Subject: Re: Response to complaint from Dean Anderson (fwd)

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2004 18:03:59 -0400 (EDT)

I've noticed that Rob Austein continues to use [email-masked] for his work as
WG co-chair.  I think I've been very patient, and have held off on legal
recourse so far.

Dean Anderson
Av8 Internet, Inc

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 14:14:39 +0930
From: Mark Smith <[email-masked]>
To: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked], [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Response to complaint from Dean Anderson

On Wed, 19 May 2004 23:42:01 -0400 (EDT)
Dean Anderson <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Tue, 18 May 2004, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
> 

<snip - whole lot of legal stuff that I don't have time to
read - I've got a few thousand RFCs to go ...>

Firstly, let me say that it is really sad that legalease, legal
council and legal positions have appeared on an IETF mailing
list to the extent we've seen. I've understood that the IETF was
all about best technical solutions and positions, not best legal
solutions and positions.

Dean, I'm in no position to implement this as a solution (nor
have I spent time thinking about how hard or easy it
would be to implement), however, presuming that @ietf.org doesn't
implement MTA blocking via methods such as SORBS, and I don't
think they do, would you be happy if all people who have official
IETF positions (eg. area advisor, working group chair, etc) had
@ietf.org email addresses, and used those for any IETF related
correspondence ?

Regards,
Mark.

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 15:53:47 -0700

> WG co-chair.  I think I've been very patient, and have held off on legal

Dean,

we have been very patient with you, but you are misrepresenting the 
situation.

I have replied that I do not see the merit to your complaint, and have NOT 
asked Rob Austein to change his address, have NOT asked ISC to change their 
antispam policies, and have NOT asked SORBS to change ther listings - 
having concluded that none of these is the IETF's business.

(the alternative - declaring that every antispam function of every system 
that is used by an IETF participant is a matter for the IETF to have an 
opinion on, and possibly work to have changed, every time it causes a 
message to bounce or be dropped - is simply not workable.)

If you don't like that decision, you are free to appeal the decision to the 
IAB according to RFC 3005, or to pursue any other avenue that you feel 
appropriate.

Making oblique reference to legal action on the IETF list will not change 
the situation.

                        Harald

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 18:42:27 -0400 (EDT)

> we have been very patient with you, but you are misrepresenting the 

I don't feel as though I have misrepresented anything. The same cannot be
said with regards to your messages on the topic, particularly your
(misleading) claim that I have some request about incorrect ownership
data. I have made no such request, and in fact there is no incorrect
ownership data, and you are quite well aware of that.  You seem to be 
misrepresenting other things as well.

> having concluded that none of these is the IETF's business.

I am aware of your responses. I have read them carefully, and have passed
them to our counsel.  However, other people seem to feel that your
handling of the situation has not been reasonable, and some have even
suggested fairly sensible ways for the IETF to work out the problem.  I do
not understand why you persist in such unreasonable, unfair, and
unbalanced behavior, even in the face of reasonable suggestions.

> message to bounce or be dropped - is simply not workable.)

We are not discussing anti-spam functions, nor a routine message bounce,
nor a benign transient error.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with spam
or anti-spam functions.  Your attempt to describe it as such is misleading
and incorrect.  We are discussing defamation, baldly false statements
originated by court-proven liars, unlawful participation in a group
boycott, commercial disparagement and other issues.  No one (except you)
has claimed that spam has anything remotely or even peripherally to do
with this.  The disputed behavior is the subject of the ISOC Code of
Conduct, and the IETF Guidelines of conduct, as well as the IETF Mission
Statement.  So it is the "IETF's business", because conduct of its members
are the subject of these documents, and the conduct of the IETF's
representatives performing IETF business is the responsibility of the
IETF.  Should said representatives perform their IETF duties unlawfully,
then the IETF bears the responsibility for those unlawful acts.

> IAB according to RFC 3005, or to pursue any other avenue that you feel 

If you force that, we will have to do that.  But it seems that there is a 
more reasonable way to handle the problem.

---

From: "Stephen Sprunk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 19:28:40 -0500

Thus spake "Harald Tveit Alvestrand" <[email-masked]>
> message to bounce or be dropped - is simply not workable.)

While I disagree with Dean in general and also with most of his current
argument, I think it is a reasonable request that IETF "officials" be given
an @ietf.org email alias and that those aliases be published for use in
situations such as this.

It's probably going too far to require sending mail from those aliases;
despite Dean's faults, he's smart enough to use the published alias if he
gets a bounce from someone's personal or work address.

S

Stephen Sprunk      "Those people who think they know everything
CCIE #3723         are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
K5SSS                                             --Isaac Asimov

---

From: David Kessens <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 18:35:37 -0700

Stephen,

> an @ietf.org email alias and that those aliases be published for use in

I like this idea (for other reasons) but I am not sure whether this
really addresses this particular problem: Even if I would have an
@ietf.org account, I would still want to use my anti-spam filters. I
just get too much spam and generic accounts like this are bound to
attract an enormous amount of spam. Unfortunately, the cost of
miscategorizing a mail has become lower than the cost of checking all
my mail manually.

David Kessens
---

---

From: "bill" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 18:55:17 -0700

As a working group chair - I would refuse an e-mail account that I am
not allowed to spam control on my own terms.

Before long these published email addresses would become spam sponges -
and completely worthless (or expensive timewise to correctly filter

Bill

I am training for my first endurance event... and SAVING lives click
here to find out more!
http://www.teamintraining.org/participant/strahm-163543

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of
Stephen Sprunk
Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 5:29 PM
To: Harald Tveit Alvestrand; Dean Anderson
Cc: Internet Engineering Task Force
Subject: Re: Response to complaint from Dean Anderson (fwd)

> I have replied that I do not see the merit to your complaint, and have

> NOT asked Rob Austein to change his address, have NOT asked ISC to 
> change
their
> (the alternative - declaring that every antispam function of every 
> system that is used by an IETF participant is a matter for the IETF to

> have an opinion on, and possibly work to have changed, every time it 
> causes a message to bounce or be dropped - is simply not workable.)

While I disagree with Dean in general and also with most of his current
argument, I think it is a reasonable request that IETF "officials" be
given an @ietf.org email alias and that those aliases be published for
use in situations such as this.

It's probably going too far to require sending mail from those aliases;
despite Dean's faults, he's smart enough to use the published alias if
he gets a bounce from someone's personal or work address.

S

---

From: "Stephen Sprunk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 21:05:52 -0500

Thus spake "David Kessens" <[email-masked]>
> > argument, I think it is a reasonable request that IETF "officials" be
given
> really addresses this particular problem:

Dean's problem is that he sends mail from an open relay, which isc.org's
servers block completely (with good reason, sorry Dean).  ietf.org's servers
apparently don't since we all receive his rants, and presumably isc.org
doesn't block mail from ietf.org, so this would solve the immediate problem.

> Even if I would have an @ietf.org account, I would still want to use my
> anti-spam filters.  I just get too much spam and generic accounts like
> this are bound to attract an enormous amount of spam. Unfortunately,
> the cost of miscategorizing a mail has become lower than the cost of
> checking all my mail manually.

I don't object to those aliases pointing to systems with content-based
anti-spam systems; if Dean's mail looks like spam, individual people could
whitelist him without also being subjected to any spam passing through his
open relay.  Though, of course, the odds are slim any of us would do that.

S

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2004 20:54:38 -0600 (MDT)

> From: "Stephen Sprunk" 

> an @ietf.org email alias and that those aliases be published for use in

Exactly what is this situation?  Why can't Mr. Anderson say whatever
he needs to say to Mr. Austein here or via a relevant working group
mailing list?

> gets a bounce from someone's personal or work address.

How would Mr. Anderson use a private IETF alias belonging to Mr. Austein?
If sending a polite, IETF-relevant private message from one IETF
participant were important to Mr. Anderson, he would have long since
sent his message in public via an IETF mailing list.  Any complaints
or other thoughts Mr. Anderson has about a working group, an AD, other
IETF participants, or whatever would have long since been forwarded
via a friend, sent to this mailing list, the IAB, or via the official
appeals process.

There is an important issue here separate from Mr. Anderson's concerns.
Why hasn't Mr. Anderson been told to say whatever he wants to say in
an IETF mailing lists or to the relevant IETF role accounts?  Why has
the notion that individuals have rights enforced by IETF rules to send
private mail to other IETF participants been consistently supported
or at least never refuted?  Mr. Alvestrand's recent message only
disavows the IETF's interest private filters.  What RFC imposes an
obligation to receive private (not to mention unfriendly) mail on ADs,
WG chairs, or any IETF participants? 

Private IETF aliases for IETF officials would be invitations for
harassment and abuse, and it is important that IETF participation not
be contingent on tolerating harassment or abuse.  Harassment and abuse
must be defined by the targets of mail for deciding whether to accept
future private messages.  IETF participants must be allowed their own
definitions of acceptable private mail, no matter how wrong they seem
to mail senders or third parties.  Filtering messages to IETF mailing
lists is justifiably controversial, but private mailboxes are none of
the IETF's business, and not merely because of scaling problems.

I care about this issue because other individual IETF and ASRG
participants have threatened or started attacks on me similar to Mr.
Anderson's attack on Mr. Austein, because my mail systems are configured
to reject their private (not sent via IETF reflectors) mail.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2004 23:11:32 -0400 (EDT)

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

> servers block completely (with good reason, sorry Dean).  

Stephen, thanks, but you have some of your facts wrong.  Neither ISC nor
SORBS blocks us because of our relays, nor is the blocking limited to our
open relays.  And in fact, the relay used (cirrus.av8.net) is not an open
relay, but in fact is an SSL/SMTP AUTH relay*.  Rather, ISC/SORBS block
__ALL__ of our IP address space (that is, a full /16 and a full /21),
because they claim this IP address space is "hijacked/disused".  This
includes all of our customers.

In fact, like ORBS before it, SORBS also isn't a __spam__ blacklist. Its a
"personal"  blacklist of sites that Alan Brown, Matthew Sullivan, and Paul
Vixie and their associates just don't like. It is completely
innappropriate for the IETF or its staff to associate with or use such a
list for IETF business.

[* Yes there are still reasons to run open relays---Indeed, our SMTP AUTH
relay is the least used: a commercial failure, really, but I use Pine
which is one of the few clients that can support SMTP AUTH.  SMTP AUTH has
done nothing to block spam, anyone can sign up. Open/Closed, doesn't
matter. Unless you can't do SMTP AUTH, then it matters. Thousands of
software packages don't do SMTP AUTH, and millions of users who want to
outsource parts of their email system or services.  There is a large
market for open relay services and none of it is spam. ]

The address space in question has been in continuous use since 1989
(130.105/16) and since 1993 (198.3.136/21).  I am the authorized contact
for this space, and the entities or their successors to which the IP
address blocks were originally assigned are still in existance. If our use
of these blocks was without permission, they are able to complain.  These
public facts are easilly found by anyone interested in them.

Examination of the ARIN information demonstrates the false nature of
the claims by Vixie, Brown, and Sullivan:

OrgName:    AV8 Internet, Inc 
OrgID:      AV8IN
Address:    P.O. Box 7286
City:       Nashua
StateProv:  NH
PostalCode: 03060
Country:    US

NetRange:   198.3.136.0 - 198.3.143.255 
CIDR:       198.3.136.0/21 
NetName:    AV8IN-NET-1
NetHandle:  NET-198-3-136-0-1
Parent:     NET-198-3-0-0-1
NetType:    Reassigned
Comment:    
RegDate:    2003-07-30
Updated:    2004-02-23

OrgTechHandle: DA31-ARIN
OrgTechName:   Anderson, Dean A.
OrgTechPhone:  +1-617-344-9000
OrgTechEmail:  [email-masked]

# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2004-06-19 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN's WHOIS databas

OrgName:    Open Software Foundation 
OrgID:      OSF
Address:    P.O. Box 7286
City:       Nashua
StateProv:  NH
PostalCode: 03060
Country:    US

NetRange:   130.105.0.0 - 130.105.255.255 
CIDR:       130.105.0.0/16 
NetName:    OSF
NetHandle:  NET-130-105-0-0-1
Parent:     NET-130-0-0-0-0
NetType:    Direct Allocation
NameServer: STARSHIP.AV8.COM
NameServer: CONCORDE.AV8.COM
Comment:    
RegDate:    1988-07-20
Updated:    1998-12-21

TechHandle: DA31-ARIN
TechName:   Anderson, Dean A.
TechPhone:  +1-617-344-9000
TechEmail:  [email-masked] 

Mr Sullivan claims that if we do not reveal our relationships and
contracts with these entities, then we haven't "proved" our rights to use
the address space. Of course, that is nonsense.  Others have made
similarly absurd claims such as 'IP address space is a government grant
that can only be used for non-profit purposes' (Kai Schlichting made this
claim in a generally defamatory letter he sent to the OSF/The Open Group,
whose attorney forwarded it to me)

The false claims by ISC/SORBS is not a matter of blocking spam.  It
doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with blocking spam.  ISC/SORBS
falsely asserts that IP address space is "hijacked/disused".  This is a
bald lie, first promoted by Alan Brown, who you might recall once used his
ORBS blacklist to block ISPs that had nothing to do with spam, for reasons
that had nothing to do with spam: just because he didn't like those ISPs.
Brown then lost 3 separate lawsuits involving defamation and false
statements, and ultimately appears to have lost his business to pay the
consequent damages. When Brown's own subscribers complained, he said it
was a "personal" blacklist and had no particular standards.  Brown was
pretty thoroughly discredited but this does not appear to have deterred
Sullivan and Vixie from associating with him.  Brown and his associates
Paul Vixie and Matthew Sullivan have continued to promote and support
defamation of ISPs they don't like, just like ORBS did previously. None of
the 3 cases Brown lost had anything to do with spam.  Similarly, this has
nothing to do with spam.

ISC/SORBS (Brown, Vixie, and Sullivan) are not claiming that we are
spammers: They are falsely claiming that our address space is
"hijacked/disused".  Vixie and I have conflicts that predate spam, and
goes back at least to Namedroppers in the late 1980's and the issue of HS
class Root servers.  More recently, I've worked (with others of course) to
prevent several frivolous changes to the DNS protocol that Mr. Vixie
supported, and which would have benefited products and companies he has a
financial interest in.  Indeed, the current dispute arose out of
complaints about improper activity by Mr.  Austein as WG co-chair with
respect to one of those proposals. That complaint, originally and
appropriately made off-list, was rejected by Mr. Austein's ISC.ORG email
system, run by Mr. Vixie.

ISC's harrassment by computer is not the only issue. There are also the
matters of on-list disparagement by Mr.  Bush and Mr. Vixie, and of course
Mr. Alvestrand has recently made his own original false and misleading
statements implying there is somehow incorrect ownership information and
that somehow I have made some request of him to change that. I haven't
made any such request. If there is any trivially incorrect information, it
does not support the assertion that the space is "hijacked/disused".

We cannot ignore these acts by and through the IETF.  We have business
with the IETF, and have a stake in the engineering of the Internet.  We
cannot allow persons at the IETF (either employees, staff or participants)
to defame or disparage Av8 or myself to others or to Av8 Customers who
might participate in the IETF.  We certainly cannot allow the IETF process
to be inappropriately manipulated by ISC or Paul Vixie or others to their
financial advantage.

For your reference, I'll summarize the salient events regarding SORBS and 
ISC's harrassment by computer:

Brown, Sullivan, and Vixie originally claimed that the OSF no longer
existed, but withdrew that claim after I contacted Sullivan directly last
year. They refuse to withdraw the rest of their false claims, apparently
seeking to draw me into a lawsuit with Mr. Sullivan Unlike Mr. Brown
(previously) and Mr. Vixie (currently), Mr. Sullivan has no company or
assets to pay damages. But this is consistent with a plan of action posted
on Spam-l after MAPS lost in Exactis V. MAPS.

SORBS has been booted from other ISPs for violating AUP rules which
prohibit defamation and other bad conduct.  Despite their bad conduct,
Vixie then provided them with hosting services at ISC, and has refused to
accept abuse reports, which is both ironic and hypocritical.  100% of the
sites we've contacted have stopped using SORBS altogether when they
examine the false claims made by SORBS.  It seems that few or no reputable
people or companies want to associate with this organization after finding
out what it is up to.  Strangely, the ISC and the IETF are the rare
exceptions.

Some have attempted to describe this as simply a "false positive" that is
an unfortunate, but unpreventable event. This is a false claim.  There are
plenty of anti-spam methods out that do not harrass Av8 Internet, or make
false claims.  Many (if not most) people have given up altogether on
IP-based blocking.  Indeed, given that most spam/abuse comes from
virus-infected computers on DHCP connections that force them to change IPs
every few hours, it seems impossible that IP-based blocking could be
effective unless the blacklist had some advance knowledge of the IPs to be
used. And of course, advance knowledge is impossible unless the blacklist
is the abuser.  So, if you find an effective IP-based blacklist, well,
you've found something very interesting.

There are many anti-spam tools that do not engage in defamation and false
claims.  Judging by the relative absence of complaints by our users, it
seems that SORBS is a very little used list, and that like ORBS before it,
its purpose is nothing other than defamation and disparagement. Outside of
ISC's harrassment on the IETF lists, we have very little problem with
SORBS use, and 100% of the sites that we've run into using SORBS (outside
of ISC and the IETF) have quit using SORBS altogether after we've
contacted them.  As I pointed out previously, SORBS isn't an anti-spam
list at all, but a "personal" blacklist created by Sullivan, Brown, Vixie,
and their associates.

You may be wondering why SORBS is claiming our address space is
"hijacked/disused", instead of claiming it as open relay. I wondered that,
too. I don't know the answer, and ISC/SORBS/Sullivan/Vixie aren't saying.  
But I think its because they already lost the "is it legal to block open
relays?" argument. We have gone into legal dispute with a couple large
ISPs whose abuse admins threatened to block our relays, and who claimed
that open relays somehow send spam. The admins described __anonymous__
relays.  When we corrected that description, and explained the difference
between an open relay and an anonymous relay, their lawyer reversed the
admin and promised not to block our relays[**].  There is nothing abusive
or unlawful about open relays.

[** It is an interesting footnote that in one case, the admin who lost on
the open relay question posted messages to an ISP list saying that we had
hijacked space.  While he has a relationship to Vixie and Sullivan through
Nanog, his post was after SORBS began their listing. It is unclear how he
learned of the listing, since it wasn't discussed on Nanog or Spam-l ]

The ISC/SORBS issue has nothing whatsoever to do with open relays.

But even if it did have something to do open relays, there is still no
reason to block our relays: There is no spam coming from our relays, in
comparison to other ISP relays. They are policed far better than most
ISP's closed relays.  We respond far faster and far more responsibily than
say, Bill Manning did with complaints about ISC's hosting of an abuse site
(http://www.iadl.org/bm/bill-manning-story.html)  Manning _still_ claims
that "we can't prove any relationship between EP.NET and ISC.ORG", despite
their long and well-known history in operating PAIX.

Please also be aware that an open relay is not an __anonymous__ relay.  

I might agree that there is no reason or little reason to run anonymous
relays. Av8 does not run anonymous relays.  However, many anti-spam
radicals cannot make the distinction between anonymous relays and open
relays. I don't know whether this is due to lack of intelligence or if
they just intentionally mislead people (their attorneys and management)  
about the difference.  

However, making it about open relays makes no difference. Blocking our
open relays through particpation in an unlawful group boycott is still
unlawful for the IETF and its staff, (see
http://info.av8.net/spamstuff/vix-spam-abatement-ietf.html)  Defaming and
disparaging Av8 Internet by the IETF, its staff or its participants is
also unlawful.  But it isn't about open relays, its about falsely claiming
that IP Address space is "hijacked/disused"

Dean Anderson
Av8 Internet, Inc

---

From: Paul Vixie <[email-masked]>
Date: 19 Jun 2004 03:35:49 +0000

[email-masked] ("Stephen Sprunk") writes:
> ...
> servers block completely ...

actually i think the reason dv8's ip address listed on SORBS is due to
reported irregularities in the trust deed for that address block, rather
than due to reported open relay activities.  maybe dv8 will eventually
sue somebody, so that a court can sort it all out and all the facts can
be objectively and publically known.

a note for harald and the others-- i've been lawsuit-threated by experts,
and i can tell you from that experience, dv8 appears to not be an expert.
-- 
Paul Vixie

---

From: Ed Gerck <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 10:30:32 -0700

The solution to this self-limitation problem [1], if the Internet MUST be
the only communication path used by someone, is to use IETF web forms
that go directly to the server. Anyone can access the web forms and submit
their communication to the relevant persons/WGs. If the site is down, try
later.

Cheers,
Ed Gerck

[1] If someone wants to only use email for communication, this means
that email will be his single point of failure in communication.
Even if it's an ietf.org email. And, one may ask, what's wrong with
using a postal address if email fails? After all, IETF IDs and RFCs
include the postal addresses of authors. And some also have phone,
fax, pager, IRC, IM, etc., available. Insisting on using only one
communication path is un-Internet.

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 18:43:23 -0400 (EDT)

While there have been "reported irregularities", the person making the
report (Alan Brown) is a court-proven liar, and has done this sort of
thing in the past.  An examination of the records shows no irregularities,
and the entities assigned still exist. All the facts are already publicly
known. The claim of being "hijacked/disused" is false.

It is also publicly known that Mr. Brown, Mr. Sullivan, and Mr. Vixie have
blacklisted companies that aren't spammers in the past. Both Mr. Brown and
Mr. Vixie have been forced to retract those false claims by lawsuits, and
have risked or actually lost significant amounts of personal assets in
damages. 

Mr. Vixie's obvious malice for Av8 Internet is plain to see, as is his
association with SORBS, Brown, Sullivan, and other disreputable
characters.

Av8 has been through the legal "mill" and hired lawyers on the subject,
but that does not make it an expert on lawsuits. If Av8 were "expert" on
lawsuits, we'd be able to practice law ourselves instead of hiring
lawyers.

Av8 is a expert on Open Relay operations, and on providing internet
services to customers.  However, it is unclear what Mr. Vixie's expertise
is actually in, other than name-calling, and making disparaging
alterations on another companies trademarks. I have seen little else.  I
suppose Vixie is also an expert at making false claims and using
blacklists to block companies that aren't spammers.

Dean Anderson
Av8 Internet, Inc

---

From: Bill Sommerfeld <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2004 22:22:10 -0400

> that go directly to the server. 

It's not a solution.  For one, spammers, not content to ruin email,
have been abusing web forms for quite some time; spam filters will be
required there, as well.

						- Bill

---

From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 17:17:27 +0800

Harald,

HTA> we have been very patient with you, but you are misrepresenting the
HTA> situation.

Both parts of your statement are not only true, but have been true
quite a number of times in the past, with respect to this particular
"claimant".

We have policies for dealing with those who post to IETF mailing lists
contrary to the mailing lists policies.

I think it is time to invoke similar policies for those who abuse IETF
process.

The alternative is acceding to a deprivation of service attack.  IETF
resources are scarce and we need to start acting like we believe it.

d/
--
 Dave Crocker <mailto:[email-masked]>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
 Sunnyvale, CA  USA <tel:+1.408.246.8253>, <fax:+1.866.358.5301>

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 04:36:01 -0400

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004 18:43:23 EDT, Dean Anderson said:

> Mr. Vixie's obvious malice for Av8 Internet is plain to see, 

As is the fact that the feelings appear to be mutual....

> alterations on another companies trademarks. I have seen little else.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Dean, if your complaint is that Paul is making "disparaging" comments, you
*really* need to proof-read before you hit send.  Or even better, have somebody
from 2 cubicles/offices/whatever read it and tell you if you're laying it on
too thick.  Or at least take a break - hit the rest room, the vending machines,
whatever, then re-read it before you hit send...

(Hint - no matter *what* your personal opinions of Paul Vixie are, or what
personal, professional, or business animosity there may exist between the two
of you, saying that you're unsure what Paul's expertise is in only manages to
tell the reader that you're either (a) very bitter or (b) just fell out of a
tree and don't know any of your Internet history, or (c) both....)

---

From: Ed Gerck <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 09:33:24 -0700

> have been abusing web forms for quite some time; spam filters will be

The server can filter as the IETF wishes (or dare) but there would be no
problems with black-lists and mail routing affecting the message being
RECEIVED by the IETF -- which is the point in question.

---

From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 16:22:49 -0400 (EDT)

> As is the fact that the feelings appear to be mutual....

One never appreciates being publicly disparaged, defamed, or harrassed,
but it is incorrect to assume that just because I have been attacked, that
I harbor malice for that person. Rather, I feel sorry for someone who is
presumably in his 40's and resorts to name-calling.  Such unsocialization
or immaturity must be debilitating.  I pray for them.  This does not mean
that I will silently accept such treatment, nor does it mean I will not
assert my rights and privileges to object to such treatment.

Besids Mr. Vixie's on-list comments, there is his involvement in the
defamatory and misleading statements about Av8 Internet's IP address
space. Long ago, and for other reasons, I came to believe that defamation
results in a short term loss for the defamed and a short term gain for the
defamer, but a long term gain for the defamed and a long term loss for the
defamer.  Lies are always exposed as lies and liars are always exposed as
liars.  This is particularly appropriate as the UN meets today to discuss
anti-semitism, which is also spread by defamation.  The defamed may be
saddened and harmed while being defamed, but have solace in the fact that
history will eventually right the wrong: It always has. It always will.  
This doesn't mean one should be complacent.  Everyone should stand up to 
stop defamation.

I have made efforts to make my criticisms professional and accurate, and
not to allow myself to degenerate into name-calling. Persons who behave
badly and call other people names deserve criticism.  While everyone may
be fallible from time to time in overheated discussion, some people seem
to have no control or compuction whatsoever.  I have tried to make sure
that my criticisms meet the standard of cool and detached professionalism.
Mr. Vixie's comments ("loons", "trolls", "dv8", "least technical person on
the list" do not meet that standard.

But I note that you have not amoung those who have posted messages calling
for Mr. Vixie to "take a break" before calling other people names.  Is it
that you have become accustomed to his behavior or do you hold me to a
different standard?

> > alterations on another companies trademarks. I have seen little else.

Not exactly.  Questioning someone's expertise is quite a bit different
than declaring someone else to be "the least technical person on the
list".  I did the former, Mr. Vixie did the latter.  The former is
reasonable and appropriate, the latter isn't.

Questioning Mr. Vixie's expertise is not unreasonable nor inappropriate in
the light of his last several disparaging remarks not only about myself
and subsequently my company, and also Mr. Vixies inappropriate
name-calling of other people. I note that the Chair has also failed to
chastise these other inappropriate comments by Mr. Vixie.

I am aware of Mr. Vixie's past involvement in DNS and his operation of a
Root nameserver, yet just recently he diverted attention from genuine
questions raised by several people about Root Anycast to a personal attack
on several of the participants.  This does not seem to be appropriate for
a trusted person in DNS or Root server operations, and leads to questions
about professionalism, responsibility, maturity, and and ultimately, trust
in his expertise in that area.  The name-calling raises further questions
about whether we can trust Mr. Vixie's assurances. This is also not a
personal attack: Such questions are valid, have been raised by several
people, and have gone unanswered except for name-calling.

Dean Anderson
Av8 Internet, Inc

===================

Date: 19 May 2004 22:16:36 +0000
From: Paul Vixie <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: Root Anycast

there are two things that i think it's important that everybody 
understand.

first, anyone who posts from roll accounts like "[email-masked] (jfcm)"
tends to be dismissed as a troll.

second, anyone who seriously uses the term "legacy DNS root" tends to be
dismissed as a loon.

i now return control of your television set to the loons and trolls...
-- 
Paul Vixie

---

From: Bill Sommerfeld <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 19:34:02 -0400

> RECEIVED by the IETF -- which is the point in question.

If a message is blocked by a filter without making a sound, is it
actually received?

							- Bill

---

From: Ed Gerck <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 18:06:31 -0700

> If a message is blocked by a filter without making a sound, is it

Cute ...this is not a quantum problem. If the filter is after the
server providing the form page and the SUBMIT button, yes, the
server received the message. IETF can have a log file before the
filter (SOP), allowing review of what is filtered.

---

From: Gene Gaines <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 21:24:40 -0400

Enough.

The Dean Anderson fiasco has continued long enough.

This is a formal request that Anderson be asked to
cease the off-topic diatribes about a problem that
I view as of his own making.

The IETF should have no legal or moral obligation
to accede to his demands, nor should any individual
associated with IETF activities.

His negative diatribes and threats do damage to the
IETF.  It is important he cease or be banned from
IETF lists.

I have not met Mr. Anderson, but remember him quite
well from past correspondence lists such as:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

 To: Yakov Shafranovich <[email-masked]>
 Subject: Re: Fwd: ICANN asks Verisign to shutdown SiteFinder
          in 48 hours
 From: Dean Anderson <[email-masked]>
 Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2003 17:12:02 -0400 (EDT)
 Cc: [email-masked]
 In-reply-to: <[email-masked]>
 Sender: [email-masked]

I see that Verisign is complying while they "review their
options".

Well, hopefully they are having their lawyers go over their
contracts to see if ICANN can claim it is in breach of any
contract. It would seem that they can't, having not complained
about other registries, and having not substantiated any adverse
effects to the internet. It will take some time to go through
each claim and offer a substantial proof that it is wrong. It
will be interesting to see what the lawyers say.

It was really to bad that they gave the "angry scientists and
engineers" as much credit as they did. This angry group is
basically the same bunch of Verisign bashers that have been
whining about Verisign or Network Solutions for many years, when
there are other registries that are much more deserving of
criticism. Calling them scientists and engineers gives too much
credit because real scientists and engineers deal in facts. I
would use another term.

I for one hope that SiteFinder will come back, and I wish
Verisign good luck.

               --Dean

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Gene Gaines
[email-masked]
Sterling, Virginia

--

---

From: Bill Sommerfeld <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 21:39:00 -0400

> If the filter is after the

Substantially similar capabilities are present in all of the SMTP
MTA's I'm familiar with.  If a message delivery attempt is rejected
early, only envelope information is logged, but if the message was
rejected in error, that's generally sufficient to identify what needs
to be whitelisted.

						- Bill

---

From: Anthony DeRobertis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 11:01:34 -0400

On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 11:11:32PM -0400, Dean Anderson wrote:
> which is one of the few clients that can support SMTP AUTH. 

On a random technical point, this isn't true. At least not any longer.
Most commonly used mailers now support SMTP Auth, including Outlook,
Mozilla/Thunderbird, Apple Mail, mutt, pine, etc.

---

From: Ed Gerck <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jun 2004 18:54:56 -0700

Bill Sommerfeld wrote:

> MTA's I'm familiar with.  

The problem, as has been (too) extensively discussed here, is that
blacklists and other routing restrictions prevent the email from ever
reaching the desired user's MTA (not to mention the user's MUA).

What I suggested is a web interface to the IETF mailboxes, such that
any routing problems TO those mailboxes would cease to be an issue,
allowing the IETF to be in FULL CONTROL of what is forwared to a
mailbox, or not.

Of course, I still believe that insisting in only using the email
for communications and screaming "bloody murder" when it does not
work for some reason, at some time, is very un-Internet. If you want
only a single path, you have to live with the resulting single point of
failure. Allowing web-based messages in addition to email is a simple
and cost-effective way to provide redundancy and reduce the importance
of problems such as reported by Anderson.

---

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 13:43:44 -0600 (MDT)

> From: Bill Sommerfeld 

> rejected in error, that's generally sufficient to identify what needs

Yes, but after you've had them, you find that facilities that log the
fewest few dozen KBytes of SMTP bodies are very valuable.  SMTP envelope
logs are unitelligible to most users, not only because they are terse
but because the SMTP envelope is a mystery to the fewer users that
know about it.  Delaying filter rejections until the SMTP DATA command
and so capturing the message body resolves a lot of complaints of the
form "Why did your idiotic spam filter reject that perfectly good mail
message?"  That can significantly reduce whitelisting requirements.

Logging bodies involve some obvious privacy hassles.  You must keep the
logs private.  The logs can have only censored copies of the envelope
so that recipients can't know who else was sent the same message.

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 23:03:30 +0200

> of problems such as reported by Anderson.

The IETF has used email as its primary method of conducting its 
business for almost 20 years. The IETF is also in charge of all the 
relevant standards. So if email doesn't work, I think the IETF should 
fix it rather than come up with ad-hoc additional communication 
mechanisms that have more than enough problems of their own.

Creating such a new channel only gives people with unreasonable email 
habits (such as rejecting replies to list messages without saying why) 
positive feedback so email becomes even less reliable.

---

From: shogunx <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 05:17:36 -0400 (EDT)

> mechanisms that have more than enough problems of their own.

I am in agreement that the mailing list mechanism should not be
tampered with... it works, so don't break it.  The addition of realtime
facilities like irc could potentially augment the process, as long as the
dialogs were archived for public consumption.

> positive feedback so email becomes even less reliable.

sleekfreak pirate broadcast
http://sleekfreak.ath.cx:81/

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 22:05:36 +0200

My understanding was that IANA is a neutral, independent, technical 
authority, everyone using the TCP/IP technology could trust, independently 
from any operational, political, national, commercial consideration which 
are the areas of ICANN, and of other bodies (such as GAC, MINC, ITU, ISOC, 
UN, etc.).

Also, that as the custodian of the references necessary to use the IETF IP, 
it was part of the IETF IPR protection system. I understand that it 
predated the creation of ICANN, of ISOC, of IETF and even (under the name 
of NIC) of the DNS.

I am therefore surprised and (IANAL) I am not sure about the implications 
of the following IANA definition, in a document ICANN is to publish on Monday :

"the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a function performed by 
ICANN".
http://www.iana.org/procedures/delegation-data.html

ICANN's position within the intergovernance is under UN study, subject to 
possible political negotiations or intergovernmental agreements (cf. the 
ongoing WSIS Prepcom meeting in Hammamet). ICANN is only under contract for 
three years with the USG. RIRs only entered into an MoU with ICANN on the 
grounds that it may not be still here in two years. The majority of ccTLDs 
are not interested in joining ICANN's ccNSO. I do not understand how this 
fits with the necessity of a perpetual, stable, not controverted, 
consensually accepted, trusted technical standard parameters repository?

Or do I read the definition wrong?
jfc

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 16:39:57 -0400

> are not interested in joining ICANN's ccNSO. I do not understand how this 

IANA and the ccNSO/ccTLD are two different beasts.  ccNSO and company
keep track of what NS records are authoritative for what zones. IANA  keeps
track of things like the fact that HTTP is port 80, and which DHCP options
use what numbers, and the like.
_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 00:52:43 +0200

At 22:39 25/06/04, [email-masked] wrote:
>IANA and the ccNSO/ccTLD are two different beasts.

hmmm. They seem now to be both ICANN stuff. This is the point.

>ccNSO and company keep track of what NS records are authoritative for what 
>zones.

Happily not (most of the ccTLD would not like it !!!). This is a IANA job. 
At least until Monday.
Then it seems it will be an ICANN job, under IANA trade name.

>IANA  keeps track of things like the fact that HTTP is port 80, and which 
>DHCP options use what numbers, and the like.

We agree. And this Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a function 
performed by ICANN.

Is IETF OK with that? I understood that the "functions of the IANA" were 
_currently_ supported under contract by ICANN. I have no position on this. 
I just want to understand where IANA fits in the intergovernance.

I quoted ccTLDs and RIRs because they both expressed concerns about ICANN 
still being around three years from now. There is the same feeling among 
the @large left-overs. If ICANN closed I would not cry. But if it closed 
the global NIC, a contingency plan would be necessary.

Other countries will certainly initiate such a plan. It is to be supposed 
they will mirror ICANN numbers for a while, but they may also introduce 
their additional ones for many reasons (testing [cf. ICP-3], national 
needs, etc.  ). OK with me as long as they first intergovern a conflict 
resolution system and eventually the resulting distributed global NIC they 
will form.

jfc

---

From: Karl Auerbach <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 16:15:25 -0700 (PDT)

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:

> authority

> "the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a function performed by 

There is a significant lack of clarity in these matters.

ICANN has a number of legal arrangements with the US Dept of Commerce and 
its subagencies.  The most relevant to IANA is a sole-source purchase 
order that comes from the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration 
(a sub-agency of the DoC) under which NOAA is purchasing an essentially 
undefined thing called the IANA function and ICANN is providing that thing 
for zero dollars.

Usually in a purchase order the flow of deliverables runs towards the 
purchasor.  In this case nothing particularly tangible flows towards the 
NOAA, but there does seem to be a rather cloudy delegation of authority 
from NOAA to ICANN.  In addition there is the oft-asked and never answered 
question of whether NOAA (or NTIA, another sub-agency of the Dept of 
Commerce) has such authority to delegate in the first place.  (The GAO did 
examine that question and found the authority to be lacking.)

In any event, what commeth via purchase order can goeth via the lapse of 
that purchase order.  Unless there is some unwritten accord, ICANN has no 
guarantee that it will continue to be able to act as the uncompeted, 
sole-source provider of the IANA function.

The IANA function as practiced by ICANN appears to have at several 
distinct parts:

1) The operation of the L root server.  I have never heard one bad 
word about ICANN's performance with respect to the L server  As far 
as I can tell, the hands on those knobs are very competent.

2) The assignment and recordation of "protocol numbers".  This is the 
classical Numbers Czar function.  Again, this seems to be competently 
handled, although I have heard complaints that processing of number 
assignments is taking too long.  And I have had my own concern that this 
function is really something that more properly belongs under the IETF's 
umbrella.

3) ccTLD assignment authority.  This is the controversial function.  This 
is a job that requires IANA to decide who gets to act as the internet 
presence of each sovereign nation (that is, each sovereign nation except 
the US - US dealt with the .us TLD outside of ICANN and despite ICANN.)

Yes, there are competing theories of whether a ccTLD is a direct aspect of 
sovreignty or is merely a database key that happens to be isomorphic with, 
but not dependent upon, the existance of soverign states.  My own sense is 
that the latter theory is not flying well among the collective governments 
of the world.

ICANN does not keep time cards, or at least it didn't when I last checked. 
And there is a great intermingling of tasks among the ICANN/IANA staff. 
These two aspects combine to make it very difficult to assign a 
quantitiative cost or level-of-effort number to IANA as a whole and much 
less to the distinct IANA tasks.

However, by observation it appears that the bulk of the cost, and trouble, 
of IANA is in item #3.

I have had concern that ICANN, or rather IANA, is being used as a pawn by 
political factions in a number of countries.  ICANN's redelegations are 
often based on fairly thin bodies of evidence and are supported often by 
some rather questionable assertions (e.g. a letter relinquishing a ccTLD 
that was on an otherwise blank sheet of paper without letterhead and over 
the unverified signature of someone claiming to be the long lost contact.)

During my term I never felt that ICANN or IANA had the staff expertise to 
be able to swim in those shark infested waters.  However, my sense is that 
with the advent of current president and other staff changes that ICANN, 
oops, IANA, is perhaps better equipped for this now than it was 18 months 
ago.  But the question is still present: Might not the question of who is 
the most rightful operator of a ccTLD be better handled by existing 
organizations that are much more sophisticated in matters pertaining to 
who is the rightful sovereign power of a nation?

 		--karl--

---

From: [email-masked] (Scott Bradner)
Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 19:49:00 -0400 (EDT)

see RFC 2860

Scott

---

From: Ed Gerck <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 10:34:00 -0700

shogunx wrote:

> tampered with... it works, so don't break it. 

What I suggested could easily and seamlessly merge with the mailing
list, as an email that was received by a web interface.

BTW, I'm glad you are in the first phase of problem solving -- denial.
I'm suggesting we move to the second phase -- investigate options to
solve the problem.

---

From: shogunx <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 08:53:07 -0400 (EDT)

> list, as an email that was received by a web interface.

What are you suggesting, a web-based archive of list traffic and a form on
a website to post to ietf lists?

> I'm suggesting we move to the second phase -- investigate options to

Please define the problem that you are attempting to solve.

---

From: Ed Gerck <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 11:00:13 -0700

to save trees, please read my past messages here, the answers are there.
Thanks.

---

From: "JFC (Jefsey) Morfin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 20:25:01 +0200

>see RFC 2860

Dear Scott and Karl,
thank you for your comments. I explain. I consider the interest of a draft 
on the digital intergovernance I do not know yet if I want to undertake 
such a task, how, with who, and where. I established a site 
(http://intergovenance.org) to gather inputs from different authorities (I 
play it low key as it could be too big a project if not worked in parallel 
with SIS). The idea I float is to extend and generalize RFC 920/1591 from 
ARPA Internet, to Internet, to current inter-digital-network-convergence. 
Mixing past, experience, specifics and future of the different technologies 
towards a coherent model of the digital ecosystem and of its usage. From 
bandwidth to users technical aspects. Not by who does what, but by what is 
needed and how it is best performed.

A basic need is for a generalized e-networks lexical and 
theory/modelization. Nothing fancy. What we do all the day long, but put 
into a single structured document from telecoms, to datacoms, to 
communication services. Analyzed for what they should do, not for history 
or what they currently do.

There, there is a need for a neutral, stable, reference "system". Until 
now, this was thought as a "center" in the global network governance. For 
many reasons (risk containment, sovereignty, experimentation, operational 
flexibility, cybernetic warfare, economic intelligence, etc.) such 
"centers" in network horizontal governances must become a concerted 
specialized vertical governance within the intergovernance of the 
inter-networks/technology/systems/services/usages/etc. Also, there is a 
clear "law": if one wants to keep an intergoverned system under a single 
governance, that governance will either obsolete (ITU?) or become a 
dominance (ICANN?), both being discarded (an intergovernance does not 
fight, it circumvents).

So, the future is clear. It is made of a IANA network concerted system for 
the very large diversity of names and numbers used for network 
interoperations and users interapplications. One "IANA" centers per 
country, region, sector, culture, city, etc. down to private ones. They 
will provide the ubiquitous e-continuity metastructure. Each horizontal 
thematic intergovernance (DNS, numbering, geonumeric bases, formats, etc; 
etc. ) will have to devise their ways to keep their global information 
matrix consistent - or to restore its consistency after a dysfunction, an 
attack or a sovereign zone take-over for critical reasons. ICP-3 of ICANN 
is a good introduction to this effort in the DNS area.

There are two good ways and a bad one to reach this from the today situation.

- good 1. the current IANA multinationalize/multilingualize/multitechnoloze 
into it. This looks unrealistic but matching IETF "core values". IETF 
already coped with other unrealistic challenges. ccTLDs could be a good 
existing supporting structure. But users support (@large) would be needed 
to establish it. IETF would have the lead.

- good 2. IANA becomes a part of ICANN. ICANN is increasingly perceived as 
an USG agency. So, the common international practices apply. Some countries 
(ccNSO) want to keep using it. Some others will create their regional, 
national governance structures and bodies. This will be good for QoS 
through competition. ITU will probably then be the best solution, if it 
creates an ITU-I Sector.

- bad one. to mix them both to impose an ICANN governance. This cannot 
technically work on medium/long term. A dominance does not fit in a 
distributed system. This will create an increasing instability and will be 
circumvented by usage and real world intergovernance. The bodies associated 
with the dominance will probably be discarded. RIRs have understood that. 
Most of the ccTLDs too.

Let be clear. I do not speak of short term political instability. But of 
very long term architectural instability. To understand this let recall 
that positions taken in minutes as obvious in 1984 are the ruling the way 
the name space works today. We all know the difficulty of making move the 
inter-networked system, ex.: IPv6. Today 88% of the mankind does not use 
the Internet. Also 88% of them are neither EU/US citizens.

If 70% of the mankind was connected in a decade, the increase would be 
150%. If 2/3 of the new comers adopted one different parameters in an area 
(for example to get ML.ML denied by ICANN, or a different no spam mail 
system, or a different DNS RR,) we would have the same number of users than 
today (800 millions) using that solutions. We know the compatibility 
difficulty for IPv6, the threat of alt.roots for some: we would have to 
increasingly live for ever with this kind of problems. I have no doubt that 
natural evolution will correct IANA possible mishandling over the next 
century - the same as sometime the whole network will be IPv6, the naming 
multilingual, etc. But in the meanwhile?

Scott, I did not quote RFCs because on the grounds above.

1. RFC 2468 comes before. With a substantial with "a function performed by 
ICANN".

2. RFC 2860's is only the technical work of the IANA. Not on its 
architectural nor on its intergovernance aspects. It signed by Fred Baker 
showing that IETF is the one delegating (with silent IAB), hence my 
question to IETF. The given IANA definition is: "Internet Assigned Numbers 
Authority (a traditional name, used here to refer to the technical team 
making and publishing the assignments of Internet protocol technical 
parameters). The IANA technical team is now part of ICANN"

This refers to:
- a group of people identified as such, not to a function.
- this is a bilateral hosting agreement. Not an assimilation.
It does not match either "a function performed by ICANN".

Karl, your technical and legal points are well made. But let be candid: 
outside of a very few ICANN/IETF and g/s/ccTLD group of people, who cares 
about the NOAA Internet? This may certainly have a technical impact because 
someone with technical responsibilities in ICANN or IETF is affected. But 
this would be a bug to correct. Not something to keep, not even to discuss.
jfc

---

From: shogunx <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 2004 10:47:14 -0400 (EDT)

seems like the problem is poor signal to noise ratio.
i'm not sure that will be solved by quick and easy web interface to noise
creation.  do we have an easy route to communicate with the spammers?
like posting on this list?  if they are spamming, then they are also
watching and giggling.  if so, perhaps we could ask them a few things;
"what do you want?", "do you have a question?", and "does your mother know
what you are doing?" come to mind.

scott