Re: Why not PDF: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)
Peter Dambier writes: Just try this good example: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/133654main_ESAS_charts.pdf It is a nice promotion for the successor to the space shuttle. Best store it localy before viewing. It is a nice document with wonderful pictures. But building the screens takes me hours. That is one of the reasons why I am afraid of pdf. Why be afraid of PDF? This document just a PDF conversion of a PowerPoint document. The document is large because it contains a lot of graphics, mostly bitmap graphics. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Image attachments to ASCII RFCs (was: Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Format in Addition to ASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats))
Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes: Try a bank of flashing LEDS. Even banks of flashing LEDs are rare these days. I recall mainframes with large control panels that were awash in LEDs (or small neon lamps, earlier on), and I thought they were exceedingly cool (and still do). But they were very expensive and weren't used very often, and so they went away. Banks of switches disappeared a bit earlier. Spinning tape drives should always be shot from low oblique angles, with the computer room lights turned off and replaced by carefully placed colored spotlights (the ones in the back have to be blue or green). Test and diagnostic software that zips through tapes at high speed can be very handy. Or you can run tape copies with delay loops or on a heavily-loaded system so that the tapes screech to a halt every few seconds. For still photography, make sure someone dressed for a board meeting is extending an index finger towards a button on the equipment somewhere. In fact, the person pushing the button should be a woman, and there should be a man in conservative dress behind her standing with a clipboard, looking on with authority and approval. In the U.S., they must not both be WASPs, but one should be. If you must shoot screens, keep them monochrome and run listings of program source code (any language will do). Memory dumps can work too, although they are a bit less varied. It used to be that there had to be an oscilloscope somewhere in the frame, but that's not necessary now. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Reality (was RE: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Iljitsch van Beijnum writes: That's the popular view. In reality, people deployed NAT mostly for reasons that have little to do with the global IPv4 address depletion. They deployed it mainly because getting an IPv4 address costs money, and involves considerable red tape. Mainly because it costs money. The future just doesn't want to honor the principle of least astonishment: what we expect to change, often stays the same, while what we expect to stay the same, more often than not changes. Yes, this is the problem faced by all futurists, including those who work in IT. The only thing that one can reliably predict is the unknown. Everyone who thinks that regular users are going to forego IPv4 connectivity in favor of IPv6 connectivity as long as IPv4 still works to a remotely usable degree is a card carrying member of the Internet Fantasy Task Force*. Yes. Even I don't plan to do so unless my ISP forces the issue; the change would bring me nothing and would cost time and money to implement. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Reality (was RE: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.)
John C Klensin writes: So, let's assume that I'm an ISP and (i) I discover that I've switched to IPv6 to avoid needing to use private addressing in my core network, (ii) I discover that it is now costing me more to support IPv4 customers (because they require protocol and address translation gateways, even with 4-to-6 and similar schemes) than it does to support native IPv6 customers. (iii) I decide to start passing those costs along to the IPv4 users, maybe even disproportionately to get people to migrate. Or suppose that, as an ISP, I decide I want to save IPv4 addresses for my big-bucks customers and hence to force those regular users to pay the big bucks to keep using IPv4. Plausible so far. Now, at least two things impact whether migration occurs at that stage. One is whether there are still effective options for IPv4 at a sufficiently low differential price point to justify a switch in providers. How large that differential would need to be is pretty much speculation -- far harder than predicting the future of address space exhaustion. And it is complicated by the question of how much choice of providers that regular user actually has -- in many areas, the answer is not a lot of choices. In the areas that make the heaviest use of the Internet, there will be many choices, and the only ISPs able to get away with an IPv4 surcharge will be the last ones to support IPv4. The first one to attempt a surcharge will inevitably lose customers. The second is whether IPv6 is really good enough to deliver services (at the applications layer, which is all those regular users care about) that are roughly as good, and as complete as set, as the IPv4 services.It is there that I think we are in trouble with regard to hardware, support costs, tutorial information, etc. There will also be trouble if someone decides to use IPv6 services that were never available in IPv4, and discovers that the rest of the world is still not on IPv6. The interesting thing is that the last part of the world to move to IPv6 will probably be the part that has the most IPv4 addresses ... that is, the United States. So anyone with IPv6 will have trouble dealing with hosts in the United States, and that will not help adoption of IPv6. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Reality (was RE: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Peter Sherbin writes: It is worth about the same as a postal address that comes naturally when they build a new house. In a similar way when a new device comes to existence it gets an address out of infinite universe of 0 and 1. That would only be true if IP addresses were geographically assigned, which they aren't. You know, you could assign IPv6 addresses in a strictly geographic way and you'd have more than enough for everyone, everywhere, with very simple routing. But of course that won't be done. The actual cost driver here is a need for an operator (e.g. Postal Service or ISP) to maintain a list of all existing addresses to be able to provide their services. Not necessarily. If the addressing is strictly geographic--n addresses for each area of m square metres on the planet--routing would be very simple and wouldn't require much in the way of tables. With 78 bits, you can address every millonth of a second of arc in latitude and longitude on the planet. That's an area of about 0.00095 square millimetres. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Copyright status of early RFCs
Carl Malamud writes: RFCs are for all practical purposes in the public domain and it would be a very gutsy RFC author that went to court and tried to show that they had systematically defended their copyright over the last X years and were thus entitled to assert copyright this year. While many RFCs may have fallen into the public domain, I should point out that copyright holders need not actively defend their copyrights in order to keep them. That is often true for things like trademarks and trade secrets, but not for copyrights, which retain their full validity for their entire term, whether they are defended or not. Note that every message sent by anyone to this mailing list (or any mailing list, for that matter) is also protected by copyright. This remains true whether or not individual authors choose to defend their copyrights. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.
Peter Dambier writes: http://www.manitu.de/ They offer you: fixed IPv4 address with reverse lookup at 9.99 Euros per month. I don't live in Germany. The exception does not disprove the rule. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.
John Calcote writes: I'll just jump in here for a second and mention also that vendors offer what they have to, not what they can. They want to provide the most bang for the buck, so to speak. These companies don't offer the multiple-static-ip-address option today because most ISP's don't offer it to home users and home (SOHO) users represent the target market. It is unlikely that ISPs will ever offer static IPs or multiple IPs to home users at any time in the future for free. They will continue to charge heavy premiums for such professional features, with or without IPv6. That said, they *would* offer these features if SOHO users were constantly frustrated about the fact that they can't make use of the multiple static addresses that their ISP provides them because of limitations in their router equipment... SOHO users probably won't be willing to pay 500% more for multiple or static IPs, anyway. The fact is, _when_ IPv6 becomes truly mainstream and ISP's begin to offer multiple static addresses because they can ... ISPs can do that already, but they charge a great deal for it, and they probably always will. ATT used to charge for any telephone color other than black, even though the cost of producing a telephone was the same no matter what color it was. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: 128 bits should be enough for everyone, was:
Dave Cridland writes: I do understand your argument, and you're correct in all its assertions, but not the conclusion. I suspect that's the case for everyone at this point. Not as long as I still see people claiming that 128 bits will provided 2^128 addresses _and_ that it can still be divided into multiple bit fields. You state, loosely, that 128 bits will not realistically yield 2**128 addresses, which is entirely true. Yes. It's been pointed out that IPv6 wasn't designed for that, instead, it was designed to yield 2**64 subnets, and even so, it's acknowledged that a considerable amount of that space will be wasted. People have agreed with this, but pointed out that the subnet level can be moved down, since we're only using an eighth of the available address space. I don't think many people appreciate just how quickly such policies can exhaust an address space--mainly because they keep emphasizing that 2^n addresses are available in n bits, apparently oblivious to the multiple factors that will waste most of the addresses. Your conclusion, however, is that we should be switching to a zero-wastage allocation mechanism preferably based on variable bitlength addresses. That is one option. Another is to stop trying to plan the entire future of IP addressing today. As I've said, just adding one more bit to 32-bit addresses would hold the Internet together for years to come. Immediately blowing 2^125 addresses is absurd. In response to this, several people have commented that this is unworkable using both current hardware and any hardware predicted to be available within the next few years. I don't know about that, but I'm prepared to accept that opinion. I'll accept the opinion, but as long as it remains opinion, I can continue to assert the contrary. I don't see any insurmountable obstacle that would prevent this type of implementation. Indeed, I should think it would greatly simplify routing. There's an additional unanswered question your argument has, which is whether the - very real - issues you're pointing out with prefix based allocations will cause actual operational problems within a timeframe short enough for anyone to worry over for a few decades, and - a related issue - would these problems hit sufficiently quickly that a replacement for IPv6 couldn't be developed in time? In this respect I'm going by past history. As I've said, engineers routinely underestimate capacity and overestimate their own ability to foresee the future, often with expensive and defect-ridden results. The Internet gets bigger all the time, and the cost of these mistakes will be astronomically high in the future--more than high enough to justify changing this mindset. I'm just trying to limit the damage by suggesting changes as early as possible. Has anyone else noticed that the simplest standards tend to last the longest, and that complex, committee-designed standards are often obsolete even before the 6000-page specifications are printed and bound? I see that SMTP is still around, but I don't see too many people using X.400. I see people writing code in C, but not in Ada. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: 128 bits should be enough for everyone, was: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: StupidNAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Iljitsch van Beijnum writes: And in reaction to other posts: there is no need to make the maximum address length unlimited, just as long as it's pretty big, such as ~256 bits. But there isn't much reason to not make it unlimited, as the overhead is very small, and specific implementations can still limit the actual address length to a compromise between infinity and the real-world network that the implementation is expected to support. The point is not to make the longest possible addresses, but to use shorter addresses without shooting ourselves in the foot later when more address space is needed. Use unlimited-length addresses that can expand at _either_ end, and the problem is solved. When more addresses are needed in one location, you add bits to the addresses on the right; when networks are combined and must have unique addresses, you add bits on the left. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: 128 bits should be enough for everyone, was:
Steve Silverman writes: The problem with allocating numbers sequentially is the impact on routers and routing protocols. The problem with not doing so is that a 128-bit address doesn't provide anything even remotely close to 2^128 addresses. You have to choose what you want. I have heard that the Japanese issue house numbers chronologically. When you find the right block, you have to hunt for the right number. What you are suggesting is similar. You would have as many routing table entries as hosts in the world. The router would not be affordable. The traffic for routing entries would swamp the net. The processing of these routing advertisements would be impossible. It doesn't scale! Variable address length scales, and it never runs out of addresses, but nobody wants to do that, even though telephones have been doing it for ages. The function of an address is to enable a router to find it. That is why we try to use hierarchical addressing even at the cost of numbering space. In that case, assign addresses to points in space, instead of devices. An office occupying a given plot of land will have an IP address space that is solely a function of the space it occupies. Routing would be the essence of simplicity and blazingly fast. IMO one problem of the Internet is that it isn't hierarchical enough. Consider the phone system: country codes, area codes ... This makes the job of building a switch much easier. I think we should have divided the world into 250 countries. Each country into 250 provinces. Yes, it would waste address space but it would make routing much easier and more deterministic. With a variable address length that can extend infinitely at either end, the address space would never be exhausted. That's how telephones work. Yes this would mean a mobile node needs to get new addresses as it moves. So what. We already have DHCP. Cell phones do a handoff already. I agree. We also have DNS. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.
Keith Moore writes: I find myself wondering, don't they get support calls from customers having to deal with the problems caused by the NATs? Sure, and the reply is I'm sorry, but we don't support multiple computers on residential accounts. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: 128 bits should be enough for everyone, was: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: StupidNAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Stephen Sprunk writes: An IPv4/6 address is both a routing locator and an interface identifier. And so engineers should stop saying that n bits of addressing provides 2^n addresses, because that is never true if any information is encoded into the address. In fact, as soon as any information is placed into the address itself, the total address space shrinks exponentially. Unfortunately, the v6 architects decided not to separate these into separate address spaces, so an address _must_ contain routing information until that problem is fixed. It doesn't seem to be likely we'll do so without having to replace IPv6 and/or BGP4+, and there's no motion on either front, so we're stuck with the locator/identifier problem for quite a while. Then we need to make predictions for the longevity of the scheme based on the exponentially reduced address space imposed by encoding information into the address. In other words, 128 bits does _not_ provide 2^128 addresses; it does not even come close. Ultimately, it will barely provide anything more than what IPv4 provides, if current trends continue. That's why 85% of the address space is reserved. The /3 we are using (and even then only a tiny fraction thereof) will last a long, long time even with the most pessimistic projections. If it turns out we're still wrong about that, we can come up with a different policy for the next /3 we use. Or we could change the policy for the existing /3(s) to avoid needing to consume new ones. Or simply stop trying to define policies for an unknown future, and thereby avoid all these problems to begin with. It's been a decade since we started and we're nowhere near using up the first /3 yet, so it appears we're in no danger at this point. As soon as you chop off 64 bits for another field, you've lost just under 100% of it. Variable-length addresses only work if there is no maximum length. Ultimately, yes. But there is no reason why a maximum length must be imposed. E.164 has a maximum of 15 digits, meaning there are at most 10^15 numbers. Here in +1 we only use eleven digit numbers, meaning we're burning them 10^4 times as fast as we could. That's not a great endorsement. Telephone engineers make the same mistakes as anyone else; no natural physical law imposes E.164, however. Also, telephone numbers have the same locator/identifier problem that IPv4/6 addresses do. In fact, IPv6's original addressing model looked strikingly similar to the country codes and area/city codes (aka TLAs and NLAs) that you're apparently fond of. Maybe the problem is in trying to make addresses do both. Nobody tries to identify General Electric by its street address, and nobody tries to obtain a street address based on the identifier General Electric alone. The difference is that in IPv6, it's merely a convention ... Conventions cripple society in many cases, so merely a convention may be almost an oxymoron. The folks who designed IPv4 definitely suffered from that problem. The folks who designed IPv6 might also have suffered from it, but at least they were aware of that chance and did their best to mitigate it. Could they have done better? It's always possible to second-guess someone ten years later. There's also plenty of time to fix it if we develop consensus there's a problem. Sometimes the most important design criterion is ignorance. In other words, the best thing an engineer can say to himself in certain aspects of design is I don't know. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: 128 bits should be enough for everyone, was:
Theodore Ts'o writes: You've been making the same point over and over (and over) again. To some, perhaps. I'm not so sure that it has yet been made even once to others. It's probably the case that people who will be convinced by your arguments, will have accepted the force of your arguments by now. For people who don't accept your arguments, they are not likely to be swayed by a last post wins style of argumentation. It depends. People with an emotional attachment to a specific notion will never been convinced otherwise, but people who simply don't understand something may change their mind once they understand. May I gently suggest that you stop and think before deciding whether you need to respond to each message on this thread, and whether you have something new and cogent to add, as opposed to something which you've said already, in some cases multiple times? May I gently suggest that you use the delete key on your keyboard for messages that you don't want to see? I doubt that bandwidth is a problem at MIT. It has always worked for me, and I'm constrained by much more limited bandwidth. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: 128 bits should be enough for everyone, was: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Iljitsch van Beijnum writes: So how big would you like addresses to be, then? It's not how big they are, it's how they are allocated. And they are allocated very poorly, even recklessly, which is why they run out so quickly. It's true that engineers always underestimate required capacity, but 128-bit addresses would be enough for anything ... IF they were fully allocated. But I know they won't be, and so the address space will be exhausted soon enough. We currently have 1/8th of the IPv6 address space set aside for global unicast purposes ... Do you know how many addresses that is? One eighth of 128 bits is a 125-bit address space, or 42,535,295,865,117,307,932,921,825,928,971,026,432 addresses. That's enough to assign 735 IP addresses to every cubic centimetre in the currently observable universe (yes, I calculated it). Am I the only person who sees the absurdity of wasting addresses this way? It doesn't matter how many bits you put in an address, if you assign them this carelessly. ... with the idea that ISPs give their customers /48 blocks. Thank you for illustrating the classic engineer's mistake. Stop thinking in terms of _bits_, and think in terms of the _actual number of addresses_ available. Of better still, start thinking in terms of the _number of addresses you throw away_ each time you set aside entire bit spans in the address for any predetermined purpose. Remember, trying to encode information in the address (which is what you are doing when you reserve bit spans) results in exponential (read incomprehensibly huge) reductions in the number of available addresses. It's trivially easy to exhaust the entire address space this way. If you want exponential capacity from an address space, you have to assign the addresses consecutively and serially out of that address space. You cannot encode information in the address. You cannot divided the address in a linear way based on the bits it contains and still claim to have the benefits of the exponential number of addresses for which it supposedly provides. Why is this so difficult for people to understand? That gives us 45 bits worth of address space to use up. You're doing it again. It's not 45 bits; it's a factor of 35,184,372,088,832. But rest assured, they'll be gone in the blink of an eye if the address space continues to be mismanaged in this way. It's generally accepted that an HD ratio of 80% should be reachable without trouble, which means we get to waste 20% of those bits in aggregation hierarchies. No. It's not 20% of the bits, it's 99.9756% of your address space that you are wasting. Do engineers really study math? This gives us 36 bits = 68 billion /48s. That's several per person inhabiting the earth, and each of those / 48s provides 65536 subnets that have room to address every MAC address ever assigned without breaking a sweat. What happens when MAC addresses go away? How are you providing for the future when you allocate address space based on the past? Why not just leave the address space alone, and allocate only the minimum slice required to handle current requirements? That's another problem of engineers: they think they can predict the future, and they are almost always wrong. What was the problem again? And that's the third problem. Remember also: any encoding of information into the address field (including anything that facilitates routing) exponentially reduces the total number of available addresses. So it might look like 2^128 addresses, but in reality it may be 2^40, or some other very small number, depending on how much information you try to encode into the address. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Scott Leibrand writes: They can charge for IPv4 addresses because they're perceived to be scarce. With IPv6 they may be able to charge for allowing me a /48 instead of a /56 or /64, but IMO they won't be able to assign me a /128 by default and charge me if I want a /64. They will charge you for every address beyond one. Wait and see. BTW, giving out /64s is one reason why the IPv6 address space will be exhausted in barely more time than was required to exhaust the IPv4 address space. Then I will switch ISPs. They will all be doing it. ARIN guidelines specifically require ISPs to give out larger blocks when requested. If any ISPs try to be hard-nosed about it and give out /128's anyway, it will be pretty easy to pressure shame them sufficiently that they'll feel it in the marketplace. How? I haven't been able to pressure or shame my ISP into setting rDNS correctly for my IP address. In fact, nobody at my ISP knows what that means. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Scott Leibrand writes: We definitely will have to see how it shapes up in the US. In Japan, where they actually have IPv6 deployed to end users, it looks like most ISPs are giving out /64's to home users, and /48's to business users: Looks like IPv6 will be exhausted even sooner than I predicted. I doubt it. There are RFC's (3177) and RIR policies (http://www.arin.net/policy/nrpm.html#six54) that *require* ISPs to allocated a /64 or larger unless it is absolutely known that one and only one device is connecting. See above. So if I understand correctly, 99.9% of the IPv6 address space has already been thrown away. Why bother going to IPv6 at all? What is correct rdns? Is adsl-066-156-091-129.sip.asm.bellsouth.net correct? The correct rDNS is the one that matches my domain. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: StupidNAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes: That is not a real problem. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard _that_. Eight bits, sixteen bits, thirty-two bits, sixty-four bits, and now 128 bits ... they are all good for eternity for at least a few years, and then suddenly they are out of space. It is not practical to manage router tables with greater than 2^64 entries. In fact it is impractical to manage router tables with more than 2^48 entries using technology forseable in the next ten or so years. It will never be possible to put an entire gigabyte of memory into a computer. Processor speeds cannot exceed around 10 MIPS without running into fundamental physical barriers. The maximum transmission speed of a modem can never exceed 2400 bps. The other side of the coin is the fact that many devices will effectively require no more than a /128 because of the way they connect up to the network. For example cell phones will be serviced on plans where the subscription fee is per device. Verizon, T-mobile, cingular need no more than one /64 each to service those networks. No more than 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses each? Well, that's comforting. But I suspect they will run out, anyway, for the same reason that all address spaces run out. Throwing away essentially the entire address space (/64) from the beginning is not a good sign. It just demonstrates that the address space will be exhausted in linear time, not exponential time. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re:StupidNAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes: My point was that even if we do run out of /64s at some point the last few remaining /64s can be made to go one heck of a long way. So the address space will ultimately be managed in crisis mode, because it was so badly mismanaged to begin with. Why does that sound familiar. Even if we do eventually exhaust the address space we can fix up the problems easily enough at the internetwork level. Why not just do things right to begin with? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: StupidNAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Joel Jaeggli writes: I find it interesting that our vision is frequently so short-sighted that we can't even envision in the course of an arguement the applications that are possible today let alone the ones that people will want in the future. And one consequence of this is that we cannot possibly know today how to allocate address for the future, which is another reason why address spaces are exhausted to quickly, no matter how many bits they contain. And this in turn is why IPv6 won't last. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Mark Andrews writes: Which was why IPv6 when to 128 bits rather than 64 bits. That won't help. It will add perhaps 25% to the lifetime of the address space, no more. 64 bits of address space would have been fine to give everyone all the addresses they would need. 128 bits gives them all the networks they will need. No, it does not. It's only twice as much as 64 bits, and 64 bits is only twice as much as 32. Addressing schemes consistently allocate addresses in a terribly shortsighted way as bit spans, rather than address ranges, so address ranges are consumed much more quickly than they should be. This seems to be one of the most consistent mistakes of computer engineers ever since computers were invented. After all these decades, they still have no clue. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Thomas Narten writes: This is FUD. Care to back up your assertions with real analysis? Sure. The consistent mistake engineers make in allocating addresses is that they estimate capacity in terms of sequential and consecutive assignment of addresses--but they _assign_ addresses in terms of bit spans within the address itself, which exhausts addresses in an exponential way. They do this in part because they attempt to encode information directly into the address, instead of just using it as a serial identifier. An address of n bits contains 2^n available addresses _only_ if they are assigned serially and consecutively; dividing those bits into any arrangement of smaller fields reduces capacity exponentially. For example, if you have a 16-bit address field, at first it looks as those it has 65,536 addresses. And it does ... if you assign addresses as 0001, 0010, and so on. But if you allocate addresses by dividing those 16 bits into fields, you dramatically reduce the total address space available. If you reserve the first eight bits for a vendor, and the second eight bits for a product, you've cut the address space by 99.6%, not by 50%. You will run out of addresses in record time, and yet you'll never use more than a tiny fraction of the theoretical capacity of the address space. All because you wanted the short-term convenience of encoding information into the address itself. Engineers make this mistake over, and over, and over. I don't know if they are just too stupid to understand the above concepts, or if they are so arrogant that they think they can somehow short-circuit information theory and do the impossible. I tend to vote for arrogance, since I think (and hope) that engineers aren't really that stupid. And further evidence for pure arrogance is that engineers try to allocate address spaces now for a future that they are unable to imagine. They allocate /64 fields out of 128 bits for purposes that they understand now, even though the real need for addresses is likely to be completely different (and unforseeable) by the time addresses actually start to run short. I know I'm wasting my breath; if engineers were that easy to persuade, they would not have made the same mistake over and over for nearly a hundred years. I'm sure others have tried to point out their errors time and again, especially in recent years as more people have caught on to the problem. But they can't be told. They are convinced that it won't happen to them, even though it happened to everyone else. A 128-bit address seems like more than the universe will ever need, and it definitely is ... but only if addresses are assigned serially from the address space, without any information encoded into the address itself. As soon as you reserve any portion of the field in any way, there are multiple exponential reductions in capacity, which can exhaust the address space entirely in a very short time. The mistakes have already been made with IPv6. Someone decided to allocate bit spans out of the address, instantly invalidating the very vast majority of all possible addresses in the address space, and thereby reducing address capacity exponentially. Nobody really knows how addresses will be used 20 years from now, so why do people try to guess and sacrifice the capacity of IPv6 in the process? Don't they ever learn? Is there a safe and conservative way of allocating IPv6 address space? Yes. Set the first 96 bits to zero, and set the remaining 32 to the current IPv4 addresses. When that runs out, set the first 95 bits to zero, set the 96th bit to one, and use the remaining 32 bits for another IPv4 address space. And so on. A space of 128 bits will last for eternity in this way, and most of the space will remain available for any conceivable future addressing scheme, even those we cannot dream of today. In other words, don't allocate bit spans within the address field, allocate address _ranges_ out of the full 128 bits. But I know that won't happen. However, perhaps this message will remain archived somewhere so that I can say I told you so when the address space finally runs out (I'm pretty sure I'll still be around--we all will). ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IPv6 vs. Stupid NAT tricks: false dichotomy? (Was: Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.)
Scott Leibrand writes: NAT (plus CIDR) was the short-term solution, and is realistic as a medium-term solution. In the long term, though, I don't think it will be the only solution. It will be if ISPs continue to charge for extra IP addresses, as they probably always will. And if someday I want to switch to a new ISP who prefers not to give out IPv4 addresses at all, that'll be fine with me, as long as my ISP provides me IPv4 translation services to reach that portion of the Internet that is still IPv4-only at that point. If your ISP charges you extra for more than one IPv6 address, what will you do? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.
Keith Moore writes: NAT is a dead end. If the Internet does not develop a way to obsolete NAT, the Internet will die. I hardly think so, but in any case, the solution is pretty simple: give out IP addresses for free, instead of charging an arm and a leg for anything other than a single address. As long as ISPs won't provide multiple addresses, or won't provide them except at unreasonably high prices, NAT will remain. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.
Keith Moore writes: and at some delta-T in the future, some things will be different. it might (or might not) be that lots more hosts run v6, it might (or might not) be that NATs are discredited, it might (or might not) be that the Internet mostly exists to connect walled gardens. Probably the last of these, but for economic rather than technical or political reasons. As long as multiple IP addresses cost ten times more than a single address, NAT will stay. This would be true even in a pure IPv6 world. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.
Keith Moore writes: don't think upgrade; think coexistence. How do IPv4 and IPv6 coexist? Like ASCII and EBCDIC, perhaps? As an engineer, the right thing to do is to transition away from NAT (along with IPv4), so that eventually it can be discarded. I'm not aware of a smooth transition option; how does it work? And NAT is economically driven. Unless ISPs stop charging for extra addresses, it's hear to stay. for some applications, it's simply impractical; for other apps, it's much more expensive (in terms of added infrastructure and support costs) to operate them in the presence of NAT. in either case the market for those apps is greatly reduced, and the apps are more expensive as a result. It might still be cheaper than converting them to IPv6. again, this doesn't really solve the problem - it only nibbles off a small corner of it. NATs do harm in several different ways - they take away a uniform address space, they block traffic in arbitrary directions, they hamper appropriate specification of security policies, and these days they often destroy transparency. Agreed, but they reduce the amount of money you must pay to your ISP each month by a factor of ten or more. the reason this looks so complicated compared to NATs is that NATs never really worked all of this stuff out. NATs started with a simple design, pretended it would work well without doing the analysis, and have been trying to fix it with bizarre hacks ever since that have only made the problem worse. People will go to great lengths sometimes to save money. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: I-D ACTION: draft-ash-alt-formats-01.txt
John Levine writes: Among valid PDFs, do you include PDFs that are coded to prohibit text extraction? How about PDFs that are just bitmap scans of printed documents, like the PDF versions of some early RFCs from the 1970s? Use the most conservative (and thus probably the earliest) version of PDF. Later versions are designed mostly to make money for Adobe, and they are scarcely needed for documents that contain only formatted text and diagrams. Using an early version of PDF also guarantees that the document can be opened with (almost?) any version of Acrobat Reader or other software. I still use Acrobat 4.x, and I have it set to generate Acrobat 3.x documents, and I've yet to generate any document that requires a more recent version of the software. If you limit yourself to the text and simple artwork that has sufficed for the printed page for the past few centuries, you don't need anything more recent, and you shouldn't be using anything more recent. Be conservative in what you require, and liberal in what you accept. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IAB Response to Appeal from Jefsey Morfin
Harald Tveit Alvestrand writes: Thank you for the processing of this request. However, this mailing list maintainer is now completely uncertain about what his marching orders are with regards to continuing to administer the ietf-languages list. The IAB seems to have decided that it's the IESG that has to decide this; there is nothing else in the decision of the IAB that is clear to me. Until the IESG hands me a new decision, I will continue to administer the ietf-languages list as if RFC 3683 was appropriate guidance for administering it, including upholding the current suspension of posting rights for Jefsey Morfin until February 13, 2006. The alternatives would be to declare that I'm making up the rules on my own, or to declare that the list has no rules until the IESG decides; the last interpretation is not one I'm willing to run a list under. (Yes, he's gotten suspended again.) It sounds a lot like you're trying to rationalize a personal preference. Your instructions are apparently unclear, so you just do what you want. It takes you several paragraphs to say it, but that's what it amounts to. I like the use of the passive: He's gotten suspended again, as if a stray lightning bolt did this and no human being had any role in it. Apparently you must uphold the suspension actively, but the suspension itself takes place through some sort of external magical influence. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: I-D ACTION:draft-ash-alt-formats-01.txt
Joel M. Halpern writes: First and foremost, if the input format is PDF, how will the RFC Editor edit the document? PDF documents are not editable. PDF is designed to be uneditable. It's for final versions of a document, and the difficulty involved in trying to edit it is one of its most useful features. If the document isn't acceptable as-is, then it should be rejected until the author makes any required changes. I'm not saying that PDF is or isn't the right format, but I can say that PDF seems like the least of several evils when it comes to encoding line art in a document. If you have to go beyond ASCII text, PDF is the next step up. It's certainly better than RTF, or Word format. And it is so thoroughly entrenched these days that it has a good chance of surviving over the long term, whereas many other formats do not. Also, at least early versions of PDF cannot easily carry viruses; later versions are perhaps best avoided because of this risk. Secondarily, as a lesser matter, for the WG / Documents that get selected for the experiment, can you indicate what composition tools (editors) are likely to be suitable for producing this? Are we going to be requiring that the document editors for those documents have and use word? (Or Open Doc, or ...) Or are we expecting them to find their own tools to participate in the experiment? There are lots of ways to generate PDF. An additional option is to offer PDF generation from text or other formats. PDF is a good archive format for anything that requires line art and not just text. Of course, if no document will ever require anything more than simple text, there's no need for PDF. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Fairness and changing rules
Sam Hartman writes: I'd like to understand why changing the rules in the middle of a process is a bad idea. They aren't rules if they can be changed even as they are being applied. If you want to make rules, you have to be willing to abide by them. Changing the rules even as they are applied is equivalent to not having rules to begin with (although I realize this is precisely the unstated goal for some people). It should not be the case that if you collect sufficient evidence you can get someone banned from a mailing list. You have a right to expect that if you collect sufficient evidence of an administrative problem like a problematic individual on a mailing list, this problem will be solved in some way. You don't have a right or expectation to demand a particular solution. If for example the IESG successfully managed to convince the individual to clean up their act, you don't have a right to be disappointed that a PR action was not approved. (If the IESG claims they have convinced the individual to clean up their act, you may well be dubious about whether this claim is valid.) An alternative is to do nothing, which in the long run is the least disruptive and wasteful of resources. All problematic individuals are nothing more than one person irritating another, and if people cultivate tolerance instead of wasting their time bickering like schoolchildren, the overall result is greater productivity and flexibility for all. In particular I'm having a hard time finding an ethical or logical reason why we would not want to approve a process change that allows a lesser sanction for behavior that is already prohibited. Can you help me understand why that specifically would be a bad idea? Just because it is a change allowing a lesser sanction doesn't mean that it justifies setting the precedent of changing the rules in transit. Now, there is one case where I can see a concern. If we are concerned that the behavior may not be sanctionable today then what we are doing might be problematic. We could make an explicit determination that the behavior was currently prohibited before deciding to apply the lesser sanction. Some people might question whether we could isolate the two calls enough to make that decision. Or we could spend this time working on the real tasks of the group instead of whining about who should or shouldn't be banned. Every mailing list I've ever encountered is this way, constantly degenerating into personal attacks and attempts to censor and ban anyone who isn't sufficiently popular or well placed. Don't people ever grow up? So I agree that a solution open to less question is to refuse to apply a sanction, create a process change and wait for prohibited behavior to happen again. Why not just drop the whole thing and pretend nothing ever happened? Then the group can get back to business. I know that business isn't nearly as much fun as goofing off with bans and censorship and arguments about bans and censorship and arguments about arguments about bans and censorship, but it _is_ the nominal purpose of the group, isn't it? I think that if there is general agreement in the community that a lesser sanction, were it available, would be adequate to solve a problem, but we apply a greater sanction because that is the only tool our process permits, there would be a claim for relief under section 6.5.3 of RFC 2026. Or maybe a temporary estoppel motion for ad hoc pro tempore injunctive relief under subparagraph (b) of section IIa of codex 4 of Section 4.1.3.15/C (as amended) of RFC 4299182. You know, just writing ever more complicated policies and procedures doesn't make them useful or valid. So, if the community decides that we need to avoid a sanction in some specific case so we can change the process, I can agree with that decision. If we choose to apply a sanction we agree is too great simply because it is the tool we have, I look forward to a successful appeal of our foolishness. Perhaps just stepping out of the sandbox and getting back to work would serve to eliminate the foolishness. I'm not holding my breath, though. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Call for input: draft-hartman-mailinglist-experiment-00.txt
Sam Hartman writes: I'm interested in feedback on the following issues: * Is 18 months too long for the experiment. I don't think so but have received one comment requesting 12 months. * Are there limits that need to be placed on the IESG's authority? My preference is to grant the same authority available under RFC 2418 for WG lists to all IETF lists. * Are there other changes that need to be made? You forgot this: * Are there better ways for list members to spend their time in service of the IETF than by coming up with new ways to censor and ban on mailing lists? Perhaps some simplification is in order; I believe an Act of Congress might be a good model to follow in looking for something less complex than the current policy. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: too many notes -- a modest proposal
Andy Bierman writes: I think you missed my point. I should have said enforce or abide by draconian rules. Automating the process is even worse. Then stupid scripts disrupt WG activity on a regular basis. Inappropriate mailing list use should be dealt with by the WG Chair(s) in a more diplomatic manner. Well, one option is to stop trying to restrict access to lists to begin with. The problem with having a human being make the decision is that human beings are notoriously biased. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Questions for those in favor of PR-Actions in general
Randy Presuhn writes: A more accurate restatement is that some good people have already left because participation in the IETF was sufficiently unpleasant for them, and that other productive people are on the verge of leaving for the same reason. Well, if they can't stand the heat in the kitchen, maybe they should leave. There isn't any venue in which real discussions with real and different points of view can take place without some sort of conflict that might ruffle the feathers of particularly delicate individuals. If it's that stressful for them, they probably shouldn't be involved in such discussions. Trying to remove all the substance of the discussions just to avoid offending the hypersensitive makes no logical sense. How much snake oil and vitriol one is willing to tolerate varies with the individual and how much they're rewarded (in one way or another) for spending time in this snake pit. You think these lists are snake pits? They seem awfully tame to me. And I've seen much more snake-infested venues produce useful results, so the serpents are not necessarily obstacles. I know first-hand of several very good engineers who have stopped participating here, and have cited the level of nastiness as a key motivating factor. Well, there will always be more good engineers. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: too many notes -- a modest proposal
Brian E Carpenter writes: Exactly. If a WG group is discussing a dozen separate issues in parallel, an active participant can easily send several dozen *constructive* messages in a day. Our problem with disruptive messages can't be solved by counting bytes. Set a rolling monthly quota, then. Nobody constantly sends a long stream of consistently productive messages. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: too many notes -- a modest proposal
Noel Chiappa writes: In that case, there's no harm in the rest of us deciding we don't need the dubious assistance of few of the most troublesome, and least productive, is there? Actually there is, because there's very little correlation between being troublesome on a mailing list and being a bad engineer. This is particularly true when any failure to agree with the majority is interpreted as trouble. People who disagree are usually the motors of change, and therefore of problem resolution. Restricting discussion to those who wish only to maintain conformity and consensus in a happy little community makes for very little trouble, but also eliminates any real purpose for the discussion forum. Maybe anyone who engages in personal attacks should be banned. What do you think? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Weekly posting summary for ietf@ietf.org
Thomas Narten writes: [note: I find this type of summary to be a useful tool for highlighting certain aspects of list traffic. With Brian Carpenter's blessing, I plan on making this a regular feature for the ietf list.] Total of 312 messages in the last 7 days ending midnight January 25. Cool. Can you do it for the last two years, just to provide a more realistic perspective? Just to see if alleged troublemakers are also generating high volumes of message traffic. It would also be nice to see if all those good engineers are silent, or nearly so. If so, that would partly support the hypothesis that good engineers post infrequently, but at the same time it would render the list without any real purpose. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: too many notes -- a modest proposal
Theodore Ts'o writes: As a gentle suggestion from one of the Sargeant-At-Arms. If you were to keep track of how many messages you have been posting compared to others, I think you would find that you are one of the more prolific posters on this thread. And if you were to look at the total number of posts over the past three years, I think you would find that I hardly ever post to this list at all. However, I receive thousands of messages from the list, most of which are of no interest to me, and many of which don't even seem to be related to the nominal purpose of the list ... and I do not complain, nor do I suggest that others limit their posting for my convenience. I understand the value of forums in which freedom of expression is permitted, and I do not apply double standards. And if you were to stop, take a breath, and post a single message comprising your thoughts on all of the messages that you have been reading, and were to self-impose your own quota on the number of messages you have posted, it would very likely make the IETF list a more pleasant place to converse. I don't impose a quota. Quotas are suggestions that others have made, not me. I only suggested that quotas might be the least of several evils, for people who cannot resist the temptation to attempt to silence others with whom they disagree. If you were to stop and reflect before posting personal attacks on other people, you, too, could make the list a more pleasant place to converse. However, unlike you, I shall not attempt to tell you what to post or not post. This is a discpline that I would recommend to all who are posting to the IETF list ... But not one that you are willing to put into practice, apparently. ... but given that you are one of the more prolific as of late and you seem to have suggested the quota idea without any idea of the potential irony of that statement, I would like to commend to you your own suggestion. I didn't suggest any form of censorship. I only try to make suggestions that limit the damages of censorship, since I know that some people can't live without it. As others have suggested, if you were take as your model the posting frequency and the thoughtfulness of John Klensin's posts, it would be hard for you to go wrong. If you were to take as your model my total abstinence from ad hominem, you wouldn't have written your post at all. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: too many notes -- a modest proposal
Michael Thomas writes: Perhaps we should take a lesson from TCP and set a receive window on IETF mailing lists in the face of conjestion. The sender is thus obligated to keep the transmission within the window, and as a side effect to consider the quality of the, um, quantity. Just this simple step would greatly limit (purposeful) DOS attacks and other death spirals. It also mitigates the free speech attacks by not throttling based on content (which is inherently contentious), but based on wg mailing list bandwidth. Sounds fine to me ... but I know it would never fly. Some people consider themselves more equal than others and would object as soon as their important posts were rejected, no matter how much traffic they were generating. And they'd point to the occasional posters and insist that their infrequent posts were far less worthy of inclusion on the list. And so on. In other words, it would be fair, but fairness is not what most people want. They want total freedom for themselves, but heavy restrictions for everyone else. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Questions for those in favor of PR-Actions in general
Michael StJohns writes: Now the IETF environment of 1990 is quite different than the one today. How? And why? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: too many notes -- a modest proposal
Steve Silverman writes: It seems to me that limiting users to 3 messages / day (perhaps with a maximum number of bytes) would be a minimal impact on free speech but would limit the damage done by overly productive transmitters. This could be limited to users who are nominated to a limit list by many users. Bzzzt! No, that ruins the whole idea. It's just censorship by another name. If three messages is enough for responsible contributions by one person, it's enough for responsible contributions from anyone. If it's not, then the limit must be higher. But the limit has to be the same for everyone. As I've already said, this idea is too fair to work. Nobody wants fairness; most people want total freedom for themselves and severe restrictions on everyone else--censorship, in other words. A limit that everyone would be forced to respect would be rejected by the very same people who cry out for limits. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: too many notes -- a modest proposal Re: Proposal for keeping free speech but limitting the nuisance to the working group (Was: John Cowan supports 3683 PR-action against Jefsey Morfin)
Jeroen Massar writes: Limiting to less than 3 per day would be the same as suspending for X hours. They would both be the same only if they were carried out in the same way. If either method is applied to specific users, it's still just arbitrary censorship. If it is applied equally to everyone by a robot, then it's fair. Next to that it might also inhibit one from fixing a statement, though of course one should re-read their post before posting. Life is tough. As long as the same restrictions apply to _everyone_, no problem. Mailman is python and it should not be to difficult to add per-poster counters, but this would also require that the secretariat applies those patches and then hope that these changes are really working perfectly well. A lot of testing would be required. Many people depend on the list software, breaking it is not something that will be taken lightly ;) Also avoiding such counters can be done easily by using multiple subscriptions, but indeed that would be obvious. Excuses, excuses. The urge to manually and subjectively _censor_ is irresistibly strong, is it not? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: too many notes -- a modest proposal
Andy Bierman writes: I do not share your regulatory zeal. As a WG Chair and WG participant, I have enough rules to follow already. The last thing I want to do is count messages and bytes, and enforce draconian rules like this. But counting messages and bytes happens to be something that can be easily automated, and it can be applied with absolute consistency to everyone, without prejudice. Of course, those are exactly the reasons why many people would reject the idea--they want to keep other people from posting, but they also fear being prevented from posting themselves. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: junior lawyers, was List archives and copyright
John Levine writes: Can I politely encourage people who are not lawyers to refrain from expressing legal opinions here, or even worse stating legal opinions as though they were facts? Why? IP litigation is usually a roll of the dice, anyway. I know just enough about copyright law to know that it is complex and subtle, it is hard to say exactly what is a license and what is fair use, and should a situation like this end up in court, the result will depend on the detailed facts of the case including arguments about what's the customary usage of messages sent to mailing lists and whether people are aware of the physical locations of archives so they know what law applies and so forth. I have my opinions about what's legitimate and what's not, but I am not under any illusions that a judge would necessarily agree with me. Besides, we already got the opinion of an actual lawyer for free. What a deal. See above. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: John Cowan supports 3683 PR-action against Jefsey Morfin
Pekka Savola writes: Why must each and every WG member be required to filter a person's postings? Much more convenient to do so in one place. Because each and every WG member is an individual, with his own ideas of what he does or doesn't want to read, and imposing the same rules upon everyone prevents members from making their own decisions. It also imposes the decisions of a small minority upon the majority. Maybe you should try participating in a WG trying to be constructive sometime. Maybe. Do they involve as much puerile bickering as this list? As far as I can see from quick googling and browsing various I-D/RFC data, you've never made any contribution to any IETF WG at all, just more or less heated and/or trollish messages at [EMAIL PROTECTED] As far as I know, you're a complete stranger who resorts to personal attacks from his very first post. Maybe this list is just the place for you, from what I've seen. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: posting privileges vs receiver-side filtering
Brian E Carpenter writes: The IETF standards process requires us to archive WG mailing lists. For good reasons: open process requires a public record, and prior art claims can be checked. How much of an open process can there be if some input is censored? Not true. When one receives a few hundred emails per day, the act of ignoring, say, 75% of them takes a significant amount of time. No, it does not. I do it. I know people like to give that impression so that they can justify censorship, but it just doesn't take that much time. Even the act of maintaining one's personal filters takes a significant amount of time. See above. It isn't censorship. Whenever a third party decides to prevent one party from communicating with another, it's censorship. It's very specifically restricting misuse of mailing lists that have been set up for a given purpose. That is well within bounds for a community such as ours. Unfortunately, there is no objective defintion of misuse, so it resolves to highly subjective censorship, and often the grounds for censorship are practically unrelated to real utility or a lack thereof. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Against PR-action against Jefsey Morfin
Noel Chiappa writes: OK, I'll bite. How do you reconcile this principle with defending someone who has tried to get people penalized for saying what they think? It seems to me that there's a logical contradiction there: Jefsey gets to say whatever he wants, but others can't? I refer you to the most interesting: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.ietf.ltru/1033 especially where it says things like Reuters, my employer, received the following message today and 'We will contact tomorrow the Reuters legal department in Paris we will then copy and ask an acknowledgment from.' You're confusing messages sent to this list with messages sent out-of-band to a different destination. The question here concerns only traffic to this list, not other activities carried out by members of the list in other venues. And anyone who thinks that message to Reuters was not an attempt to create trouble for someone with their employer is being deliberately obtuse. Poison-pen messages to employers are very risky, and they are usually defamatory, and if anything bad happens as a result of the messages thus sent, the sender can find himself in considerable trouble. At the same time, an employer who acts upon a mere poison-pen e-mail or letter in an inappropriate way can find himself in trouble, too. And finally, someone who sends messages under the cover of a corporate e-mail address, domain, etc., runs the risk of implicitly dragging his employer's name into purely personal disputes, which is why many employers require that their employees not use corporate e-mail addresses or other identifiable resources when expressing their own opinions online. PS: The IETF is *not* here to provide free speech. It's here to write protocols. Speech is subsidiary to that goal. From what I've seen lately, it's here to argue about who should be censored, and to chat about which hotel should be equipped with what equipment, and other matters that seem utterly foreign to anything like Internet engineering. It sounds eerily like a typical, ineffectual bureaucratic agency. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Against PR-action against Jefsey Morfin
Harald Tveit Alvestrand writes: thanks for informing us that you're discussing that the IETF Last Call that started this debate was concerned with behaviour on the ietf-languages and ltru lists, not the IETF list. Read the Last Call: http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg02032.html It does not refer to the IETF list at all, except that it refers to other IETF mailing lists. Does this mean that you have no opinion on the actual content of the Last Call? Out of band means not sent to e-mail lists at all, so my comments apply to all mailing lists, and not just this particular list. My opinions are general and don't apply to any specific censorship attempt. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Free speech? Re: Against PR-action against Jefsey Morfin
grenville armitage writes: Must admit I always thought it was constructive speech (in the sense of attempting to engineer solutions, new architectures, protocols or clarity of understanding) that was at the core of discussions at IETF. Then I suppose that threads such as Meeting Survey Results, which have nothing to do with these goals, are out of order? Decisions as to what counts as constructive are subjective, unfortunately. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: how to declare consensus when someone ignores consensus
Robert Sayre writes: I suspect the IESG will find that the folks actually trying to get work done in the presence of JFC's emails all feel the same way. Most of the objections seem to be coming from people concerned with designing the perfect bureaucratic process. In any WG, there are implementers whose support is valuable. The rest of the participants are valuable when they fix bugs. JFC doesn't seem to fix many bugs, and drives implementers away in droves, from what I can see. Which implementers are those? Implementers don't spend their time jabbering on discussion groups; they are too busy implementing. Analyze, specific, code, test, release. No need for chewing the fat on a mailing list in that process. And there are only so many hours in a day, so one can spend them doing things or spend them talking about doing things, but it's hard to manage both. It has been suggested that I be placed under RFC 3683 sanctions in the past, though I suppose the offending messages have always been in response to misconduct (not a justification). I don't think the IETF is in any danger of developing a trigger finger here. If all the time spent discussing this most useless of RFCs were dedicated to actually addressing real problems, what might be accomplished? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: how to declare consensus when someone ignores consensus
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Can you imagine if during every murder trial they had a debate on the humanity of capitol punishment? Can you imagine if, in every business meeting, people who disagreed decided to sue each other? Please, if you don't have an opinion specifically related to Jefsey then stay out of the Jefsey discussion. Please, if you don't have a discussion specifically related to the work of the IETF, then don't bring it up here. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: suggestion on distributed systems
Peter Dambier writes: Operating Systems, Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tannanbaum and Albert S. Woodhull, ISBN 0-13-638677-6 Prentice Hall Not only do the discuss every aspect of an operating system but they include as an example and for homework practice the complete Minix operating system plus source. It hardly discusses _every_ aspect of an operating system; a lot is left out (presumably the stuff with which Tannebaum was unfamiliar). It's still a good book. It's a little bit too oriented towards UNIX, though, IIRC--I guess that's the author's favorite OS. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: John Cowan supports 3683 PR-action against Jefsey Morfin
John Cowan writes: Filtering him out individually, as I do, is insufficient: one still must read the polite or exasperated responses of others. I am almost at the point where I will filter any posting that so much as *mentions* him. Why don't you do that, then, so that he need not be banned just for your convenience? In addition, I have been the direct victim of Jefsey's spleen: he stepped outside the IETF context to send a request to my then employer to have me disciplined by that employer for unprofessional conduct. As a result, my employer ordered me not to respond to him any more, but since I have now left that employer, I will take this one action. I will not stoop to taking revenge in kind, as I want nothing more than never to hear from him or of him again. But you still mention irrelevant matters external to this mailing list in your post. Any personal problem you may have with someone outside the list (or vice versa) is completely unrelated to IETF work or mailing lists, and the inconvenience you suffer from having to press the delete key is also only very tenuously linked to this list. Maybe your employer's advice wasn't so bad. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: John Cowan supports 3683 PR-action against Jefsey Morfin
Jeroen Massar writes: And then suddenly somebody makes a seriously good contribution and your filter accidentally filters out that message which does have a lot of value and thus importance for the working group. Banning someone has the same effect, if that person has ever made any useful contributions at all (and that applies to just about everyone). Besides, you can filter without loss--by actually looking at messages. The signal to noise ratio has risen way too much by all this talk about one person and simply takes away a lot of time from a lot of people who can do a lot more technically interesting work when that ratio is brought back to signal instead of just being noise. Being able to completely shutdown a person after having repeatedly warned that person about his behavior is the only real solution here. Most of the noise and disturbance I see isn't coming from a single person, but from a lynch mob so obsessed with silencing someone they don't like that they can't even do their jobs. Why aren't you working on something productive, instead of joining in this discussion, which precisely matches your apparent definition of useless noise? Why is it bad when someone else does it, but okay if you do it? Yes, it is excluding somebody from giving his viewpoints, but it is not without arguments that this will be done and the person who this is bestowed upon has had many chances of bettering his way of posting and drifting off topic all the time. What about excluding everyone else who whines about that person? Wouldn't that make sense, too? Then again, would there be anyone left if the same rules applied to everyone? Thus in your opinion you tolerate the behavior where people contact your boss for actions you take personally (IETF is on personal basis not on business basis, at least in theory) on a public forum!? No, I don't ... but I don't discuss them on the public forum. I discuss them with my lawyer, and all corrective action is taken offline. When someone libels you to your employer, complaining about it on a mailing list is not the answer. Another way to look at your point of view is to say that mailinglists should accept spam. As the enduser who receives the list should simply filter them out. Yes. There's no way to reliably eliminate spam in an automated way, so either you let it through and tolerate a lot of mail that isn't important, or you block it and lose legitimate messages that you need to see. I need to see legitimate messages a lot more than I need to block messages I find inconvenient, so I don't filter anything. That means I have to spend a few seconds deleting hundreds of spam messages or more each day, but it vastly diminishes the possibility of me losing legitimate e-mail. That is is true of course, looking at the situation, taking a bit of a stand-off point of view, reiterating things before doing etc are a good thing, but sometimes the SnR ratio simply becomes way to high... No, sometimes the ability to stay cool is way too low. But that's the problem of the person who flies off the handle, not anyone else. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: John Cowan supports 3683 PR-action against Jefsey Morfin
Stephane Bortzmeyer writes: It is not just a matter of personal inconvenience: if the filtering is done at the edges and not in the IETF mailing list engine, it also means that public email archives (which are a very important tool for the IETF) are polluted by the useless messages sent by people like Jefsey Morfin. Since public archives are usually a violation of copyright, anyway, the entities that maintain them are poorly placed to complain. And archives can be purged after the fact, without impairing the flow of messages to the list in real time. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: suggestion on distributed systems
Steven M. Bellovin writes: Nonsense. Tanenbaum has forgotten more about operating systems than most of us will ever know. He has apparently forgotten a lot of things that I remember, or, more likely, he just has never been exposed to them. In his book he writes about the things he knows, which is only logical, but he doesn't know everything. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: OT: The case of sysop twit
Frank Ellermann writes: Are you sure that you have read and understood http://article.gmane.org/gmane.ietf.ltru/1033 ? I'm sure that I'm not interested in it. It has nothing to do with the IETF. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: List archives and copyright [WAS Re: John Cowan supports 3683 PR-action against Jefsey Morfin]
Michael Froomkin - U.Miami School of Law writes: If you post to a list with a publicly announced public archive -- and even more so if you are informed about the archive at the time you join the list (hint: you usually are) -- then I think it's pretty clear under US law (and, I'd imagine but don't actually know, also the law of most civilized countries) that you are impliedly granting a license to archive by posting to the list. Hence the archive is not a copyright violation. The key phrase here is you are informed. You have to be informed and agree to it. Forcing someone to click on a button that acknowledges reading about the archive is a way to do this (commonly used for software and various Web sites). Just assuming that someone has read fine print somewhere on some Web page associated with the list is not sufficient, however. Interesting academic questions might, or might not, arise if in a given post one attempted to assert that the implied license is being revoked for that post (including the issue of whether given the automation involved such an assertion could be legally effective), but they have low operational relevance to date. Well, that would depend on the agreement, wouldn't it? Which is all the more reason to compel a participant to read about archiving permission and agree to it explicitly in some way. There are more egregious infringements on the Net, such as Turn It In. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: List archives and copyright [WAS Re: John Cowan supports 3683 PR-action against Jefsey Morfin]
Jeroen Massar writes: IANAL but one really doesn't have to bother with US law, that really doesn't apply to many folks (fortunately :) The laws of other developed countries are frequently even more restrictive when it comes to copyright. There is a much better thing than US law, it's called IETF, and the fact that there is: http://www.ietf.org/maillist-new.html which contains: 8-- All IETF Contributions are subject to the rules of RFC 3978 and RFC 3979. --8 Mailinglist traffic also are subject to that. One gets a copy of this when signing up for the various lists. That's not good enough. Prospective list members must be presented with the actual texts themselves and must agree to abide by them _before_ they sign up. And in some jurisdictions, even this may not be enough (see moral rights and copyright). According to you Google and every other website indexing service is a violation of copyright, better get sue'ing then, you might get rich. Be careful what you wish for. At one time, copyright lasted for only a few years. And at one time, patents could only be applied to machines. Archives are meant to store things, which is what they are doing, if you don't want to contribute then simply don't. If I contribute to a mailing list that is archived, then my posts may be archived against my will. (Who wonders that now I've quoted mr Atkielski if I am in violation of his copyright...) People who haven't yet been sued tend to be very flippant about intellectual property rights. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: John Cowan supports 3683 PR-action against Jefsey Morfin
Theodore Ts'o writes: The problem with the just filter approach is that if you then fail to respond to something of substance that got inadvertently filtered out, it is trivially easy to claim rough consensus. The problem with prior restraint, such as a ban, is that nobody ever gets to respond to anything that doesn't toe the party line. That's a general problem with all censorship. With filters, the intolerance of one person doesn't influence that of others. If he misses something and fails to respond to it because of his filters, that's his own problem and his own fault. The fact that he might be careless in filtering or might choose to filter things that other people don't is not a justification for forcing the whole world to observe the same restrictions. So if everyone followed your advice (except for the poor wg chair, who has to judge consensus, so he/she would be forced to read through all of the dreck), it would be trivially easy for a group to get something past the wg; just have 2 or 3 people suggest something that would normally be controversial, insert the keyword Jefsey somewhere in the text, and then when no one responds because they have all filtered out any text containing the word Jefsey, the 2 or 3 people can claim rough consensus and the change goes in. See above. Laziness and intolerance are (or should be) problems of the individual, not the group. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IETF Last Call under RFC 3683 concerning JFC (Jefsey) Morfin
Dave Crocker writes: There is a basic difference between preventing the expression of an opinion, idea or the like, versus preventing what is effectively a denial of service attack on the conduct of group business. Yes. A denial of service attack is a technical attack on a server or network that effectively halts or dramatically interferes with normal traffic or transactions. An expression of an opinion or idea never does this. An organization like the IETF absolutely MUST encourage the former. But it cannot survive any sustained amount of the latter. Well, when the mailing list receives 200 messages a second from the same source, certainly it can take action. There are laws against that sort of DoS in most jurisdictions. Yes, one can no doubt construct all sorts of scenarios that are in a gray area between the two. No, there's no gray area between the two. It's pretty easy to see when a network is down or a server is stalled because of a DoS attack, and it has nothing in common with an expression of opinion or ideas. In other words, the excesses that constitute a violation need to be huge. No, they just need to be true DoS attacks, not expressions of unpopular opinions that are being falsely characterized as DoS attacks in order to rationalize censorship. It is difficult to imagine any reasonable person looking at the particulars of the current case and having even the slightest doubt that things are far, far beyond any possible gray area. I don't see any DoS. I don't think anyone expressing an opinion can type fast enough to create one. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: posting privileges vs receiver-side filtering
grenville armitage writes: - protects agains dilution of a WG's historical record (archives that soak up all posts to the WG's mailing list) Stop blindly archiving every message, and this ceases to be a problem. - improves the 'signal to distraction' ratio of traffic on the list (particularly important for list residents charged with keeping things on charter and evaluating rough consensus) Distraction is in the eye of the beholder. Ignoring something requires no action; paying attention to it requires action. Thus, distraction is always an explicit action on the part of the receiver; it is never forced by the sender. Yes, revocation of posting privileges and receiver-side filtering both cause a drop in traffic reaching one's inbox. But that doesn't make the actions equivalent. Yes. The former is censorship, the latter is not. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: John Cowan supports 3683 PR-action against Jefsey Morfin
Joel M. Halpern writes: Assuming I have properly understood Mr. Morfin's email, the best argument I have seen for permitting all IETF email list adminsitrators to ban him as they deem necessary is his own description of his behavior. Mr. Morfin appears to have stated that if he feels an opinion is important he will push for it (as he should.) He has also indicated that he will keep pushing for it on any and all mailing lists even after the working group chair has determined that a rough consensus exists. If I have understood his postings in this discussion correctly, Mr. Morfin has specifically indicated that he intends to behave in ways that are not in accord with the rules. It seems to me that the sensible response to a notice of intended misbehavior is to be prepared to respond immediately and directly to such behavior. The proposed action specifically gives the list managers / chairs that necessary authority in the light of Mr. Morfin's exhibited and asserted behavior. Replace Mr. Morfin with Dr. King and see how it sounds. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: FW: IETF Last Call under RFC 3683 concerning JFC (Jefsey) Mor fin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I take a look at the IETF email after four months and it's still the same discussion as when I left! I notice the same thing. The Harper Valley PTA is still very much at work, but technical issues seem to be few and far between. What, are you going to convince someone that indeed they really were bothered by someones posts? The idea is not to convince them, but to override them, so that what they think doesn't matter. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: FW: IETF Last Call under RFC 3683 concerning JFC (Jefsey) Morfin
John Levine writes: I cannot tell you how many lists I've been on that have been in exactly our situation, paralyzed by one or two people who skate along the edge of being kicked off, choking the list with clouds of irrelevant smoke. There's always the same arguments, if we were disciplined enough to ignore the noise, it wouldn't matter, everyone has a right to say something, it's about personalities rather than substance, etc., etc. You all know them as well as I do. Maybe it's time to heed the arguments instead of just complaining about them. I do, and it works well for me; I'm never bothered by clouds of irrelevant smoke on any list, even though most lists constantly have such clouds drifting about. Of course, in practice, many people refuse to heed these arguments because they simply cannot tolerate the thought of anyone being allowed to say or write anything that they themselves find objectionable. Filtering the unwanted traffic isn't enough for them; they want to prevent the whole world from seeing it. They are irritated not only by the traffic itself, but also by the thought that anyone else might be able to see that traffic. So they crusade for constant censorship of every expression of which they don't personally approve. And eventually they make as much or more noise than the people whom they find so objectionable, ironically. Eventually you end up with multiple groups on a list: those who irritate others, those who want to censor the ones they find irritating, and--sometimes--a minority of people who are grown-up enough to stay out of both of these groups and continue their normal work, cheerfully ignoring the children at play on the list. When this happens, I've only ever seen two possible outcomes. Either the smoke generators are ejected, or the productive members leave. There's a third possible outcome: The productive members are smart, they ignore the smoke, and they continue to work efficiently. But the productive members do have to be _smart_, and unfortunately that's more the exception than the rule, even on lists where the members like to believe themselves smart. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IETF Last Call under RFC 3683 concerning JFC (Jefsey) Morfin
Adrian Farrel writes: If those who would exclude Jefsey from certain lists feel that repeated 30 day bans are too much work, I suggest they draft a new process that would allow them to create longer bans on specific lists. An alternative would be for them to find new jobs that don't include this tremendous burden. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IETF Last Call under RFC 3683 concerning JFC (Jefsey) Morfin
Tim Bray writes: Ban him. Openness and inclusiveness are virtues, but not absolutes. They are only virtues when they are absolute. This ban seems to me an expression of respect for the time and energy of many dedicated and talented participants here, which are currently being wasted by JFC; such respect is also a virtue and on balance in this case, a substantially greater one. -Tim This entire fiasco tells me that the people nominally participating in it have a lot of time on their hands and very little to do, and they choose to waste it bickering like preschoolers on a playground rather than spend it trying to do the actual work of the IETF. And of course they will argue with this, because they don't want to recognize their own failings. Instead of seeing a stream of posts from this target of opportunity, I see multiple streams of posts from people complaining about him. Sorry, but the cure is a lot worse than the disease. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: IETF Last Call under RFC 3683 concerning JFC (Jefsey) Morfin
Are people on this list still arguing about this? I thought members of this list were supposed to be grown-ups (?). ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: The rights of email senders and IETF rough consensus
wayne writes: The definition of unacceptably high false positive rate can *only* be defined by the receiver of the email. It's difficult to do that if the intended receiver of the e-mail never sees the e-mails that are rejected. The false-positive rate will then appear to be perpetually zero to the receiver, even if every incoming e-mail is being discarded. In the case of spam filtering, it is important to remember that domain names are cheap. There are companies out there that will host your domain name and deal with your email for you. You can access email for your domain either via pop/imap, webmail, or forwarding. Some domain owners run their own e-mail servers. POP/IMAP, webmail, forwarding, and the like do not offer the same degree of control as an independent e-mail server, and they don't create as professional an impression. Exactly. And that goes for spam filters, firewalls, restricted mailing lists, and whatever. If the sender doesn't have any rights to contact the receiver (which usually means a contract), then what they want is irrelevant. Explain postal mail, then. Explain telephones. Letting people without standing have a say is a huge problem. What is standing? You cannot let people in Iran or the US decided whether a website in Germany can publish information that they don't like. Should people in Iran or the US decide whether recipients in Germany should be allowed to receive e-mail from China? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: RFCs should be distributed in XML (Was: Faux Pas -- web publi cation in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Juergen Schoenwaelder writes: Every little open source software project uses version control systems these days. The IETF does not. And interestingly, the IETF even likes to standardize this stuff (look at the WebDAV RFCs). Personally, I liked CVS and I do even more appreciate SVN these days (which is actually a superset of WebDAV). I would love if the IETF could _offer_ subversion services for WGs who want to use this. It would be nice to be able to simple modify a document and post the diff in a common format instead of the arcane OLD: NEW: format which really boils the ocean if you have to rename/rewrite something throughout a document. If the IETF needs all RFCs in plain text, why would it not also need plain text for version control? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Diagrams (Was RFCs should be distributed in XML)
Randy.Dunlap writes: SVG was mentioned (as spec'd by w3.org IIRC). So check out Inkscape: using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Available for multiple platforms. http://www.inkscape.org/ Using an open format that requires people to install special free software is no different than using a proprietary format that requires people to install special free software. And if that is to be the case, PDF is much more widespread than SVG. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Diagrams (Was RFCs should be distributed in XML)
Joe Touch writes: XML is modern? Where's the modern, WYSIWYG, outline-mode capable editor? And does one exist that's free? XML is fashionable, not necessarily functional. There's a difference. (I'd love to work in XML, but it seems like a 20-yr step backwards to manually edit the source code of a document) A lot of people don't remember that far back. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Diagrams (Was RFCs should be distributed in XML)
Stewart Bryant writes: However these are not taken as normative, so you have to produce an ASCII equivalent, which fundamentally limits the complexity of any normative diagram. Depends. If the ASCII document is large enough, in theory you can represent any monochrome image with an arbitrary degree of accuracy. If line lengths or number are limited, though, this isn't possible. Essentially you just make some non-blank ASCII character represent a dark pixel, and use a blank for a white pixel. So with 768 lines of 1024 characters each, you can represent a typical video display. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Open standards for pictures (Was: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Stephane Bortzmeyer writes: I agree, SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/) should be the standard for RFC. True, it is not an IETF standard but it is open (for whatever definition of open you choose). Neither PostScript nor PDF is secret. And you can write software to process PDF without paying any royalties; I think the same is true for PostScript. This is vastly preferable to reinventing the wheel. An alternative is the Graphviz dot language (http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/) which is certainly much simpler to edit by hand but is not completely open (it is a proprietary format, although its use is free and there is a free software implementation). Why is this better than PostScript and PDF? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes: Because they are your customers. The reader/author relationship is only very rarely comparable to the customer/vendor relationship. For many authors, money is not that important. No, the author can not possibly know the needs of the reader. The reader can pick what he needs and ignore what he doesn't. That's not the author's job. Once you add the headers and footers you no longer have plain text, you have ASCII text in a device dependent markup. Upon what device does it depend? Enough people get it wrong to cause me problems reading their documents. They don't know what they're doing. Blame the workman, not the tools. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes: The problems with HTML are almost entirely the result of people trying to give the author control over the final format which is none of the author's beeswax. It has been the author's prerogative for thousands of years; I'm not sure why that must change now. The author is the creator of the content, not the reader. I also agree about the PDF font problem. I do have problems printing pdf documents from time to time and every two weeks acrobat asks to upgrade itself, then if I forget and click yes thinks for a while before concluding that it can't upgrade my copy which is the paid version, not the free one. If the fonts are properly embedded, they are not a problem. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes: It has been the publisher's perogative, not the authors. They have usually worked together. Today, the author may do all the work, in which case he has complete control. The past ten years represent the anomaly in this regard, not the norm. More correctly, they represent a new norm. If you compare LaTeX to more recent document processing mechanisms you can see how Knuth and Lampson very deliberately set out to automate the existing typesetting process and styles, not replace them with ad-hoc DIY jobs. I'm not sure what you're trying to say with this. So the tactic of the author deciding the final presentation was a non-starter. In that case, plain text will do. And how pray is the user at either end meant to ensure that is the case? It's a simple option in most programs that generate PDF. I use embedded subsets in all my PDF documents, and there's never a problem with fonts, because they are in the documents. How do I ensure that my Adobe document creation software will be compatible with the reader's Adobe document reading software? It's not a question of compatibility, it's a question of setting the right option. In other words, it's just a matter of reading the manual. Answer: I should never need to bother. If you're deciding the format of your document, you need to bother, just like the typesetters who came before you. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Frank Ellermann writes: But some PDFs generated with open office still work with my old Acroreader 3, no colorspace 6 not found or other issues like cannot extract embedded font. And why should I want any embedded fonts, my OS/2 has a nice Adobe Courier, a nice Adobe Hevetica, even some ugly Times New Roman, that should be good enough for anything I care about (excl. math.) I still use Acrobat 4.x to generate PDFs, and it works just fine. Generally speaking, there's nothing in an ordinary document that requires anything more recent. The more recent versions are designed to maintain revenue for Adobe, not to provide any useful features or functionality. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Thomas Kuiper writes: Here is a real beauty on page 22 of RFC 793: An ideally suited to PDF. It would be much easier to generate that way, much easier to read, and much easier to print legibly. There's nothing wrong with having the text version as a backup, but when you get into graphics it's hard to insist on text only. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes: A bad one, empower the reader. Why are readers more important than authors? The point of communication is to get your point across to the READER. For that, you need control over how the information is presented. If you want to dictate the presentation to them then you are making a big mistake. If that were true, then all teachers would teach in exactly the same style, since doing otherwise would be dictating the presentation. There is no such thing. As the RFC corpus demonstrates people want headers, footers, page numbers. All of these can be in plain text. Add those to 'plain text' and you have text that assumes a particular output format. Dictating presentation, you mean? Nope, it's a question of getting the programmer to take remedial lessons in usability. If you are generating PDF, you're expected to know something about electronic publishing, and that includes the use of fonts. In Acrobat Distiller, embedding fonts is a simple menu option. Programers who use the manual as an excuse for bugs should be fired. Authors who don't think that they have to know anything about fonts should stick to plain text. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Frank Ellermann writes: For thoe who want this that's nice as far as it works, but I'm generally more interested in the _content_ and not style or layout. Sometimes layout is important, if text and graphic elements are mixed. And I don't want to print it, I want to read it. In a GUI or text mode window with the dimensions selected by me. Then plain text is best. This is not the case. Last DOS version I've seen was AcroDos 1, last available OS/2 version was AcroRead 3. So PDF readers are available for those platforms. IIRC that _was_ also the initial idea of SGML. SGML wasn't precise enough, I think. Now if the author is more interested in his layout than readability and accesibility, let alone transport costs, then he's obviously stupid. Tell that to print newspapers and book and magazine publishers. Version history popstop.cmd 1.7: | Added JV to MAGIC(), binary starts with %PDF or similar I don't know what this means. It was only a spammer trying PDF because it offers links not found by SpamCop's parser. The latest versions of PDF seem to support more executable code, which I do not like _at all_. One of the traditional advantages of PDF has been that it doesn't carry any significant executable code, making it immune to viruses. Unfortunately, thanks to the idiots at Adobe, that is no longer the case, although it's still far from an ideal vector for a virus. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
shogunx writes: Proprietary formats have no place in the IETF. The internet belongs to everyone, not Microsoft. Proprietary formats don't come exclusively from Microsoft, and a lot of public formats start as proprietary formats. Even many public formats are actually proprietary, even if they are available freely for use in most cases. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Hallam-Baker, Phillip writes: PDF is *very* vendor-specific and proprietary. Who sets the standards for PDF? I remember there used to be discussions here if the RFC's should be published in PDF also. It's always rejected of course, even if PDF is probably the best standard you can get for a formated document (better than postscript that it was derrived from). So you may want to ask people for Postscript there if you are really that centric about open standards. :-) Postscript is no different, it is a proprietary format but one the IETF has in the past used for standards and still accepts as a secondary - despite the fact postscript support is no longer ubiquitous. The advantage of PDF is that it preserves the exact appearance of the original document, and that it is designed to be a final format, that is, it is not designed to be editable (and editing PDF is difficult, deliberately so). Also, PDF readers of some kind are available for just about every conceivable platform, and they all work extremely well. PDF documents also tend to print very well, too. This is why the printing industry long ago adopted PDF (and PDF was designed for that industry). I'm not aware of any other format that is as reliable for preserving the format of a printed document and as portable. HTML was intended to be an email format and works well as an email format. Javascript on the other hand... HTML is a Web format, not an e-mail format. And unlike PDF, HTML does not guarantee any particular presentation at the receiving end, since the receiving software must interpret the HTML. HTML gives suggestions, not absolute rules as PDF does, which means that HTML may look nothing like the author intended. I keep my e-mail programs set to disable HTML for both sending and receiving. I don't need fancy formatting in e-mail. If I truly wish to send something that is nicely formatted, I send PDF. I take the view that this is a technology business and if people don't like new technology they probably have less to contribute than they imagine. The same is true of people who use technologies just for the sake of using technologies. They are mostly geeks, with a poor grasp of the real world of end users who see technology as a tool, not as an end in itself. -- Anthony ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Faux Pas -- web publication in proprietary formats at ietf.org
Avri Doria writes: I used to be a proponent of PDF usage in the IETF, but I have been informed that there are no PDF readers for the blind. This makes it less then optimal as a universal vehicle. The simple solution is to have a text-only version of everything, even if there is a PDF version. Text is more universal than any other type of file, but since it has so few formatting options, it can be hard to read (which is why a PDF version is also useful). It should be noted that Acrobat 5.0 and following versions provide support for screen readers and for export to formats such as HTML and RTF. (However, I've never gone beyond Acrobat 4.0 to create documents, mainly because I don't like the increasing opportunities for viruses in later versions.) ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: On PR-actions, signatures and debate
Doug Ewell writes: Does it make a difference, when someone is speaking to you in person, whether they talk in a normal speaking voice or shout into your ear with a bullhorn? Not if I have access to ear protection (the equivalent of a delete key, in this scenario). Does it matter if they call you by insulting names, or question your integrity or motives, because your opinion differs from theirs? No. If these things don't matter to you, in speech or on mailing lists, then I have to hand it to you: you are indeed a more tolerant person than I am. Thank you. Anthony, if you wish to go on thinking that my objection to Jefsey's behavior is merely a smokescreen for disagreeing with his opinions, you are entitled to do so and there is nothing I can do to change your mind. Okay. I do disagree with Jefsey's opinions ... Ah. A coincidence, I'm sure. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: On PR-actions, signatures and debate
Doug Ewell writes: It has already been explained here that this has NOTHING to do with tolerance for different opinions. It has everything to do with the obnoxious, abusive, disrespectful manner in which those opinions have been expressed. Do you think that is an improvement? Does the intrinsic merit of a point of view depend on how it is expressed? Are people here so much slaves of their emotions that they cannot look past the way in which an opinion is expressed when evaluating that opinion on its own merits? There are no objective standards for obnoxious, abusive, or disrespectful speech. I have found that characterizing someone's speech or writing with any of these adjectives often equates to saying I disagree. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: On PR-actions, signatures and debate
kent crispin writes: Toleration of disagreement has almost nothing to do with it. Instead, it's more a matter of signal to noise ratio on a limited bandwidth channel. If you fill up a list with ignorant drivel, people who don't have time to deal with drivel will go away, leaving the list to those who produce the drivel. That's the problem. I've seen it happen many times. Can you write a program that will scan a message and determine whether or not it is ignorant drivel? If not, then how can it be used as a criterion of equitable censorship? I never call anyone's messages ignorant drivel, and there's good reason for that. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Anyone not in favor of a PR-Action against Jefsey Morfin
Brian E Carpenter writes: Folks, let's be clear about procedure here. If the IESG receives a formal request under RFC 3683, we are obliged to make an IETF Last Call and listen to the responses. But as of now, we have not received such a request in the case of JFC Morfin. In terms of RFC 3683, nothing has happened yet in this case. Reading this made me think of Shirley Jackson's short story, The Lottery. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: On PR-actions, signatures and debate
Nelson, David writes: I think that this is not so hard to distinguish as you suggest. Then it should be straightforward to automate it in the form of a robot that emotionlessly evaluates each post. There are two general cases: (a) overly insistent and (b) overly personal. How much is overly? The overly insistent poster will almost always attempt to have the last word in any thread, repeats positions frequently on the premise that if you say something often enough it become true, and inserts pet peeve issues into otherwise unrelated threads. How often is almost always? How much is frequently? How much is often enough? The overly personal poster makes comments about other posters, for example making assertions about their lack of clear thinking, their failure to understand the issue, their unspoken motivations, their stubbornness, and so forth. If everyone who did this were eliminated from a list, there might only be three or four people left afterwards. Most people will resort to personal attacks very rapidly and readily once someone else disagrees with them. While there are no standards, I think that case (a) can be usually be recognized by sheer volume of postings and case (b) is easily detected because the subject of argument ceases to be about the technical details of the protocol, and becomes about the other correspondents. Does that count for long discussions of formal actions the only purpose of which is to exclude someone from the list--discussions that make no mention of any technical details of any protocol at all? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: On PR-actions, signatures and debate
Gray, Eric writes: It's just possible that the threshold might be higher for some than it is for others. So which threshold is the right threshold? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: On PR-actions, signatures and debate
Gray, Eric writes: I disagree with your statement: Most people will resort to personal attacks very rapidly and readily once someone else disagrees with them. At least in the current context. I feel that this is an overly harsh charaterization of people generally and people in the current forum in particular. It is one of the most consistent characteristics of all online discussion fora. I see it again and again, everywhere, including here. If a forum attracts people of unusually high intelligence or has a more balanced ratio of men to women (instead of the usual male-dominated pattern), the personal attacks might become much more rare, but unfortunately very few cyberspace venues satisfy either of those criteria. There is _nothing_ that rapidly descending to the level of personal attacks does to help resolve any of the probable causes for disagreement. I agree. Consequently, I sincerely hope that most adult professionals would not do so. Unfortunately, many adult professionals are just as prone to it as schoolchildren. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Anyone not in favor of a PR-Action against Jefsey Morfin
Thomas Gal writes: Need implies accepting someone elses constraints. That's a poor simplification, because 100 people could tell someone that they need to stop posting friviously and harming list progress, and they can still chose to ignore it if there are no teeth to the rules. A discussion forum is a place that, by its very nature, must allow _open_ communication. It is thus not comparable to individuals listening to personal stereos in the same room, as intercommunication between those individuals is not of the essence of their listening experience. In this latter case, they can easily put on headphones without impacting their individual experiences; but in the former case, any attempt to silence one person has an effect not only on him but on everyone else, by squelching the very activity for which the discussion forum exists. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Anyone not in favor of a PR-Action against Jefsey Morfin
Nor am I. Avri Doria writes: well said. neither am i. a. On 6 okt 2005, at 13.42, Bill Manning wrote: i for one, am not in favor of a PR action against anyone. --bill ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Anyone not in favor of a PR-Action against Jefsey Morfin
Nelson, David writes: For example, consider two college roommates. One wishes to exercise his freedom of expression by listing to music until 3 AM in the morning (without the benefit of headphones, of course!). The other wishes to exercise his right to get sufficient sleep so as to be well rested for the big exam the following morning. Clearly, each roommate, taken individually, is exercising a reasonable freedom, but in this case they have come into conflict. The student listening to music need only put on headphones, then they will both be happy. It's a poor analogy. While I have no opinion on the current case, it seems to me that the basis for any such PR decision has to be based on the balance of rights. Does the right of the allegedly abusive poster to express himself come into conflict with the rights of the other mailing list participants to conduct an orderly discourse? If such a conflict exists, then is the imposition on the many sufficiently large to justify limiting the rights of the one? Unless the allegedly abusive poster is engaging in a technical denial of service or other action unrelated to the actual substance of what he is posting, there is never any reason to exclude him. Censorship is disguised in many forms; many people like to practice it, but very few are willing to call it what it is. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Reexamining premises (was Re: UN plans to take over our job!)
Thomas Gal writes: Well certainly the network controls in place in china are a good example of this. HOWEVER I'd say really it all boild down to power. The path to power is paved with trampled freedoms. YES! Not to mention the plethora of engineers and geeks who know too much about what's going on and CAN complain. I'd say as more of our knowledge pervades society more people could understand the issues that bother some people. It's a bit like the religious debates over which operating system is best on the desktop. The average consumer doesn't care, and just goes with whatever comes installed on the machine. Only the geeks argue endlessly about supposed advantages and disadvantages to particular operating systems, none of which actually amount to a hill of beans for serious users (those who use computers to get things done, as opposed to geeks who spend their lives tweaking machines but never actually use them for anything important). ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: UN
kent crispin writes: That's sounds good, but in fact, it's utter nonsense. It's like saying that the only difference between rowboat and a cargo ship is what people believe about them. In fact, if everybody started using one of the alternate roots, it would simply collapse. Well, no. If everyone started using the same alternate roots, then the alternate roots would effectively be the real roots. There is far more to the real root system than just human sentiment. There is heavy duty infrastructure, both human and physical, involved. Nothing prevents the operators of alternate roots from putting the same type of infrastructure into place. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: UN plans to take over our job!
Johan Henriksson writes: a peer 2 peer replacement for DNS tops my internet wish list; with such, we would not need the top organizations we have today, it would be much harder for anyone to claim the net and thus we wouldn't be having this discussion. You need an authoritative root. I don't want worldwide TLDs to be diverted by unscrupulous local operators. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Petition to the IESG for a PR-action against Jefsey Morfin posted
If the IESG has the time to compile blacklists and go on witch hunts, perhaps it doesn't have enough work to justify its existence. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Petition to the IESG for a PR-action against Jefsey Morfin posted
Melinda Shore writes: Unfortunately that no longer works all that well on Usenet, either. The participant pool grows to the point where there's always somebody new, or somebody who thinks that the problem person has a point and who wants to discuss it, or someone who thinks the problem person doesn't have a point but has some ill-defined right to be heard, and so on. You say it as though these were bad things. That can work well in some small, close-knit online communities where there's a very large set of shared values, but it doesn't work all that well here. That is, small communities where everyone has the same opinion and no deviations are tolerated. Mind you, I just freakin' hate this. But I don't think the process itself as described in 3683 is at all unreasonable. You'll hate it even more when they come looking for you instead. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Petition to the IESG for a PR-action against Jefsey Morfin posted
Randy Presuhn writes: At the WG level, disruptive members cause an enormous increase in the effort required to get anything done. How hard can it be to delete messages? Our desire to ensure that minority viewpoints are heard puts us in a difficult bind when only ones expressing those viewpoints are individuals who also choose to behave badly. You can just ignore people who behave badly. Why must they be silenced for everyone just because you don't want to hear them? Invoking RFC 3934 at the WG level is not something that any WG chair would undertake lightly. I don't even understand why this is an RFC. What does it have to do with the technical functioning of the Internet? What next? An RFC establishing an official religion? I'm sure the IESG is fully aware of the gravity of invoking RFC 3683. I doubt that. If it were that aware, no such RFC would exist in the first place. However, the reason the procedures exist at all is out of the recognition that a very few people are so abusive of our processes and culture that we need to be able to cut them off so that we can get real work done. Translation: Everyone reaches a point where he prefers to censor others rather than tolerate them. If their technical arguments have real merit, they will reach us by other avenues. If other avenues work, you don't need mailing lists, do you? It would be so much simpler if everyone could be counted on to recognize (easy) and ignore (hard) the bad actors. If people don't want to ignore them, why is it your duty to do their thinking for them? ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
Re: Reexamining premises (was Re: UN plans to take over our job!)
Michael Mealling writes: The system that faced the users would be inherently trademark friendly and wouln't be hierarchical. There are lots of users of the Internet besides trademark holders. I don't see why this latter group deserves special consideration. The output of such a system wouldn't be an IP address but instead a complex record that described a compound object called a 'service'. I always get nervous when I hear talk like this. I can picture the 5000-page committee-designed specification already. ___ Ietf mailing list Ietf@ietf.org https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
