In message <F10C362E-3E8E-477D-88B7-02A8EBCA2426@gmail.com>,
"Stephen M." <stephen.myspam@gmail.com> wrote:

>Please don't praise or complain like we're supposed to take
>it at a total face value. If you don=E2=80=99t like them so much - we are
>you're audience. Explain.
>
>If you like Cogent - explain.
>If you don=E2=80=99t like Cogent - explain.

I see that many others have already chimed in to comment on Cogent's
technical prowess, or lack thereof, and on Cogent's customer service,
or lack thereof.

These things are neither my forte nor my concern.  My issue with the company
is what I believe is, and rightly should be a meta-issue that should be of
overriding concern of all who use or work on the Internet, i.e. the degree
to which the company, wittingly or othewise, has enabled theft or squatting
on -numerous- large chunks of IPv4 space by what amount to Internet criminals.

I already detailed my concerns here, and quite recently:

   https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2019-September/102944.html

The case is both clear and unambiguous.  Some little guy by the name of Elad
Cohen, living and working in Israel, who has some little two-bit "hosting"
company, has been, in very recent times, rather blatantly squatting on
numerous previously abandoned legacy blocks...  /16 after /16 after /16...
perhaps 20 or more such blocks... all of them being used, self evidently,
by Mr. Cohen, and many most or all of which Mr. Cohen demonstratably has
no legitimate rights to whatsoever... like the blocks he squatted on which
belong to the Australian national government's Department of Finance, and
another seemingly abandoned legacy /16 that belongs to the City of Cape
Town, South Africa.

And who were the primary enablers of all of this fraud and theft?  Well,
it was Mr. Cohen's helpful friends at a hosting company called FDCServers,
headquartered in the one American city most known for its high ideals
and consistantly ethical behavior, Chicago.  FDCServers is not a big
company, so I have to assume that its CEO, Mr. Petr Kral, was not entirely
oblivious to Mr. Cohen's crooked shenanigans, especially after I personally
and explicitly informed him of it all.

    https://www.linkedin.com/in/fdcservers

But the thing of it is that FDCServers, which appears to be a major customer
of Cogent, does none of its own routing, preferring instead to have their
bigger pals, Cogent (AS174) route all of this stolen IPv4 real estate to
their customer, Mr. Cohen, on their behalf.... which Cogent apparently
continued to do, right up through and including this past weekend, e.g.
for the stolen blocks 165.53.0.0/16 and 168.206.0.0/16.

My beef with both Cogent and FDCServers is simple.  They both took Cohen's
money and quite clearly didn't ask -any- reasonable questions, prefering
instead to just accept Cohen's blatant forgeries as "evidence" of his
ownership of the stolen blocks they routed for him.  And they continued
to do that, and only that, until well after I had explicitly and quite
pointedly informed them of the self-evident problems with Mr. Cohen and
his blatantly crooked business model.

The crimes of Cogent and FDCServers, such as they are, do not rise to the
level of "receiving stolen property", but I do think that they qualify
under the heading of -transporting- stolen property.  And believe me,
if a cop pulls you over while you are driving your van, looks in the
back and finds a whole lot of stolen bicycles that were ripped off from
a nearby University campus, your protestations that you were "only
delivering them to a friend" won't wash to get you out of a short stint
in the Graybar Hotel.

Cohen, with the help of FDCServers and Cogent, stole millions of dollars
worth of valuable IPv4 real estate.  Unfortunately, due to the lack of
sophistication of crinminal authorities, combined with the trans-border
and international nature of these crimes, Cohen will undoubtedly walk,
as will Cogent and FDCServers.  (So much for equal justice under law!)
But I'll tell you straight up that I personally wouldn't trust any of
these clowns to hold my wallet, not even for five minutes, and not even
if it were empty.


Regards,
rfg