RE: Who can do me a faver to send me the latest version of RFC2916bis?
http://ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-enum-rfc2916bis-07.txt -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Felix, Zhang Sent: Thursday, March 11, 2004 9:14 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Who can do me a faver to send me the latest version of RFC2916bis? I have tried to search in the IETF website, but only lots of dicussion version about it, no clean doucments. Thanks ahead.
Re: Who can do me a faver to send me the latest version of RFC2916bis?
Thanks a lot, Get it. :-) - Original Message - From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Felix, Zhang [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, March 12, 2004 11:45 AM Subject: Re: Who can do me a faver to send me the latest version of RFC2916bis? http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-enum-rfc2916bis-07.txt All currently discussed drafts of the IETF are stored in the internet-drafts directory. Harald --On 12. mars 2004 10:14 +0800 Felix, Zhang [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have tried to search in the IETF website, but only lots of dicussion version about it, no clean doucments. Thanks ahead. ___ This message was passed through [EMAIL PROTECTED], which is a sublist of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Not all messages are passed. Decisions on what to pass are made solely by IETF_CENSORED ML Administrator ([EMAIL PROTECTED]).
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
From: Nathaniel Borenstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... When each ISP makes its own rules and metes out its own vigilante-style punishment, that's not civilization, it's anarchy. And I find it considerably scarier than the underlying offense of spam itself. -- Nathaniel Your repeated misrepresentation of the use of blacklists by one party in a prospective SMTP transaction as vigilantism is as offensive as it it is a familiar complaint of senders of unwanted mail, including spammers and kooks. Regardless of what governments or anyone else might do about spam, and regardless of whether you and anyone else other than the targets of your mail consider it spam, your implicit claim to a right to send is wrong and scarier than any sort of Internet vigilante-style punishment. Some of us are bothered a lot more by the notion that you might be able to appeal to any third party to force the target of a prospective communication to shut up and eat your [mail]. Your right to send mail stops at the border routers of your ISP. Whether your mail gets any farther depends entirely on the sufferance, whim, and caprice of others. If prospective targets of your mail reject it because your IP address is divisible by 91, that is entirely fair, appropriate, and not for anyone but the owners of your targeted mailboxes to judge. Customers of ISPs that want to receive your mail but can't for any reason, whether the use blacklists, the prime factors of your IP address, or standard incompetence, have and should have only one recourse, changing mail providers. If the targets of your mail reject it because you have chosen a spam friendly ISP or an ISP with the wrong number of letters in its domain name, your only recourse is and should be to change mail service providers. The consequences of your choice in hiring an ISP that subsidizes its rates by serving spammers are no one's concern but yours. The incredible notion you have repeatedly, albeit indirectly advanced, that you have a right to have your mail delivered that should be enforced by governments or at least the IETF, would surely apply to backhoe fade, power problems, misconfiguration, and all of other things that cause mail to be lost or bounced. Having governments or the IETF dictate rights of mail senders to be be heard by their targets would be BAD! Next you'll be telling me that if you telephone me, I can't hang up on you. not that I would, but I reserve the right. Vernon Schryver[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
Vernon, Much as I am reluctant to get into this debate, let me try to make some distinctions that might be at the root of where you and Nathaniel are not communicating... * Your analogy to the phone system is exact as long as the system is end-to-end (see below). You have no obligation to accept a call from Nathaniel (or anyone else) and can be as rude as you like --within extremely broad limits -- if someone manages to ring your phone whom you don't want to talk with. But your carrier is generally required to accept a connection from Nathaniel's carrier: except in very rare and highly selective circumstances, neither is permitted to decide that you and Nathaniel should not communicate. * I run my own mail server(s) as, if I recall, do you. What I choose to accept or reject at that server is my business and my problem only. As you suggest, I don't believe that anyone has the right to tell me what I must accept, or how I am permitted to make those decisions. I also pay my ISP extra (relative to their cheapest accounts that offer essentially the same bandwidth, etc.) so that they don't get in the way of my servers or filter my incoming or outgoing traffic (at either the IP or applications level). I resent paying extra, especially since I am painfully aware that their base operating costs are lower for the kind of static-address, no-filters service I am buying than they are for various protect the users or drive up the price arrangements, but, until someone comes along with a better deal, that is how it goes. * But, when the victim^H^H^H^H^H^H consumer is essentially faced with a monopoly --buy the ISP's service with whatever conditions it comes with or be stuck with dialup-- and is not permitted to run mail servers, has no real control over whatever filters the ISP decides to install, etc., the situation is a lot closer to the classic middlebox with no control by either endpoint one (and produces variations on the same arguments). At least in the US, at bandwidth levels lower than a fractional-T1, there is typically very little choice of providers (or at least of terms and conditions). In the Boston area, as far as I know, there are a number of consumer aDSL providers, but none of them provide fixed addresses and most prohibit servers of any sort, etc., without upgrading to much more costly business services. Few, if any, will permit outgoing mail except through their servers, so, if they get blocked, all of their customers get blocked ... and have little choice in the matter. For SDSL, several ISPs offer the product but, as far as I can tell, they all do it through the same last-mile provider. And cable... well, not a lot of choices there, at least choices that don't require changing one's residence, either. Go 100 miles north of here, and the options get even fewer -- buy the cable modem service (if it is even available) at whatever terms and conditions (and incompetence) the cable provider wants to offer, or put in a DS0 or above at (last I checked) $6 / air mile/ month, for 30 or 50 miles above and beyond whatever the ISP charges. Switch carriers is a possibility, but only a theoretical one. Where the disagreement you and Nathaniel are having leads, I think inevitably except for timing, is into the state that you assume Nathaniel is assuming: sufficient governmental intervention to turn anyone who operates a mail relay into a common carrier, without the right to filter mail except in response to government-approved rituals. For many reasons, I hope we never get there, regardless of its potential advantages for controlling spam and various other sorts of bad behavior. But we don't have a free market here, with consumer choice options among ISPs who filter and ISPs who don't, at least with reasonable price differentials. regards, john --On Friday, 12 March, 2004 07:22 -0700 Vernon Schryver [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: Nathaniel Borenstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... When each ISP makes its own rules and metes out its own vigilante-style punishment, that's not civilization, it's anarchy. And I find it considerably scarier than the underlying offense of spam itself. -- Nathaniel Your repeated misrepresentation of the use of blacklists by one party in a prospective SMTP transaction as vigilantism is as offensive as it it is a familiar complaint of senders of unwanted mail, including spammers and kooks. Regardless of what governments or anyone else might do about spam, and regardless of whether you and anyone
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
John C Klensin wrote: In the Boston area, as far as I know, there are a number of consumer aDSL providers, but none of them provide fixed addresses and most prohibit servers of any sort, etc., without upgrading to much more costly business services. Check out Speakeasy; they don't filter. Their basic package is dynamic IP, but you can get multiple static IPs, without going to SDSL. -- /=\ |John Stracke |[EMAIL PROTECTED] | |Principal Engineer|http://www.centive.com| |Centive |My opinions are my own. | |=| |I'm off to wander the streets aimlessly. I'll be taking my usual| |route. -- Lillith, _Cheers_ | \=/
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
On Mar 12, 2004, at 9:22 AM, Vernon Schryver wrote: Your repeated misrepresentation of the use of blacklists by one party in a prospective SMTP transaction as vigilantism is as offensive as it it is a familiar complaint of senders of unwanted mail, including spammers and kooks. I'm not talking about any party to the real end-to-end email transaction. I'm talking about intermediaries. I have no problem at all with user-controlled filters that do whatever they want. It's when an ISP starts doing these things on behalf of a user who doesn't understand or want them that the problems arise. Regardless of what governments or anyone else might do about spam, and regardless of whether you and anyone else other than the targets of your mail consider it spam, your implicit claim to a right to send is wrong and scarier than any sort of Internet vigilante-style punishment. I don't claim any such right to send. In fact, I agree with you about your right to block. But that right belongs to the you as the recipient of the communication, not to a third party intermediary that is not acting with the explicit approval of the recipient. Just as you have the right to choose only opt in email, I have the right to choose opt out email blocking. We need to preserve BOTH of those rights. Eliminating the latter right is simply not the best way to fix the problems with the former right. Your right to send mail stops at the border routers of your ISP. Bzzt. Not in most Western countries it doesn't. In telephony, equal access regulations have long ensured that telephone companies are required to interconnect their systems and NOT make third party decisions to block calls. But that doesn't stop you personally from using caller-id information to filter my calls, or even from buying a box that subscribes to a private blacklisting service. It's your decision, not your ISP's. Whether your mail gets any farther depends entirely on the sufferance, whim, and caprice of others. Read your history. This is more or less what the 19th century phone companies argued, and it's what governmental regulation of communication in a democracy is *for*. The ISP's like to claim common carrier status when it's in their interest, but they should bear the same responsibilities as well. If prospective targets of your mail reject it because your IP address is divisible by 91, that is entirely fair, appropriate, and not for anyone but the owners of your targeted mailboxes to judge. That is certainly one opinion, but the history of telecommunications policy in the US and elsewhere is based on a rather different opinion. Customers of ISPs that want to receive your mail but can't for any reason, whether the use blacklists, the prime factors of your IP address, or standard incompetence, have and should have only one recourse, changing mail providers. This is precisely where your argument falls apart: ISP's are consolidating and becoming more and more like common carriers. Fork example, at my home in a modern American city, I have precisely two reasonably priced options if I want broadband: Cable and DSL. Ultimately it is becoming a duopoly, and while that's better than a monopoly, it just doesn't leave enough options for a fully laissez-faire position to be realistic. Next you'll be telling me that if you telephone me, I can't hang up on you. not that I would, but I reserve the right. You have that right, and also the right not to answer the phone when my name comes up on caller-id. But your phone company doesn't have the right to make the decision, on your behalf and without your consent, to not cause your phone to ring. And no, acceptable use policies aren't an adequate answer because the decreasing number of consumer-level alternatives means I'm likely to be stuck with a AUP that I find unacceptable. I don't see any difference between this situation and the situation where, say, China uses its governmental/monopolistic powers to block all email from Taiwan. It's an abridgement of a fundamental human right to communicate, which I think trumps the rights of monopolistic ISP's to cut their spam-related expenses. -- Nathaniel
PORT
Does any one know how to configure the PORT from Windows 2000 Server? coz one of our tehcnician config our PORT HTTP is Port 83 insetead of 80 and regarding on our PORT 25 I cannot open it? Does any one out there help my to configure this crap! Thanks in advance Kutch _ Add photos to your messages with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
From: John C Klensin [EMAIL PROTECTED] * But, when the victim^H^H^H^H^H^H consumer is essentially faced with a monopoly --buy the ISP's service with whatever conditions it comes with or be stuck with dialup-- and is not permitted to run mail servers, has no real control over whatever filters the ISP decides to install, etc., the situation is a lot closer to the classic middlebox with no control by either endpoint one (and produces variations on the same arguments). ... The major error with potentially catastrophic consequences in that that thinking is the notion of ISPs as monopolies. No ISP in the world has a monopoly on real Internet service, with the exception the bad situation in totalitarin states. servers of any sort, etc., without upgrading to much more costly business services. Few, if any, will That many so called ISPs are not selling Internet access is as irrelevant as the fact that many grocery stores don't sell alcohol. The lies customers of those services providers are told and tell themselves about what they are buying and using are also irrelevant. The services those providers offer are some kind of limited data services that happens to use TCP/IP and portions of the Internet. I'd like to see those providers forced to label their services honestly, but that has nothing to do with monopolies, natural or otherwise, except that monopolies seem more likely to violate truth in labelling. That there are parts of the world where you cannot buy Internet access from local providers may disappoint you and me, but it implies nothing about monopolies on Internet access. There may be monopolies on those limited data services, but that is as irrelevant as monopolies on plain old telephone service. People whose only available data services are those non-Internet access services or POTS can always use those data services or telephones to reach a real Internet service provider. Whether or not they could afford real Internet service is also irrelevant here. Where the disagreement you and Nathaniel are having leads, I think inevitably except for timing, is into the state that you assume Nathaniel is assuming: sufficient governmental intervention to turn anyone who operates a mail relay into a common carrier, without the right to filter mail except in response to government-approved rituals. For many reasons, I hope we never get there, regardless of its potential advantages for controlling spam and various other sorts of bad behavior. But we don't have a free market here, with consumer choice options among ISPs who filter and ISPs who don't, at least with reasonable price differentials. NO! In fact we do have a fairly free market. That many service providers choose to not provide Internet service is evidence that the market is free and that no monopolies for Internet Access prevail. That those service providers charge less than providers that do provide real Internet service is interesting is more evidence that monopolies do not exist. Perhaps governments should crack down the dishonesty of providers that mislabel their non-Internet access services, but that has nothing to do with monopolies. No one should have any sympathy for savvy technicians who choose to pay for a service that is not Internet access, don't get Internet access, and then complain about terrorist and vigilantes who keep them from getting services they've not paid for. That Internet service no longer costs several $1000/month is great but irrelevant. That it costs more than $30/month is also irrelevant. I think it's too bad that Internet access is not cheaper than it is, but just now I'd rather worry about the costs of food and water for most people on Earth. Vernon Schryver[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
From: Nathaniel Borenstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... I'm not talking about any party to the real end-to-end email transaction. I'm talking about intermediaries. I have no problem at all with user-controlled filters that do whatever they want. It's when an ISP starts doing these things on behalf of a user who doesn't understand or want them that the problems arise. That would be relevant to your situation if you had any contract with those intermediaries, or if you had deigned to buy real Internet access instead of some sort of data service that happens to use TCP/IP and parts of the Internet. Your trouble is that you are unwilling or unable to buy real Internet access. The fact that what you get for $30/month is not Internet access has nothing to do with evil intermediaries. ... I don't claim any such right to send. In fact, I agree with you about your right to block. But that right belongs to the you as the recipient of the communication, not to a third party intermediary that is not acting with the explicit approval of the recipient. Just as you have the right to choose only opt in email, I have the right to choose opt out email blocking. We need to preserve BOTH of those rights. Eliminating the latter right is simply not the best way to fix the problems with the former right. That is a straw man. Other than some governments, no third parties are interferring with your mail. There are ISPs acting in accordance with contracts with their customers to block your mail. You are demanding that ISPs violate their agreements with their customers and pass your mail. Whether the customers of those ISPs know what they are buying in terms of DNS blacklists is irrelevant. It is also irrelevant whether those customers are getting reasonable SLAs, floride in their water, and honest government. Your right to send mail stops at the border routers of your ISP. Bzzt. Not in most Western countries it doesn't. In telephony, equal access regulations have long ensured that telephone companies are required to interconnect their systems and NOT make third party decisions to block calls. But that doesn't stop you personally from using caller-id information to filter my calls, or even from buying a box that subscribes to a private blacklisting service. It's your decision, not your ISP's. While PTTs do regulate telephone service, Internet service is not regulated that way in for most citizens of Western countries. Besides, equivalents of the filtering you are complaining about is available from telephone companies. Qwest sells various kinds of call blocking. By your reasoning, it is ok for Qwest to block telemarketing calls with inevitiably grossly inaccurate CID filters but not for Qwest to block email with much more accurate mechanisms. Whether your mail gets any farther depends entirely on the sufferance, whim, and caprice of others. Read your history. This is more or less what the 19th century phone companies argued, and it's what governmental regulation of communication in a democracy is *for*. Yes, please do read your history, but not just the fairy tails of early 20th Century equivalents of Microsoft and their pet government regulators. The Communications Act of 1933 is widely seen outside PTT marketing departments and naive socialists as a marketing coup by the consortium that was ATT and unrelated to real problems. The ISP's like to claim common carrier status when it's in their interest, but they should bear the same responsibilities as well. In fact almost all service providers do not claim common carrier status. The few that do are not offering real Internet access. If prospective targets of your mail reject it because your IP address is divisible by 91, that is entirely fair, appropriate, and not for anyone but the owners of your targeted mailboxes to judge. That is certainly one opinion, but the history of telecommunications policy in the US and elsewhere is based on a rather different opinion. Your claim would be right if you limited it to telephone and telegraph services. The last 30 years of data services are differ. For example, the PTTs often escaped government regulation by claiming their data services differed from telephone services. This is precisely where your argument falls apart: ISP's are consolidating and becoming more and more like common carriers. Fork example, at my home in a modern American city, I have precisely two reasonably priced options if I want broadband: Cable and DSL. Ultimately it is becoming a duopoly, and while that's better than a monopoly, it just doesn't leave enough options for a fully laissez-faire position to be realistic. You are misrepresenting the services you from your local providers as Internet access. It is not. You are also misrepresenting DSL services. You can often buy DSL based Internet access from
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
On Mar 12, 2004, at 1:07 PM, Vernon Schryver wrote: That would be relevant to your situation if you had any contract with those intermediaries, or if you had deigned to buy real Internet access instead of some sort of data service that happens to use TCP/IP and parts of the Internet. I don't care to argue over terminology, but when I say Internet I am explicitly including the consumer-level services that are what 99.99% of human beings think of as the Internet. That is a straw man. Other than some governments, no third parties are interferring with your mail. There are ISPs acting in accordance with contracts with their customers to block your mail. You are demanding that ISPs violate their agreements with their customers and pass your mail. And *that* is disingenious. A take-it-or-leave it contract from a near monopoly is not a meaningful contract. While PTTs do regulate telephone service, Internet service is not regulated that way in for most citizens of Western countries. Besides, equivalents of the filtering you are complaining about is available from telephone companies. Qwest sells various kinds of call blocking. By your reasoning, it is ok for Qwest to block telemarketing calls with inevitiably grossly inaccurate CID filters but not for Qwest to block email with much more accurate mechanisms. If they sell it to me and I *choose* to buy it, that's one thing. If I'm given no alternative it's something else. -- Nathaniel
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
From: Nathaniel Borenstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] That would be relevant to your situation if you had any contract with those intermediaries, or if you had deigned to buy real Internet access instead of some sort of data service that happens to use TCP/IP and parts of the Internet. I don't care to argue over terminology, but when I say Internet I am explicitly including the consumer-level services that are what 99.99% of human beings think of as the Internet. I think you're numbers are wrong, but that's irrelevant. The label used by 500,000,000 users don't change the nature things. That 400,000,000 point point to a monitor and talk about the computer doesn't change difference between a CRT and a CPU. What you are calling Internet access is not. It differs from the real thing by both price and features. That is a straw man. Other than some governments, no third parties are interferring with your mail. There are ISPs acting in accordance with contracts with their customers to block your mail. You are demanding that ISPs violate their agreements with their customers and pass your mail. And *that* is disingenious. A take-it-or-leave it contract from a near monopoly is not a meaningful contract. You are equating $30/month whatever-you-call-it with Internet access. Then you claim that since the real Internet access available to you costs more than $30/month, it is not available. I think that is not just disingenious but dishonest. from telephone companies. Qwest sells various kinds of call blocking. By your reasoning, it is ok for Qwest to block telemarketing calls with inevitiably grossly inaccurate CID filters but not for Qwest to block email with much more accurate mechanisms. If they sell it to me and I *choose* to buy it, that's one thing. If I'm given no alternative it's something else. -- Nathaniel You are misrepresenting your situation when claim that you have no alternative. You do have a choice, but it it is not only between nothing and $30/month not-Internet-access. You could buy real Internet access, although it would cost as much as $400/month. You compound your misrepresentations by implicitly claiming that the same outfits that sell you $30/month not-Internet-access won't sell you real Internet access. Some of them won't, but many will. If you can get DSL, then you can get real Internet access. That 200 kbit/sec or more of Internet access generally costs more than $100/month does not justify your complaints about whatever you get for $30/month. I don't owe you the subsidies for your Internet access that are demanding. You want me to subsidize your access with my money and in my spam loads. If you were willing to pay what broadband Internet access reall costs, your ISP could afford real abuse instead of just letting the spam flow from your fellow $30/month lusers, and it could afford to give you spam filtering than the worst DNS blacklists. Vernon Schryver[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
On Fri, 12 Mar 2004, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote: I'm not talking about any party to the real end-to-end email transaction. I'm talking about intermediaries. I have no problem at all with user-controlled filters that do whatever they want. It's when an ISP starts doing these things on behalf of a user who doesn't understand or want them that the problems arise. Your remedy should be truth-in-advertising enforcement, as Vernon said. Entities that filter in the way that you don't like are not providing real Internet access, and should not pretend to. --apb (Alan Barrett)
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
ah, intermediaries. while at MAPS i often heard complaints (from people who wanted to send e-mail that some other people didn't want to receive) that subscribing to a blackhole list overreached an ISP's rights and responsibilities -- that customers should have to opt into such a service on a case by case basis. (which was amusing at the time since these same complainants were arguing at the same time that recipients of e-mail should have to opt out of the email they didn't want to receive. but i digress.) ultimately it was found that no law or regulation required carriage, and that an ISP (whether in the US, Canada, or EU) could subscribe to any blackhole list they wanted, and the only recourse any of their customers had was whatever was explicitly spelled out in their contracts. so, while we could argue about whether there ought to be a law or regulation, and then we could argue about which countries this law would have force within and whether an international treaty would be required (or possible), there is no sense in arguing whether a network owner has or does not have the right to refuse to carry any traffic they choose or fail to choose, for any reason or no reason. it just ain't so. - ah, monopolies. many times while at MAPS i heard complaints from end users whose e-mail was getting rejected by association, to the effect that they had no choice of ISP, there was only one ISP in their region, or whatever, and that adding that ISP to a blackhole list constituted an impossible mandate on the unwitting bystanders who happened to share that address space. well, i guess you all know how this turned out, too, right? about half of the nontechnical community of internet users now has a plethora of e-mail accounts, often free, often web-delivered. no misdeed on the part of your DSL or cablemodem provider prevents you from being a full internet citizen with all rights and privileges pursuant thereunto. of course, technical users just buy a 1U server and pay $50/month to have it colo'd somewhere, and they use their home DSL or cablemodem service for the only thing it's actually good for -- tunnelling to someplace whose abuse policies are enforced. nathaniel, john, i have a lot of respect for you but from reading this thread it's clear that you have only been studying this issue for a couple of years. please give it a decade, and read what's been written on the topic of digital rights, before you go head to head with vjs (who has been studying these issues as long as i, and who has definitely done his homework.) the fact that continued universal connectivity requires conservative behaviour by universal subset standards is a strength of the internet economy, not a weakness. it's the only fence we have, and good fences make good neighbors. the rule of law would not be nearly as fine grained or as relevant or as successful in this community. unless you think that CANSPAM is going to stop people in china or taiwan from sending you e-mail you have no fonts for about products you'd have no use for, that is. -- Paul Vixie
Re: Work effort? (Re: Proposed Standard and Perfection)
--On Monday, 08 March, 2004 13:26 -0500 Keith Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's all well and good to try to retire Proposed Standard documents that don't get implemented. But I think it's even more important to make it easier for documents that do meet the criteria to advance to Draft Standard. In my experience the hardest part of getting a document advanced is to collect the implementation report. Interesting. I would have described the hardest part as lying in the documentation process itself, in particular... * When a document has been very controversial in getting to Proposed, at least partially because of very loud and continuing objections about specific points from those who disagreed with them, it is often hard for authors, editors, [former?] WG Chairs, etc., to get up the energy to deal with what is likely to be a renewed version of the unpleasantness. * When one or more IESG members have engaged in extensive, time-consuming, and unpleasant nit-picking or bickering about provisions of the original, Proposed, document, authors/ editors/ WG Chairs may have the reasonable expectation that they would do an even better (more extensive) job on a draft coming up for Draft. and * Documents that are, themselves, perfectly ready to advance get stalled indefinitely because they make normative references to documents or protocols that, for one reason or another, less ready. The discussion below does not address the third point; I don't know quite what to do about it. Note that none of these issues is intrinsically related to the protocol quality or deployment of the specification. What the first two share with the implementation report issue is that the documentation issues are independent of the underlying reality. Hence this modest proposal: - For each standards-track document, create a web page that is used to keep track of bug reports, errata, implementation reports, and test reports. ... My not-very-modest proposal (many details would need filling in, but, as an idea...): (1) We decouple change maturity levels from write and publish an RFC (this means that the listing of maturity levels must be current and authoritative). This also meshes nicely with another proposal that was floated a few years ago, but never really written up (see below) (2) When a document comes up for review for Proposed-Draft, we look for implementations, etc., perhaps following Keith's proposal outline. If the implementations are there, we issue a Last Call for identification of serious technical/definitional flaws in the document as published, where serious is defined as problematic enough to interfere with independent interoperable implementations. If none are found, we advance the maturity level of the document, in place -- no new RFC publication required and hence little or no opportunity to reopen old wounds that lack demonstrated interoperability impact. If the document is about to time out in grade, we issue a Last Call, wait a reasonable period for protests and volunteers, and then downgrade it in place. The notion of having to write an RFC, following all of today's complex rules, and get formal consensus in order to declare a Protocol obsolete that isn't implemented and won't operate in today's environment is one of the more astonishing triumphs of bureaucracy over rationality. Similar rules would apply to Draft-Full (or whatever formula newtrk comes up with). (3) If a document is judged defective (which is difficult from judging a protocol defective), we try to find someone to fix it. If a plan (and volunteer(s)) cannot be readily found, we publish a description of the defect(s), presumably as an RFC, but, if that is unworkable, in some other way. Minimize the fuss -- if our customers don't think an updated document is worth the trouble --enough trouble to invest people, dollars for professional editing, or whatever else is required-- then we should stop losing sleep over it. Principle: If we are going to spend as much time and energy as we do getting something to Proposed, then moving it to Draft or Full should usually require only identification of implementations, deployment, and desirability, not extensive and time-consuming document rewriting john -- Footnote -- that other proposal: Some time ago, I noticed that the relationship between the STD definitions and the underlying RFCs had gotten a little too complicated for anyone to usefully understand. By being reserved to full standards, the
Re: Work effort? (Re: Proposed Standard and Perfection)
John, I think the things you describe have very many of the same ideals and targets as draft-loghney-what-standards, currently being discussed in newtrk, which still needs work and significant input to be converted from an idea to a workable process - we may have a rare case of singing in harmony here! Harald
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
Paul Vixie wrote: nathaniel, john, i have a lot of respect for you but from reading this thread it's clear that you have only been studying this issue for a couple of years. please give it a decade, and read what's been written on the topic of digital rights, before you go head to head with vjs (who has been studying these issues as long as i, and who has definitely done his homework.) Since the IETF is a standards organization, can both you and vsj tell us in your opinion, if there is anything the IETF should or should not be doing in the spam arena (changing existing standards, making new standards, etc.)? Yakov
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
Paul -- With respect, I think this argument is going nowhere because some of us want to discuss it in terms of property rights, and others of us want to discuss it in terms of human rights. I believe that communication should be viewed as a human right, and that property rights can and should be limited where necessary to ensure those rights. It seems to me that our disagreement stems from this basic difference of beliefs, rather than from logical flaws in one of our arguments, which makes for a fundamentally unproductive debate, so I'm going to *try* to shut up. :-) I will concede that if I started from a belief that the issue was one of property rights, rather than human rights, then I would probably agree with you and Vernon. -- Nathaniel On Mar 12, 2004, at 2:16 PM, Paul Vixie wrote: ah, intermediaries. while at MAPS i often heard complaints (from people who wanted to send e-mail that some other people didn't want to receive) that subscribing to a blackhole list overreached an ISP's rights and responsibilities -- that customers should have to opt into such a service on a case by case basis. (which was amusing at the time since these same complainants were arguing at the same time that recipients of e-mail should have to opt out of the email they didn't want to receive. but i digress.) ultimately it was found that no law or regulation required carriage, and that an ISP (whether in the US, Canada, or EU) could subscribe to any blackhole list they wanted, and the only recourse any of their customers had was whatever was explicitly spelled out in their contracts. so, while we could argue about whether there ought to be a law or regulation, and then we could argue about which countries this law would have force within and whether an international treaty would be required (or possible), there is no sense in arguing whether a network owner has or does not have the right to refuse to carry any traffic they choose or fail to choose, for any reason or no reason. it just ain't so. - ah, monopolies. many times while at MAPS i heard complaints from end users whose e-mail was getting rejected by association, to the effect that they had no choice of ISP, there was only one ISP in their region, or whatever, and that adding that ISP to a blackhole list constituted an impossible mandate on the unwitting bystanders who happened to share that address space. well, i guess you all know how this turned out, too, right? about half of the nontechnical community of internet users now has a plethora of e-mail accounts, often free, often web-delivered. no misdeed on the part of your DSL or cablemodem provider prevents you from being a full internet citizen with all rights and privileges pursuant thereunto. of course, technical users just buy a 1U server and pay $50/month to have it colo'd somewhere, and they use their home DSL or cablemodem service for the only thing it's actually good for -- tunnelling to someplace whose abuse policies are enforced. nathaniel, john, i have a lot of respect for you but from reading this thread it's clear that you have only been studying this issue for a couple of years. please give it a decade, and read what's been written on the topic of digital rights, before you go head to head with vjs (who has been studying these issues as long as i, and who has definitely done his homework.) the fact that continued universal connectivity requires conservative behaviour by universal subset standards is a strength of the internet economy, not a weakness. it's the only fence we have, and good fences make good neighbors. the rule of law would not be nearly as fine grained or as relevant or as successful in this community. unless you think that CANSPAM is going to stop people in china or taiwan from sending you e-mail you have no fonts for about products you'd have no use for, that is. -- Paul Vixie
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
From: Yakov Shafranovich [EMAIL PROTECTED] Since the IETF is a standards organization, can both you and vsj tell us in your opinion, if there is anything the IETF should or should not be doing in the spam arena (changing existing standards, making new standards, etc.)? draft-crocker-spam-techconsider-02.txt listed some opportunities for IETF documents. I vaguely recall they included: - codifying common sense for blacklist operators I thought ASRG time working on such a BCP, but it seems to have gone underground. - improved forms and formats for DSNs. - improved mechanisms, forms, and formats for logging mail rejections. - mechanisms for sharing white- and blacklists among MX servers for a domain. On the other hand, it would be distructive to let the IETF seriously consider supporting claims of the unfettered right to send mail regardless of the desires of mail targets and their duly appointed agents including ISPs or of entitlements to real Internet access at less than $50/month. That would further the ambitions of many to convert the Internet into what PTTs and governments said we might be allowed 20 years ago. That the spam problem involves TCP/IP does not necessarily imply that the IETF has a major role in dealing with the problem, any more than the fact that guns contain metal implies that the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) has a major role in the search for world peace. Regardless of the ambitions of individuals to make a difference or become famous, the IETF should strive first and foremost to do no harm outside its charter in primarily non-technical arenas such as the fight against spam. Vernon Schryver[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Apologies for the irony (was Re: Principles of Spam-abatement)
I apologize in advance to anyone who might see this as spamming the entire IETF list, but this may be the only way I can be sure of getting a message to Paul. And I doubt that I'm the only one who'll appreciate the irony here. Paul: I don't know whether or not you want me to be able to send you personal mail -- I'd hope so, but if not please imagine for a moment that you do. Further imagine that you *aren't* serving as your own ISP (i.e. you're not technical, you're not using the real Internet, you can't afford an expensive connection, whatever.) I call you on the phone or fax you the bounce message below and ask you how I can get email to you. What do you do? It's a serious question, and it's not primarily about property rights, it's about our right to choose to communicate with each other. -- Nathaniel PS -- Are you really rejecting all mail from comcast.net? Just curious, that's a lot of people. And if it's guppylake.com, it would have been nice if someone had told me when I was blacklisted, seeing as how I'm the administrator. -- Nathaniel Begin forwarded message: From: Mail Delivery Subsystem [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: March 12, 2004 4:06:08 PM EST To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Returned mail: delivery problems encountered A message (from [EMAIL PROTECTED]>) was received at 12 Mar 2004 21:06:05 +. The following addresses had delivery problems: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Permanent Failure: 553_Service_unavailable;_Client_host_[204.127.198.35]_blocked_using_reject-mail.vix.com Delivery last attempted at Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:06:07 - Reporting-MTA: dns; comcast.net Arrival-Date: 12 Mar 2004 21:06:05 + Final-Recipient: rfc822; [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Action: failed Status: 5.0.0 553_Service_unavailable;_Client_host_[204.127.198.35]_blocked_using_reject-mail.vix.com Diagnostic-Code: smtp; Permanent Failure: Other undefined Status Last-Attempt-Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 21:06:07 - From: Nathaniel Borenstein [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: March 12, 2004 4:06:04 PM EST To: Paul Vixie [EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Principles of Spam-abatement [body of original message omitted -- nsb]
Re: Apologies for the irony (was Re: Principles of Spam-abatement)
From: Nathaniel Borenstein ...you can't afford an expensive connection ... ... it's not primarily about property rights, it's about our right to choose to communicate with each other. If the second were true, the first would be irrelevant. That the first is relevant shows the right to choose to communicate is nonsense, except in the same sense as the costs of gasoline and real estate limit your right to travel, live, and work where you want. PS -- Are you really rejecting all mail from comcast.net? Just curious, that's a lot of people. And if it's guppylake.com, it would have been nice if someone had told me when I was blacklisted, seeing as how I'm the administrator. I suspect it is Comcast, but in the same hypothetical, contrary to facts spirit as your other questions, let's assume that it is guppylake.com. How would you be entitled to or even just expect notification? If I set my (non-existent) caller-ID filters to reject phone calls from you, would you be entitled to or expect a notice? Even if you were a telemarketer, why would you care? What if Qwest did the rejecting for me? I suspect your answers for the two media differ and that you have not considered your position on Internet access except from an emotional sense of entitlement and of hurt and outrage at being snubbed by various blacklists. Vernon Schryver[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
Perhaps you should ask this question of someone who actually _has_ studied the problem for a number of years, and has reviewed the numerous legal cases and the full text of their legal decisions, and sometimes even the motions and briefs in the case, and has reveiwed the congressional reports, and even the congressional testimony on the record. And I've been interested and involved in the legal and human aspect of various digital rights for over a dozen years. And as President of the League for Programming Freedom, have organized over a hundred very prominent computer scientists (luminaries like Don Knuth, John McCarthy, Gerald Sussman, etc,etc,etc) on the issue of User Interface Copyrights, and supervised legal briefs up to the Supreme Court. I note that Mr. Vixie has declined to participate in any of these other issues, other than to tell me that he _supports_ the notion of software patents, when I asked him to join the LPF some years ago. (Most technical people are opposed to software patents) The LPF has been fighting software patents and won on the issue of User Interface Copyrights in the Lotus V. Borland. --Dean On Fri, 12 Mar 2004, Yakov Shafranovich wrote: Paul Vixie wrote: nathaniel, john, i have a lot of respect for you but from reading this thread it's clear that you have only been studying this issue for a couple of years. please give it a decade, and read what's been written on the topic of digital rights, before you go head to head with vjs (who has been studying these issues as long as i, and who has definitely done his homework.) Since the IETF is a standards organization, can both you and vsj tell us in your opinion, if there is anything the IETF should or should not be doing in the spam arena (changing existing standards, making new standards, etc.)? Yakov
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement (fwd)
For some reason, this message, sent at 17:43 EST, has not made it to the list, or showed up in the list archive, even though a message sent after it is in the archive. http://info.av8.net/spamstuff/vix-spam-abatement-ietf Mar 12 17:43:34 cirrus sendmail[23157]: i2CMhXMU023157: from=[EMAIL PROTECTED], size=11824, class=0, nrcpts=2, msgid=[EMAIL PROTECTED], proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=cirrus.av8.net [130.105.36.66] Mar 12 17:44:05 cirrus sendmail[23159]: i2CMhXMU023157: to=[EMAIL PROTECTED], delay=00:00:31, xdelay=00:00:31, mailer=esmtp, pri=71824, relay=ietf-mx.ietf.org. [132.151.6.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (OK id=1B1vNs-0004Wr-00) This one, sent 20 minutes later, is in the archive, and I've even got the copy from the list already. Mar 12 18:03:05 cirrus sendmail[23522]: i2CN34iB023522: from=[EMAIL PROTECTED], size=2272, class=0, nrcpts=2, msgid=[EMAIL PROTECTED], proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=cirrus.av8.net [130.105.36.66] Mar 12 18:03:35 cirrus sendmail[23524]: i2CN34iB023522: to=[EMAIL PROTECTED], delay=00:00:30, xdelay=00:00:30, mailer=esmtp, pri=62272, relay=ietf-mx.ietf.org. [132.151.6.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (OK id=1B1vgk-0005zS-00) Curious --Dean
Re: [ga] LatinoamerICANN publica versión en españolde los Estatutos del ICANN
Stephane and all former DNSO GA members or other interested stakeholders/users, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote: On Wed, Mar 10, 2004 at 03:09:16PM +0100, Vittorio Bertola [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote a message of 19 lines which said: that posting in English is a significant additional effort for many of us - not to mention speaking in English at physical meetings or even from a podium... It is clearly a problem in every international forum: IETF or RIPE (which are supposed to allow the participation of everyone on an equal basis) are quite difficult to master if you are not very proficient in spoken english. I have two responses and/or suggested remedies. 1.) If the UN can handle it, who cannot the IETF, Ripe or ICANN now be able to do so. Answer: They really don't want to... Suggestion: Take the time an effort to provide for translators [ Human type ] and/or acquire the available software to do real time language translation, both written or spoken. 2.) As English is the international language of choice, perhaps those that cannot or do not speak, read or write English should take the personal responsibility to learn. [ This is the I don't know how many times I have suggested this time I have made this recommendation ]. I as an individual have taken the time as an American to learn to speak chinese, read, write and speak Spanish, Read and speak pretty good French, and have spoken German most of my life. If I can accomplish this, than surely many ICANN, Ripe, and IETF folks that do not comprehend english very well can at least learn to do so fairly proficiently. Failing to take that reasonable and well advised responsibility by any of these organizations forum's participants to master English is nothing more than pure lazieness or inconsideration for the majority of stakeholders/users that speak and/or read english more than adequately... Regards, -- Jeffrey A. Williams Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 134k members/stakeholders strong!) Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others - Pierre Abelard If the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B; liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by P: i.e., whether B is less than PL. United States v. Carroll Towing (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947] === Updated 1/26/04 CSO/DIR. Internet Network Eng. SR. Eng. Network data security IDNS. div. of Information Network Eng. INEG. INC. E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Registered Email addr with the USPS Contact Number: 214-244-4827
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Yakov Shafranovich) writes: Since the IETF is a standards organization, can both you and vsj tell us in your opinion, if there is anything the IETF should or should not be doing in the spam arena (changing existing standards, making new standards, etc.)? yes there is, but vern says it won't work, so i won't go into it again, yet. -- Paul Vixie
[Fwd: [Ham-Linux] Be careful what you say]
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/02/17/HNlindash_1.html ___ Ham-Linux mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/ham-linux -- Doug Royer | http://INET-Consulting.com ---|- [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Office: (208)520-4044 http://Royer.com/People/Doug | Fax:(866)594-8574 | Cell: (208)520-4044 We Do Standards - You Need Standards smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: [Fwd: [Ham-Linux] Be careful what you say]
SORRY - I sent it to the wrong list! -- Doug Royer | http://INET-Consulting.com ---|- [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Office: (208)520-4044 http://Royer.com/People/Doug | Fax:(866)594-8574 | Cell: (208)520-4044 We Do Standards - You Need Standards smime.p7s Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
Vernon, VS On the other hand, it would be distructive to let the IETF seriously VS consider supporting claims of the unfettered right to send mail VS regardless of the desires of mail targets and their duly appointed VS agents including ISPs or of entitlements to real Internet access VS at less than $50/month. I'll probably regret pursuing this, but... I have not seen any inclination of the IETF community to support such claims, but from your statement, I fear it may have happened and I missed it. What are you referring to? d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
Nathaniel, NB some of us want to discuss it in terms of property rights, and others NB of us want to discuss it in terms of human rights. Unfortunately, the IETF mailing list is not a very good venue for either topic, because most of the folks on the IETF mailing list have no qualifications or special insight into these difficult issues. Opinions, sure But none of the essential insight required for making any meaningful progress in such a discussion. d/ -- Dave Crocker dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com Brandenburg InternetWorking www.brandenburg.com Sunnyvale, CA USA tel:+1.408.246.8253
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Nathaniel Borenstein) writes: Paul -- With respect, I think this argument is going nowhere because some of us want to discuss it in terms of property rights, and others of us want to discuss it in terms of human rights. I believe that communication should be viewed as a human right, and that property rights can and should be limited where necessary to ensure those rights. Since the E in ietf does not stand for Human, I am concerned about the direction this thread is taking us, and I feel sure that Harald is shortly going to tell us to take it elsewhere. However, in the meantime, I think we should find out if we have a point of agreement and then a departure, or if we just have no common ground at all. Property is something that humans have -- it does not exist apart from a property-holder and the only property-holders recognized at this time are humans. Therefore (and, tautologically) property rights ARE human rights, or at least, rights that only humans have. When you seek to separate them you seem to postulate that some rights-of-humans are more human (or more humane) than others, where property rights are not among the most fundamental. If this is your view, then I disagree. The writings of John Locke (1632-1704) convinced me ~2.5 decades ago that property rights, and specifically self-ownership was the foundational right on which all other rights depended. Without it humans are just live meat. If you wish to attribute to two parties the right to communicate, then you must (by definition) strip any and all intermediaries of their right to use and/or dispose of their property as they see fit. It seems to me that our disagreement stems from this basic difference of beliefs, rather than from logical flaws in one of our arguments, which makes for a fundamentally unproductive debate, so I'm going to *try* to shut up. :-) I will concede that if I started from a belief that the issue was one of property rights, rather than human rights, then I would probably agree with you and Vernon. -- Nathaniel If you wish to balance the rights of some humans against the rights of other humans, you can do so either by degrees or by exclusion. One man's right to swing his fist ends at the tip of another man's nose would be an example of the latter. The state can lawfully deprive you of some share of your property in order to ensure the welfare of others who have less would be an example of the former. Are you hoping that the Internet becomes some kind of welfare state? Do you long for communications socialism? If so then you will find potent forces arrayed against you -- not the least of which is that the nature of the Internet medium prevents anything like a police force from existing. An intermediary who withdraws their consent can do so absolutely and your only recourse is to find a different intermediary -- which you can do absolutely, so long as you have their willingness to participate. In my way of looking at things, this is the best possible system to ensure that humans' rights are respected. And because the history of nations on our little blue marble is such that they will never be able to agree on a treaty that would overcome the Internet's essential communications freedom, I think we'll forever live in an e-world where only private actions matter. -- Paul Vixie
Re: Principles of Spam-abatement
On Fri, 12 Mar 2004 16:06:04 -0500, Nathaniel Borenstein wrote: With respect, I think this argument is going nowhere because some of us want to discuss it in terms of property rights, and others of us want to discuss it in terms of human rights. I believe that communication should be viewed as a human right, and that property rights can and should be limited where necessary to ensure those rights. I propose we recenter this discussion on our mission, which is enhancing communication. With that in mind we can ask ourselves whether --on the evidence--hypothetically protective measures like blacklisting are useful or not for enhancing communication (not just for one person but for the entire community of users). Property rights and human rights issues are not irrelevant but they are not central to this discussion. At the moment the Internet is lawless. We are discussing among ourselves what measures the community can take until law comes, and enforcement comes. Issues like abuses by (hypothetical) monopolies are peripheral. I don't have all the answers (though I have formulated one which I think is a good one, see URL below) but I believe will it enhance communication is the only way to approach the problem in the current state of lawlessness. Jeffrey Race http://www.camblab.com/misc/univ_std.txt
Re: Apologies for the irony (was Re: Principles of Spam-abatement)
From: Vernon Schryver [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Nathaniel Borenstein ...you can't afford an expensive connection ... ... it's not primarily about property rights, it's about our right to choose to communicate with each other. If the second were true, the first would be irrelevant. That the first is relevant shows the right to choose to communicate is nonsense, except in the same sense as the costs of gasoline and real estate limit your right to travel, live, and work where you want. The essence of your analogies to gasoline and real estate seems to be that all of these problems are of a sort that a person having and willing to spend more money could work around. The essence of your morality, it follows, is that since a person of means can choose to work around them, then there is no further societal interest in the problems -- they are non-problems. I suspect that if we discussed the issues at length, you'd be incapable of not using a phrase equal or equivalent to efficiency of markets with all of the depth of meaning given to it in a freshman economics course. It doesn't matter to you how the problems are created or why. The material differences between the commodities you compare matter not. It doesn't matter what the problems imply for the overall health of society. It doesn't matter what the foreseeable or probable evolution of the problems is in the future. It doesn't matter what individual human choices determine or could change these problems. You say: Those who can pay may and nothing else matters -- solution enough. That's awfully tidy. Certainly saves taking a systemic view of human society -- messy swamp of uncertainty that would be. By gosh I think that by analogy you've found a nice little calculus for generating solutions to: lack of access to potable water, edible food, fuel and energy in other forms, shelter, health care, education, privacy, personal safety, and security in old age. You should run for office, or something. I think, though, that nsb is thinking about the problem like an engineer. I know, I know... what craziness such wacky idealism as engineering can lead to. You know there's that nutty sense that engineering skills are a form of power which is separate from political and economic power -- that if in possession of such skills there comes a responsibility to apply them and relate them to other forms of power in a manner commensurate with the privilege of possessing them. Yadda yadda yadda -- nobody takes such nonsense seriously, right? Once the rockets go up / who cares _where_ they come down / that's not my department, / says Wernher von Braun -- Tom Leher (Where I come from, there is a name for people with the skills of an engineer but not a sense of the responsibility. The name is tool.) PS -- Are you really rejecting all mail from comcast.net? Just curious, that's a lot of people. And if it's guppylake.com, it would have been nice if someone had told me when I was blacklisted, seeing as how I'm the administrator. I suspect it is Comcast, but in the same hypothetical, contrary to facts spirit as your other questions, let's assume that it is guppylake.com. How would you be entitled to or even just expect notification? I don't see how you could get entitled from would be nice. I can see how you get just expect from would be nice but also why it falls flat on you. If I set my (non-existent) caller-ID filters to reject phone calls from you, would you be entitled to or expect a notice? Wouldn't that rather depend on oh, yeah details of circumstance. But the money solution to all problems spares us from thinking about those. Nsb could just pay for as many additional outgoing numbers as it takes to annoy you. And you can just pay to figure out how to block that effort. Even if you were a telemarketer, why would you care? He's not. What's your counter-factual objection to guppylake? What if Qwest did the rejecting for me? I suspect your answers for the two media differ and that you have not considered your position on Internet access except from an emotional sense of entitlement and of hurt and outrage at being snubbed by various blacklists. I suspect that your suspicion is childish rationalization of your easy moral calculus that conveniently spares you from the responsibilities of engineering. -t
Re: Work effort? (Re: Proposed Standard and Perfection)
(2) When a document comes up for review for Proposed-Draft, we look for implementations, etc., perhaps following Keith's proposal outline. If the implementations are there, we issue a Last Call for identification of serious technical/definitional flaws in the document as published, where serious is defined as problematic enough to interfere with independent interoperable implementations. If none are found, we advance the maturity level of the document, in place -- no new RFC publication required and hence little or no opportunity to reopen old wounds that lack demonstrated interoperability impact. If the document is about to time out in grade, we issue a Last Call, wait a reasonable period for protests and volunteers, and then downgrade it in place. The notion of having to write an RFC, following all of today's complex rules, and get formal consensus in order to declare a Protocol obsolete that isn't implemented and won't operate in today's environment is one of the more astonishing triumphs of bureaucracy over rationality. Similar rules would apply to Draft-Full (or whatever formula newtrk comes up with). John, I cannot support the notion that the only technical flaws that should prevent a document from advancing from Proposed to Draft are those that interfere with independent interoperable implementations. A protocol may interoperate quite well with itself, and yet have a peripheral effect on a large number of other protocols. A protocol that does not share channel capacity fairly with TCP can have a disruptive effect on TCP-based protocols. A protocol that defines a new kind of (IPv4 or IPv6) address space that behaves differently from existing address space can break applications even if that protocol does not directly interact with those applications. A protocol which doesn't provide adequate authentication can cause its hosts to be compromised which in turn affects the operation and security of other services. That, and it's too easy for technical flaws to be missed at Proposed Standard that show up after some implementation and/or deployment experience is gained - and these aren't at all limited to flaws that interfere with interoperation. I do agree that we should not reopen noncontroversial documents that aren't found to have significant flaws. I have occasionally suggested that rather than re-edit documents advancing in grade, we start out by making lists of things that need to be changed. If that list ends up being less than N pages or X% of the length of the original specification, publish the list with a preface that says RFC , with the following clarifications, changes, and corrections, is approved for Draft Standard. OTOH, some documents that were controversial at Proposed probably do deserve special scrutiny at Draft. That doesn't mean that we should automatically reopen them, but it might be that given the subsequent experience with the document it no longer meets the criteria for Proposed (e.g. no known technical omissions). Principle: If we are going to spend as much time and energy as we do getting something to Proposed, then moving it to Draft or Full should usually require only identification of implementations, deployment, and desirability, not extensive and time-consuming document rewriting What if we applied the same principle to software? What if once a program were written there were an expectation that it should never be substantially changed, never be re-evaluated in light of changed conditions or new understanding? Keith
