Subject: Re: WG Review: Open Pluggable Edge Services (opes)

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 18:00:05 -0400

> "Participation" includes "authorization" and is part of the security
> model.  

If you are saying that explicit authorization is a necessary component to 
participation, that sounds okay.  If you are saying that authorization is
implicit in participation, I'd have a big problem with that.

> The notions of integrity and authorization are obligatory
> in the WG documents.

There is no WG yet, so there are no WG documents.  Anything written prior 
to the charter being approved is subject to change, or even to being
discarded.  We should not assume that the WG will adopt it once formed.  

> Other WG's are concentrating on the network and transport layer
> intermediaries.  We've got HTTP and possibly RTP.
> 
> We have no control over whether or not functional layer
> separation is abandoned.  

True, we don't have control over it, but that doesn't mean it's a good
idea for a WG group to standardize a way of breaking layer separation.
And there are lots of folks who keep trying to do that.  I have no way of 
knowing whether whether they're represented in this proposal or not - it's 
too vague to tell.

> The detailed wording of the charter comes from Area Directors;
> I don't like the connotations of "arbitrary" and can see no reason
> for using it.  However, it is scary to imagine the depth of the
> paranoia that jumps from there to the end of the Internet
> architecture.

One person's paranoia is another's experience.  Surely you will admit that
firewalls, NATs and interception proxies exist, that they do harm 
interoperability, and that many of them act without the consent of their users 
and routinely change traffic payloads on the fly?

> The architecture is motivated by notions of dynamic content
> and the notion of distributed semantic evaluation.  It is a logical
> general of caching.

It would be useful to say something about this in the charter.

> The technical issue of whether or not the IP addresses are honored
> is outside the scope of the charter and the technology developed
> therein.  

Perhaps they are indeed orthogonal. But again these things do exist,
and the charter can easily be read to say that the WG will be working
on these things.  There are many kinds of "intermediaries" in the
Internet, and saying that they can do "arbitrary" things is leaving
a lot of wiggle room.

I also think that even extending the notion of intermediaries within HTTP
is operationally dubious - intermediaries have been HTTP's biggest problem
to date.  But in relation to the scope of the current proposed charter, 
that's a miniscule detail.

Keith

---

From: "Jim Fleming" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 17:38:04 -0500

----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith Moore" <[email-masked]>
> and routinely change traffic payloads on the fly?

It is widely reported that 80% of all IPv4 equipment never touches what
some people define to be the IPv4 [legacy|toy|government] Internet.

Are you discussing standards for the majority (80%) or the minority (20%) ?

If current trends continue, and more and more of the islands that make
up the 80% become privately connected via 2002:<IPv4>:0000:<IPv8>
and native <IPv8>, this may be one more reason to work on standards
that most of the people can use.

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg12213.html
2002:<IPv4>:0000:<IPv8> vs. 3FFE:<IPv6>
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/ietf/Current/msg12223.html

Is the goal to work on standards that are widely used, or only used
by a narrow part of the population ?

Should people set up separate standards bodies working in the
new address spaces and new TLDs (http://www.New.Net) ?
That may allow the 80% to focus on 100% of their own needs.
As for the 20%, it looks like they are covered.

Jim Fleming
http://www.DOT-BIZ.com
BIZ World
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