I wish I could share your confidence in the wisdom of the market. In my experience, the market does eventually learn what works well and what doesn't, but for subtle things like how addresses are used this can take years. And by the time the market does learn, it's often too entrenched to change. NAT is one example; email user agents that make it easy to run executable attachments are another [*].
IETF can't stop vendors from doing harmful things. But we're being irresponsible if we fail to discourage the harmful things that we know about. Keith [*] The MIME standard even repeatedly warned about the hazards of doing so, but that didn't stop unscrupulous mail client vendors from deploying MUAs that have become fertile breeding grounds for viruses. Why nobody has sued them for this is beyond me, because their negligence and refusal to follow the standards has resulted in billions of dollars of downtime (thus lost revenue) and support costs for networks and end systems - even to those not using their software.) > Keith, > > That is not going to happen. The market will ignore such silliness. > > /jim > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Keith Moore [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 8:17 PM > > To: Bob Hinden > > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Subject: Re: Some IPv6LL operational experience > > > > > > I strongly disagree that this practice adds value to IPv6. > > IMHO it has the potential to do a great deal of harm. It is > > even worse that NAT. > > > > Did we go to all of that trouble to deprecate SL only to find > > that people will now insist that LLs are generally usable by apps? > > > > If we're going to make IPv6 even less predictable and less > > functional than IPv4, why did we bother? -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
