Hi,
On Sun, 2007-02-11 at 19:31 -0800, Christian Huitema wrote: > I have seen users, with broken cell phones, or who have lost their > phone. They are simply in trouble. They have hard time recovering the > cell phone numbers of their friends, colleagues, family members etc. > > Do you mean that the only copy of their address book was inside their > cell phone? If that is the case, they will indeed have a hard time > retrieving all these numbers. On the other hand, there are many ways to > synchronize a cell phone with a PC or a server that keeps a safe copy. > You can even use vCards (RFC2426) do describe these entries in a > standardized way. That's right of course. Users should backup their correspondents' phone numbers to their PCs. However, this doesn't mean that they will do it unfortunately. In addition, this assumes that everyone has a PC. In addition, even if you have a PC and even if you have a backup, I'm not sure if the PC will be immediately available when you buy a new phone (because the old one is broken). Finally, I have also seen users with broken PCs. (This happened recently, a friend has lost all his backup.) > > I have seen users (including myself) exchanging phone numbers in > > ridiculous ways. The first number is read to the other user, and the > > other user returns his/her number via the cellular network. It should > > be noted that this also requires short distance user contact. If the > > other user is 100 meters away, you see each other but you are in a > > crowded place and you can't reach each other, you simply cannot > > communicate. You have cellular phones but are unable to communicate. > > That's ridiculous indeed, when you could simply attach vCard to an > e-mail. Not to mention publishing it in a web page, or make it available > to your friends in an instant-messaging service. Sending the phone number via e-mail is possible indeed, but this is a too indirect (hence slow) solution and makes some important assumptions. 1. This assumes that you have the destination user's e-mail address. BTW, I also think that the proposed protocol is not limited to phone numbers. We can also request an e-mail address. 2. This solution is too indirect in that, you need service from e-mail servers, which may be busy, temporarily unreachable, the network may be congested etc. 3. You have to wait until the mail arrives at the target mail box and the user checks mail. Today we have special services that notify the user upon new incoming mail. However, I'm not sure how fast this is. In addition, this is an optional service. Using an instant-messaging service has similar (almost same) problems. > The problems that you describe hardly seem related to server-less name > resolution in a local network! The proposed protocol could also use infrastracture DNS (i.e. standard DNS). This would look as follows: Let us assume that Alice Collins has a personal DNS name "alicecollins.domain.com". Her phone has an IP address that is registered to this DNS name. The requestor user enters the name Alice Collins, the proposed application generates the corresponding DNS name, makes a standard DNS query, and obtains the IP address. At this point the proposed application can send a private information query to Alice's phone. If approved by Alice (in real-time), her phone number can be learned. This would work globally, but I don't think this is realistic. (BTW, it can be noted that, one would ask why I need a phone number in this case.) Using multicast name resolution (or, name-based IPv6 addresses) with human names that have local significance only, seem realistic to me. Here the term "local" may take different meanings. It may be a local cellular network that covers a large number of cells, or a localized mobility management domain. Such a local cellular zone can cover a large geographical area. This is an important progress compared to using a technology like Bluetooth (for exchanging private info). But the proposed protocol cannot work globally. That's why we need phone numbers and our goal is to allow people to share their phone numbers more easily. Regards, pars mutaf > > -- Christian Huitema > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPv6 working group mailing list ipv6@ietf.org Administrative Requests: https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ipv6 --------------------------------------------------------------------
