Africa's Internet Management Body Mired Again by Corruption Allegations (theregister.co.uk) 25
orange shares a report: The organization responsible for allocating internet addresses across Africa has yet again become embroiled in scandal, this time over long-standing claims of corruption. A founding employee of Afrinic resigned soon after allegations emerged that millions of its valuable public-facing IPv4 addresses had been stolen and sold or leased to others through companies he controlled. Soon after, Afrinic's external auditor PwC informed the organization it, too, was resigning from its role.
In both cases, Afrinic's board has attempted to place itself above the issue by ordering an investigation and sending a letter to PwC asking for an explanation. But internet insiders say the rot goes far deeper, and note that warnings of unusual activity at Afrinic, including misdirected organizational funds, have long gone unanswered by a series of CEOs and boards, despite a series of "investigations." In an explosive article earlier this month, the lease and sale of allegedly stolen blocks of IP addresses going back years was traced directly to the organization's second employee, Ernest Byaruhanga, Afrinic's policy coordinator.
In both cases, Afrinic's board has attempted to place itself above the issue by ordering an investigation and sending a letter to PwC asking for an explanation. But internet insiders say the rot goes far deeper, and note that warnings of unusual activity at Afrinic, including misdirected organizational funds, have long gone unanswered by a series of CEOs and boards, despite a series of "investigations." In an explosive article earlier this month, the lease and sale of allegedly stolen blocks of IP addresses going back years was traced directly to the organization's second employee, Ernest Byaruhanga, Afrinic's policy coordinator.
Oh yeah (Score:1)
Not like the US House of Representatives.
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Uh, she did that yesterday.
Just copying ICANN most likely (Score:3)
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There are plenty of organizations far more corrupt than ICANN - The International Olympic Committee, FIFA, The United Nations, and the European Union, for example. And they hardly invented the concept.
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IP addresses are the new cryptocurrency (Score:3)
My predictions stands (Score:3)
"Africa's Internet Management Body Mired Again by Corruption Allegations "
Between regional corruption, and states like China firewalling their country off from the rest of the world, the Internet will break up into interNets. China will have their own Internet, Russia will have their own, India will have their own, Arabs will have their own, Eastern and Western Europe will like have separate internets, etc. The Internet will break up into Superpower and Regional Internets, all firewalled off from each other for political and security reasons. And Crime. Russian ransomware isn't as dangerous if Russians can't reach your networks. Our children and grandchildren won't know what the truly global Internet was, except from stories from their grandparents. "Why, there was a time I could see websites in France! Imagine THAT, youngin'!". In China, they won't even have this, as the ChiComs will simply memory hole the fact that a global Internet ever existed, Orwell-style. Everything will be rewritten so that Internet technology was created in China, and those sneaky Gwai-Lo's stole it from them, so the wise, benevolent Communist Party had to create a Great Firewall to protect them. And they'll believe every word (see: the Tienanmen aftermath).
And Africanet, or whatever it will be called, will barely function and be run like, well, an African country. Just as Afrinic is now.
In the end, a truly free global Internet without mass crime, fraud, and government control (not to mention government AND corporate snooping) was too much to ask for. That brief, blissful birth of the web from the mid 90-s to mid-oughts will be remembered as a legendary time.
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Africa is not a pattern for the rest of the world. Lower intellectual standing, driven by millennia of phsyical state of mental state, have created a population distortion, that is not capable of reasonably understanding the real ramifications of mass corruption. As such, African economies are highly corruptible and the model going forward, well likely be foreign corporations, running African corporations by remote control to extract as much profit as possible, as fast as possible, with total disregard for
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It's not just economies, corruption and nepotism are everywhere. Your loyalty is to your family members, then to your tribe/ethnic group, and then it ends. Unless you've lived there it's hard to understand just how dysfunctional everything is, or at least that things work but nothing like how they work everywhere else. In fact when I saw the headline I was tempted to respond with the standard "Welcome to Africa!" that's used whenever people with no experience of how things work there expresses shock at s
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