Subject: Re: opes and technology picks

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 14:14:06 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
> To: "Scott Brim" <[email-masked]>
> cc: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>, "Michael W. Condry" <[email-masked]>,
>    Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>,
>    Markus Hofmann <[email-masked]>, Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>,
>    [email-masked], [email-masked]

> ...
> maybe someone should write up a completely new charter, which actually 
> explains in precise, well-defined, technical terms (not marketing speak) 
> what kind of protocol the group proposes to write, and how it interacts
> with other protocol engines.

As the saying goes, "let's not and say we did".

Have you forgotten the Megaco circus?  The IETF has already played
the "We Disapprove" card, and found that had no good effects nothing
worth mention.

If the OPES group produces something good, then great.  If not, it will
not enhance evil interception proxies.  By standardizing their controls,
it is more likely to make it easier for people to fight them (perhaps
illegally) than to increase their deployment.  The OPES WG can be no
worse than many other current and past IETF W-G's that started "in the
weeds" and went downhill.  To see what I mean, read some of the recently
announced I-D abstracts, or if your stomach feels particularly strong,
the drafts themselves.

When you have a big standards organization like the IETF, groups that work
on bad ideas are very much desirable.  They soak up the attention of
go-ers, salescritters, loons, and career managers.  Otherwise their
compulsions to Contribute To The Standards Process (as they say in ANSI
circles) forces them to waste time of other WG's with arguments that far
more than 4,294,967,296 addresses can be encoded in 32 bits, that if you
have nothing to hide then you have no reason to object to wiretapping,
and that no third party would ever dream of filtering private email with
SMTP interception proxies or inserting ads without permission.

Talk such as this is not cheap.  It harms by wasting time and distracting
from the issues that matter.  Instead of wasting time talking a battle that
is already lost, how about fixing cs.utk.edu to answer EHLO with STARTTLS?

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 17:59:40 -0400

> go-ers, salescritters, loons, and career managers. 

they also soak up time of other well-meaning IETF participants, not the least
IESGers who have to review their documents and try to do damage control.

some of us have joked about forming a Golgafrinchian Ark B working group, and 
some of us have seriously considered doing it.  but in my experience the 
groups that are out of control really do waste a lot of resources that could
be better spent elsewhere, and they really do harm IETF's reputation by
producing stuff which is useless at best and harmful at worst.
 
> from the issues that matter.  

in case you haven't noticed, this conversation isn't just about OPES.

> Instead of wasting time talking a battle that

it's a fallacy that you can reduce system complexity by adding more complexity.

Ketih

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From: "Jim Fleming" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 17:42:44 -0500

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/select/1098/int.html

"POSTEL: It's perfectly appropriate to be upset. I thought of it in a
slightly different way--like a space that we were exploring and, in the
early days, we figured out this consistent path through the space: IP, TCP,
and so on. What's been happening over the last few years is that the IETF is
filling the rest of the space with every alternative approach, not
necessarily any better. Every possible alternative is now being written
down. And it's not useful."