Subject: Re: more on IPv6 address space exhaustion

From: [email-masked] (Sean Doran)
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 05:47:58 +0200 (CEST)

| good god we have the lobbyists trying to engineer the Internet
| now - everyone is an expert it seems. :-(

Thank heaven for the IPv6 "B Ark" that distracts such people
from real engineering issues.

	Sean.

---

From: "J. Noel Chiappa" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2000 03:15:55 -0400

> From: Rick H Wesson <[email-masked]>

    > this stems from the lack of engineers intrest in politics, until its
    > too late.

Err, not quite. That's what sad, actually - the point I made was a policy
point, not a technical point - and thus presumably one that someone doesn't
need to be an engineer to apprehend.

I didn't even get to the technical reasons why this is a bad idea....

	Noel

---

From: Eric Brunner <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2000 15:56:15 -0400

keith,

having punted on the marks over strings2addrs (policy by indirect rather
than direct beneficiaries), is anyone kidding themselves that the result
of the content over routing (policy by ...) is going to follow a similar
path?

i wish i'd made the "you can't do good design with a mindset like that"
to the authors of a recent i-d a little more forcefully. doing the same
in an oddly proximal context is like swimming in glue.

eric

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 16:08:54 -0600 (MDT)

> From: John Day <[email-masked]>

> ...
> I think anyone who understands why an address is not a name 
> understands why this is a bad idea.  However, the people who are 
> making these noises do not have this understanding.  This is 
> political and imposing technology on it is difficult.  While this may 
> resemble legislating that pi = 22/7, it is going to be much more 
> difficult to explain that it is.
>
> While I agree that this is really dumb, I think we need to take it 
> very seriously and not just brush it off. ...

> I *thought* this had been killed off over a year ago, when it came up 
> on this list.  But apparently not.

There are many incredibly stupid things in the human universe, and this
nonsense is far from the worst.  This will not go away for at least
several decades, because until it is actually tried, each time you kill
it, another techno-political genius like our erstwhile inventor of the
Internet re-invent it, and all of the previous advocates will revive

If you don't come up with a way for the demagogues to have their way,
they'll force worse than we can imagine with legislation.  To the extent
that what they want is impossible and perhaps a little more, whatever you
actually provide doesn't have to actually work.  It need only fit their
specifications.

Deal with this circus as the TV industry handled the v-chip foolishness.
It was obvious from the start that could not work and it didn't.  There
is now some minor grumbling from the demagogues, but because the TV
industry gave them what they asked for, the demagogues are stuck.

That tactic is also the right answer for other political brain farts, from
the Asian efforts to censor political speech to the FBI's ambition to
become big brother.  Giving the wanabe and real authocrats what they ask
for is the cheapest, safest, and quickest way to end the threat they pose.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Greg Skinner <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Aug 2000 15:43:31 -0700 (PDT)

> this stems from the lack of engineers intrest in politics, until its

Not necessarily a lack of interest, but that most engineers are not in
much of a position to influence a political decision.

A recent article in Slashdot covers this in some respects.  Although the
article tends to label engineers as selfish, the author raises some
relevant (imho) points on the role that engineers are able to play in
technology policy-making.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/24/202207&mode=thread