 100s of customers and the idea I believe 
was to get in touch with someone at those organisations who could help. 
That is hard to do without naming them.
> 4. The discussion could only present one side of what may be a complex
> commercial matter
Skeeve did a good job of keeping that separate with still being an 
advocate for this client which I think we all like to do, "In the 
billing dispute, there are two sides to every story, and I am not in any 
way suggesting my customer is without fault, or the provider is... I am 
just dealing with a route poisoning situation that no matter what the 
business issues are – this is an action that NO provider anywhere should 
do to interfere with routes on the internet."

> 6. Sufficient information may have been divulged to identify individual
> parties involved in the dispute so representing breaches of
> confidentiality at many different levels (client-ISP, outsourcer-client etc)
Customer wasn't mentioned or the offending ISP, they are the two parts 
of the puzzle needed to work this out. Unfortunately you are an innocent 
party trying to make a point here about releasing information on the 
list and the first thing a lot of people would have done reading this is 
check a looking glass (or a border) for your AS path.
> 7. No indication as to what authority or in what role the originating
> poster had in raising the topic
He has a customer... Did you read the thread?
> For instance, I don't believe that "operational issues" is meant to
> cover commercial and legal issues.
His customer wasn't operating because of a route poisoning issue.

I am not sure what your intention is behind this post, for the most part 
there was some good information about how to get around it technically 
and how to do it via the proper channels (upstreams and APNIC) useful 
information.

-James.