On 21/08/25 16:41, James R Cutler via NANOG wrote:
I, too, have been appalled at the fragmentation and fragility of 'more modern' verbal
(and visual) interaction tools. "How soon we forget." No (anti)social network
tool provides reliable history as they respond to social and political whims which
provide only selective memory and only for as long as business goals support such.
In my estimation this is as much to do with technical implementation and
legal liability as it is business goals.
Imagine you are creating a new chat app (not a protocol). The end user
has several devices and usually doesn't have a TCP connection to the
server, so the server stores all the messages so that when the user
opens their app on any device it asks the server for the latest messages
and they see the same thing on each device. You don't even try to do
end-to-end encryption because that's *hard* (seriously) and this is the
first version of the app.
Perhaps the user can join a chat group with several other users, and
obviously you'll only store one copy of the messages in that group and
serve it to all users in the group.
Now an abuse report comes in. It's from the police. Someone posted
something illegal. You have to delete it (among other actions) or you go
to jail, and you don't like jail. So you delete it. Now it doesn't
appear in anyone's chat history. You modified their chat history.
There is no way to avoid this.
So how's this different with email and IRC? The difference I see is that
the party who relays the message to all members of a chat group is
different from the party who stores the message. The mailing list server
isn't technically able to delete messages it already amplified, and each
user's inbox server could be separately forced to delete it, but that is
a waste of time (when it's gmail) or completely illegal (when it's
self-hosted).
It's the same with IRC but even stronger. The server isn't technically
able to delete a message it already amplified, and police aren't
breaking into your house to wipe it out of your RAM. If you use a
bouncer, it's likely to be self-hosted, but even if not, it's not worth
sending a legal notice to everyone's bouncer providers.
This is part of the design of email and IRC *primarily because they are
old*. They come from the time when the internet was a cooperative, open
federation project between many peer organizations, rather than one
company trying to lock you into a closed system, followed by another
company trying to lock you into a different closed system.
Although you could design your *new* system to deliver messages
immediately to the end user's RAM, it won't interact well with
multi-device support and only-sometimes-online support. The need to
maintain a TCP connection to the server is a major complaint about IRC
and possibly the biggest reason for its decline in popularity. Although
it works just fine in a lot of desktop computer scenarios, and okay
enough in laptop scenarios, it's utterly intolerable in mobile phone
scenarios, which, as you probably know, make up about 95% of usage.
Let's assume you're willing to sacrifice multi-device support. TCP does
buffer messages for a short time, seconds to minutes at most. You could
try to do a TCP-like thing, and see how long you can extend the
buffering until you need to get lawyers involved. If messages are
buffered on the server for five milliseconds and you can't delete them
in response to a legal request, that is okay. Five seconds also appears
to be okay. How about five minutes? Five hours? It will become a problem
before five days.
You could design your system so that you *can* delete messages from
TCP-like buffers. If a client's next connection is after you get a legal
request to delete a message, it just won't get that message, but clients
who got it earlier will still have it. This still means you need a
department to process legal requests. It still doesn't work if you wrote
the client, because the police will simply ask: why did you write the
client in a way that doesn't allow the server to order it to delete
messages it already received? And you'll go back to jail. So this kind
of thing really requires a real open architecture.
Over several decades, I have been able to recall NANOG discussions that bear on
current situations. Here is one example.
From: "james.cutler () consultant com" <james.cutler () consultant com>
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 2021 15:07:14 -0400
Dave,
I am a regular discourse user these days. I have been a NANOG list participant
for at least a quarter of a century. I
find all the modern forums require examining multiple web pages and do not
support gaining any historical perspective
or assist in correlating various topics into a coherent gestalt. They also
require waiting for all the embellishments
and formatting which html users prize as advantages, even when words, well
reasoned or hasty, would serve as well or
better.
As you might surmise from the forgoing: IT AINT BROKE. DON’T FIX IT.
Pardon my shouting in my fervent expression of my opinion, but it is important
that you hear and consider this.
-
James R Cutler - 🦉 No AI content
719 Leicester Street, Plymouth, MI 48170-1020
+1 (734) 673-5462 [email protected]
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