"What is 'breaking the law' in one place is 'supporting the human rights

of the oppressed' in another."

Are you suggesting that protecting privacy is essential and protecting
the law can't be because some countries lack sufficient respect for the
law (and therefore might misuse ALTO information)?


-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Kaufman [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 5:16 PM
To: Richard Bennett
Cc: Enrico Marocco; Nicholas Weaver; Richard Woundy; [email protected];
DePriest, Greg (NBC Universal)
Subject: Re: [alto] Is there really a 'war' between ISPs and app
providers?

Richard Bennett wrote:
> Not to be too flip about it, but It's not clear to me that helping 
> people break the law falls in the scope of the requirements for this 
> working group or of the IETF in general.
What is "breaking the law" in one place is "supporting the human rights 
of the oppressed" in another.

But there's also corporate applications where there may be IT policy in 
place that restricts employees from sending lists of IP addresses of 
other users of that application in plaintext.

I admit that in both cases traffic analysis can be used to find *some* 
of the participating nodes, but a system where larger numbers of 
candidate nodes are transmitted to the ISP for ranking in plaintext is 
clearly not as safe as one where candidate nodes are transmitted to a 
trusted ISP for ranking in a secure form and that is not as safe as one 
where a trusted third party can anonymize the requests prior to having 
them ranked.

Given my position, I'm not really able to go on speculating more about 
what specific types of applications users might develop on top of the 
overlay network I implement for them, as it is important that my design 
be as generic as possible and not tailored to any specific use, 
particularly a use which might not be legal somewhere. What I can do it 
point out that a requirement that has come to me is that if I have my 
overlay use something like ALTO in order to build a more optimal 
overlay, some developers don't want node information being transmitted 
in plaintext, and others don't want it being transmitted at all.

Matthew Kaufman
_______________________________________________
alto mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/alto

Reply via email to