Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
Lloyd,
I second your request:
... unless you have a specific request for a ... IESG statement,
I'd like a statement that RFC2418 will be adhered to by mailing lists.
So would I. I use multiple email addresses: [local-subaddr]@bovik.org,
[EMAIL PROTECTED], etc. -- like thousands of other people. And as people
on this list should know by now, I value pseudonymity and anonymity in
the rare circumstances that they are necessary and in the common
circumstances that they are sufficient.
Lately, the only clear need for this kind of thing has been those
virus-alert email warnings. What's next, computer-prion alerts?
("Warning: This message was edited by the author and not approved
by the U.N. Department of Culture! Further perusal of this message
might eat away at your brain. This message brought to you by a
robot authorized to prevent you from seeing what its creator thinks
you shouldn't." :)
My local USENET newsgroups have a "cancelcritter" that uses a
rule-based system to decide what articles are velveeta. The fact that
it operates behind the scenes is pretty strange. If it would only
summarize the subject lines and source addresses of the messages it
has cancelled on a regular basis, that would be great. But because it
does, some people claim that it often makes mistakes, and so it is
another one of the many similar reasons that cancels are often ignored
by news admins these days.
Similarly, instead of moderating non-subscriber messages, the default
for mailing lists should be to pass them through unless the conditions
described in:
http://www.ietf.org/IESG/STATEMENTS/moderated-lists.txt
in particular:
... 'persistent' and 'excessive'
are detected. So, for example, if you have the tenth non-subscriber
message in the last hour on a list that usually gets ten messages a
day, then maybe it is time to start holding them for the moderator.
Similarly, for "middle boxes," if you are keeping statistics on the
packets you are forwarding, and all the sudden the proportion of SYNs
from a particular neighbor spikes, maybe it is time to emulate a
source quench on that neighbor. (Or heck, why not even send a few
ICMP source quenches just to say you did.)
And now, for the "thinking outside the box" economic analogy for this
class of problems. Lately, I've been running a data collection
routine that is intended to promote reading literacy using internet
technologies:
http://www.bovik.org/reps-char.cgi
Roughly half of the example children represented in the data presented
by that script are poor readers for their age level. Why are they poor
readers? Because they live in poor school districts with large class
sizes and insufficient insitutional support. Why are they in those
circumstances? Because their wealthy metropolitan neighbors are so
carefully concerned with the education of their own children, that
the often carefully adjust the flow of funds to limit the distribution
based on "performance" such that the schools that already have the
smaller class sizes and the best paid teachers get more money, and no
progress in class size or teacher salaries is made in the
poorly-performing schools.
So, just as some list administrators limit the ability to post in a
timely fashion to those already subscribed, many states have
complicated school funds distribution formulas which act to limit the
resources needed for good education to those who already have them.
In both cases, it is done in the interest of protecting a resource,
ease of communication or reading literacy ability, by hoarding it to
those who already have it.
The analogious solution to the one proposed above would be similar to
the Bush education plan, which only cuts off funds after three years
of poor school performance.
Cheers,
James
Re: STD-2 is obsolete
Joe Touch wrote: IANA can't change the status of an STD - that's an IESG action. If you think this matters, I would raise it with the latter. Agreed. I was not aware that there was ever a proposed STD-1 I-D and/ or last call. Anyway, is it possible to declare (by whoever) the http://www.iana.org/numbers.htm as STD-2? Or, perhaps a mini RFC as STD-2 that informs where to get the current numbers? I also believe that more information should be added into an RFC: - where to get an RFC - where to get the recent status of an RFC It is sometimes very confusing for the internet community at large, to trace back the source of accurate information. PS, these following was cited from a standard /etc/services: -- # Note that it is presently the policy of IANA to assign a single well-known # port number for both TCP and UDP; hence, most entries here have two entries # even if the protocol doesn't support UDP operations. # Updated from RFC 1700, ``Assigned Numbers'' (October 1994). Not all ports # are included, only the more common ones. [...] # From ``Assigned Numbers'': # The Registered Ports are not controlled by the IANA and on most systems # can be used by ordinary user processes or programs executed by ordinary # users. # Ports are used in the TCP [45,106] to name the ends of logical # connections which carry long term conversations. For the purpose of # providing services to unknown callers, a service contact port is # defined. This list specifies the port used by the server process as its # contact port. While the IANA can not control uses of these ports it # does register or list uses of these ports as a convienence to the # community. regards, -- Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim - VLSM-TJT - http://rms46.vlsm.org - Good bye hegemony - http://sapi.vlsm.org/DLL/linuxrouter
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
Lloyd, Just to be clear: If you object to how the midcom elist is operating you need to take that up with the midcom-admin and the relevant AD. done. on cc. On open IETF lists, I have the right to post what you deem to be rubbish, and you have the right to choose to ignore me (and the satisfaction of doing so). midcom's policy limits those rights a priori without consensus or even persistent complaints from list members. Are you asserting that you (and anyone else for that matter) have the right to spam an IETF mailing list and that filtering/moderating such messages is inappropriate? I would be surprised if there is widespread support for such a view. What complicates the overall issue is that in all the cases I'm aware of where "moderating" goes on, it is to reduce spam. I suspect few people would argue that spam filtering is an unacceptable "censorship" in practice. However, because spam filters can make mistakes, it is highly desirable (as a sanity check/second opinion) for a human to double check automatic rejections. Unfortunately, having a human look at a message and decide whether to forward it on will always be viewed as moderation/censorship by some regardless of the reasons for doing so. Consider the two extremes: automatic spam filters in which no human has chance to overrule an automatic rejection, and completely open mailing lists with no anti-spam filters. Neither of these seems to be desired in the majority of cases, and any in-betweens would appear to require some level of human "moderation". Thomas
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Revealed! - Scientifically Proven Strategies.......
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Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
I really don't want to participate in a flame-war about "moderation", but Donald E. Eastlake 3rd [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: As long as WG chairs are trusted to determine WG consensus, I don't see why they can't determine if a message is obviously irrelevant to the tasks for which a WG was created. It is a bad idea to assign to the same person the tasks of limiting _input_ to a discussion and determining the _output_ of a discussion. We should _try_ to move away from any discussion of whether our leaders are "trustworthy", and instead discuss whether the _structures_ in place are designed correctly to achieve our purposes. -- John Leslie [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
I'm going to stick with my opinion and "agree to disagree" because although everything you say may be true, my experience suggests otherwise. The issue is that of false positives. I used to do what you describe but the algorithm got it wrong once, or at least one time that was brought to my attention. Not because the algorithm was buggy but because assuming "." is a separator between pure localpart and subaddress is wrong. I also had some strange experiences with "/" in "X.400" addresses, but that may be moot today. The downside of getting it wrong may only be annoying, in general, but as a service provider I can not afford to be annoying. In my opinion it does take rocket science because you're making semantic assumptions with no foundation whatsoever. I called it illegal because a localpart should be opaque outside its local environment. I tried to find a reference to this effect in some standard but couldn't. It may just be "practiced wisdom" but I can not remember a time when it wasn't true. You more or less got me on the case sensitivity issue. I also agree with your assessment that most filtering practices incorrectly do case insensitive comparisons of localparts. However, as a practical matter, I think this is one of those issues where you have to be "liberal in what you accept, conversative in what you send." I'm very careful to retain case settings (got that wrong once, too, many years ago) and I do case insensitive comparisons of localparts, but only after the domains match. This doesn't make it right, but I'm also careful to note duplicates so if there were two subscribers with the "same" localpart but with different case settings, it would get noticed immediately. Thus, in this case, I have a fail-safe so I'm comfortable doing it with automation. You're right about the lack of filtering standards and I for one think we should change that. Jim On Thu, 1 Feb 2001, Keith Moore wrote: Date: Thu, 01 Feb 2001 16:08:08 -0500 From: Keith Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: James M Galvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Keith Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd) There's another subtlety here - lists that filter mail from non-subscribers penalize folks who use subaddressing for incoming list mail, since they don't post from the same address at which they are subscribed. Ideally, lists should not consider subaddresses when comparing a contributor's address against the list of subscribers. Failing that, it's helpful if a subscriber can get his "From" address registered as one for which there is special permission to post. Your suggestion to "not consider subaddresses" is impractical at best, and illegal regardless. On the contrary, it's clearly practical as I have running code in bulk_mailer that does this (which will be in the next release). Nor is it illegal. Since there are no standards regarding list filtering, there are no standards that prohibit lists from doing filtering using fuzzy matching rather than exact matching on an address. My guess is that most lists that filter on source address are already taking liberties when comparing addresses - they're doing case-insensitive comparisons of the local-part when according to the standards the local-part is allowed to be case-sensitive. It doesn't take rocket science for the list to seperately compare the domain of an email address and the portions of the local-parts up to but not including any of the separators commonly used: ( + - / . = # ) hosting the elist. Even if it did you're suggesting the elist server should peek or otherwise parse the localpart of an non-local email address and that is wrong. Guess we'd better put a stop to those case-insensitive comparisons, then. The only practical solution is, as you propose, that the elist needs to have a separate list of addresses approved to submit messages. Actually I've demonstrated that there is another practical solution, one which is unlikely to penalize those using subaddresses at all. Keith
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
From: Thomas Narten [EMAIL PROTECTED] ...However, because spam filters can make mistakes, it is highly desirable (as a sanity check/second opinion) for a human to double check automatic rejections. Unfortunately, having a human look at a message and decide whether to forward it on will always be viewed as moderation/censorship by some regardless of the reasons for doing so. ... That seemes to assume that automated spam filters are necessarily based on content and have significant false positive rates. Neither need be true. Vernon Schryver[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
Your suggestion to automate the detection of "persistent and excessive"
could work for people and would help "throttle down" those discussions
that need it from time to time, but it would not protect an elist from
spam.
With only one exception of which I am aware (and its not midcom), the
only reason for the "moderation" is to identify spam and to prevent such
one-off messages from ever getting to the subscribers.
Jim
On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, James P. Salsman wrote:
Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 01:57:09 -0800 (PST)
From: James P. Salsman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
Lloyd,
I second your request:
... unless you have a specific request for a ... IESG statement,
I'd like a statement that RFC2418 will be adhered to by mailing lists.
So would I. I use multiple email addresses: [local-subaddr]@bovik.org,
[EMAIL PROTECTED], etc. -- like thousands of other people. And as people
on this list should know by now, I value pseudonymity and anonymity in
the rare circumstances that they are necessary and in the common
circumstances that they are sufficient.
Lately, the only clear need for this kind of thing has been those
virus-alert email warnings. What's next, computer-prion alerts?
("Warning: This message was edited by the author and not approved
by the U.N. Department of Culture! Further perusal of this message
might eat away at your brain. This message brought to you by a
robot authorized to prevent you from seeing what its creator thinks
you shouldn't." :)
My local USENET newsgroups have a "cancelcritter" that uses a
rule-based system to decide what articles are velveeta. The fact that
it operates behind the scenes is pretty strange. If it would only
summarize the subject lines and source addresses of the messages it
has cancelled on a regular basis, that would be great. But because it
does, some people claim that it often makes mistakes, and so it is
another one of the many similar reasons that cancels are often ignored
by news admins these days.
Similarly, instead of moderating non-subscriber messages, the default
for mailing lists should be to pass them through unless the conditions
described in:
http://www.ietf.org/IESG/STATEMENTS/moderated-lists.txt
in particular:
... 'persistent' and 'excessive'
are detected. So, for example, if you have the tenth non-subscriber
message in the last hour on a list that usually gets ten messages a
day, then maybe it is time to start holding them for the moderator.
Similarly, for "middle boxes," if you are keeping statistics on the
packets you are forwarding, and all the sudden the proportion of SYNs
from a particular neighbor spikes, maybe it is time to emulate a
source quench on that neighbor. (Or heck, why not even send a few
ICMP source quenches just to say you did.)
And now, for the "thinking outside the box" economic analogy for this
class of problems. Lately, I've been running a data collection
routine that is intended to promote reading literacy using internet
technologies:
http://www.bovik.org/reps-char.cgi
Roughly half of the example children represented in the data presented
by that script are poor readers for their age level. Why are they poor
readers? Because they live in poor school districts with large class
sizes and insufficient insitutional support. Why are they in those
circumstances? Because their wealthy metropolitan neighbors are so
carefully concerned with the education of their own children, that
the often carefully adjust the flow of funds to limit the distribution
based on "performance" such that the schools that already have the
smaller class sizes and the best paid teachers get more money, and no
progress in class size or teacher salaries is made in the
poorly-performing schools.
So, just as some list administrators limit the ability to post in a
timely fashion to those already subscribed, many states have
complicated school funds distribution formulas which act to limit the
resources needed for good education to those who already have them.
In both cases, it is done in the interest of protecting a resource,
ease of communication or reading literacy ability, by hoarding it to
those who already have it.
The analogious solution to the one proposed above would be similar to
the Bush education plan, which only cuts off funds after three years
of poor school performance.
Cheers,
James
rule-based moderation (was Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd))
Jim, Thanks for your comments: Your suggestion to automate the detection of "persistent and excessive" could work for people and would help "throttle down" those discussions that need it from time to time, but it would not protect an elist from spam. Neither does non-subscriber moderation. List spammers can subscribe first, from throw-away 3rd party accounts for example. The only way to completely block spam is prior restraint, which causes: - subjective judgements on borderline cases - need for moderator(s) to be on line often - delays in posting for everyone - other forums to become more useful None of those disadvantages are acceptable, as reflected in the official IETF Working Group guidelines. People who are not used to spam and incapable of ignoring it probably do not have the kind of experience with the internet which would help the IETF serve its mission and advance the state of the art, anyway. Having said that, if there is going to be a rule-based system in place to detect "persistent and excessive" posts to a list and spool such messages depending upon parameters such as subscriber/nonsubscriber source address, here are some more suggestions for paramters: - Redundancy. Messages substantially similar to recent messages (based on similarities seen in the virus warning floods of the past few months on the ietf list) might be held for a moderator to examine at his or her convienience. - HTML email. I am not the only one who would like to see HTML messages replaced with a message saying "This message contained only HTML; to view it, please visit http://www.ietf.org/" - Size. Messages over several dozen kilobytes could be truncated and similar archive pointer URLs placed at the beginning and end of the list-sent message with a similar explanatory blurb. However, I would advise not including rules based on substrings (e.g., "make money fa$t" etc.) because that is an endless game of cat-and-mouse. Cheers, James
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
Jim, I agree that it's wrong to assuming that "." is a separator, but if you have a subscriber named "xxx.yyy@zzz", how likely is it really that a posting from "xxx@zzz" is spam? Keith
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
I agree that it's wrong to assuming that "." is a separator, but if you have a subscriber named "xxx.yyy@zzz", how likely is it really that a posting from "xxx@zzz" is spam? Aah, I wasn't seeing your heuristic correctly before. I agree, the probability such a thing is spam is pretty low, and the downside of getting it wrong is "harmless" enough. So, you could even automate such a thing. The ding that I got in this "parsing localpart space" was unsubscribing "xxx.yyy@zzz" because I assumed that "xxx@zzz" was a match. Fortunately, I've always sent "good-bye" messages so the mistake was caught more or less immediately, but it really turned me off to localpart parsing, which, spam filtering aside, I still think is wrong. Jim
Light, PI Gig E - 2001 Annual Report seehttp://cookreport.com/lightipgige.shtml
Light, IP and Gigabit Ethernet A Road Map for Evaluation of Technology Choices Driving the Future Evolution of Telecommunications - 2000 COOK Report Interviews - Introduction to the 6th in an annual series. Contrary to some opinions, the COOK Report finds that the Internet revolution is not spelled dot com. The revolution is in fact to be found in a total revamping of the transport of bits. While the dot com empires of 1999 collapsed in 2000 the cost effectiveness of pushing the Internet Protocol over glass yielded more dividends than ever before. A growing amount of telecom traffic has migrated to a growing amount of fiber. The pure Internet play throws out SONET effectively doubling available fiber in the case where redundant loops were used. Whereas lighting each new fiber used to call for new bays of OC-48 SONET equipment at perhaps $100,000 a bay and up, a strand can now be lit at a gigabit by a $7,000 Ethernet switch on each end. While gigabit Ethernet over glass is the current preferred Internet way, ten gigabit Ethernet transport will be arriving by year's end. If 40 lambdas per strand were high end in 2000, 160 is likely to be common by year's end. With the completion of multiple metro fiber build outs, end-to-end fiber may now be taken or granted by most business customers. The explosion of bandwidth as the result of more fiber and technology that squeezes more bandwidth from each strand has meant that, in some instances, the delivery of a gigabit costs about what a T-1 did a decade ago. The bottom line is that telecommunications which is prepared to forego traversing the legacy PSTN is now upwards of 1000 times cheaper than that which powers a circuit-switched voice call. While corporate managed VPNs have been able to avoid the PSTN for some time, a new development has emerged in Canada where customer management of optical wavelengths using the OBGP protocol holds the promise that by year's end users of Canada's new public sector gigabit Ethernet over fiber infrastructure will be avoiding carrier clouds entirely. At the basic levels of both transport and network management the Internet revolution is shaping up to tell the PSTN that it is no longer needed. In telephony meanwhile protocols are being developed that will allow the diversion of large amounts of PSTN traffic to the Internet. ENUM is the major such protocol. This will allow Internet carriers to offer and deliver many services to PSTN attached phones that the PSTN itself cannot negotiate. Other protocols such as instant messaging are shaping up as coordinators for PSTN activity and off on switches that can control Internet connected devices. Fiber to the home is becoming more common and companies like World Wide Packets are gearing up to make gigabit Ethernet termination equipment that will give connected families, telephone, fax, high end video, ordinary TV and data off of the same line. Canarie the Canadian advanced internet agency has some interesting ideas about these developments stating that Divergence rather than Convergence may be the key to low cost fiber to the home. Here is a narrative paraphrase of the language of a slide from the presentation 'Optical Communities' in September 2000. When people first started looking at Fiber to the Home (FTTH), they deemed it to be too expensive because it assumed all services would be converged - date, voice and video. They noted that expensive terminal equipment would be required to segregate voice, data and video services at the home. Meanwhile voice traffic has largely gone wireless. Note that lifeline voice can significantly increase system costs by demanding high reliability and depending for this on DC battery power, 911 services. Perhaps it is time to conclude that the big driver for residential broadband is not voice or video. It is the Internet. Very soon Internet will carry video and second line voice. So instead of building a converged network such as FSAN, HFC, etc build an Internet network only. Divergence rather than Convergence may be the key to low cost FTTH. While the power of the new systems is awesome, there are additional issues that will keep very interesting the life of anyone who must evaluate these changes and plan a winning strategy for the future. While one better be aware of the key differences in the power of the technology when compared to the circuit switched world's way of doing things, one also needs to understand that progress has, in this case, waded out into new and uncertain territory. There are some growth and scaling issues where the answers are not yet clearly understood. For example readers should consider Bill St. Arnaud's paper on scaling issues of Internet growth. http://www.canet3.net/library/papers/scaling.html If the suppositions in this paper prove to be correct, then the role of backbones will have to be rethought and much Internet topology
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
Lloyd and all, I am heartened to read your post and somewhat encouraged to see that other than myself and a very few others that someone has the courage to stand up for open discourse and free exchange of ideas on the IETF mailing lists. I for one agree with you that if filtering is needed by participants on any IETF mailing list it can be done on the participant level not through a moderator of any sort. Using a moderator is paramount to selective censorship. And any form of censorship is wrong Lloyd Wood wrote: IETF mailing lists are intended for OPEN discussion; the benefits (cross-pollination between lists, lack of inhibition about stating your opinions) are widely recognised as outweighing widely-accepted drawbacks (e.g. Peter Lewis advertising every forum everywhere he can think of, allisat going on yet another hallucinogen-induced trip down memory lane). midcom is not open. midcom should not be part of the IETF, much less a working group. No, I don't care that having a moderator-in-the-middle filtering everything is in the spirit of the midcom charter and must be for my own good. I _really_ don't like the concept of an IETF-approved poster to a mailing list on an IETF-run server. We can do our own filtering, if we choose to, and we don't need the IETF to do it for us. Moderator approval of individual posters is outside the spirit of RFC2418, and would require AD and IESG approval. What are we coming to? L. [EMAIL PROTECTED]PGPhttp://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/ -- Forwarded message -- Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2001 11:00:40 -0500 (EST) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Mail sent to midcom Your mail to 'midcom' with the subject: Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval. The reason it is being held: Only approved posters may post without moderator approval. Either the message will get posted to the list, or you will receive notification of the moderator's decision. Regards, -- Jeffrey A. Williams Spokesman INEGroup (Over 112k members strong!) CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng/SR. Java/CORBA Development Eng. Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC. E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact Number: 972-447-1800 x1894 or 9236 fwd's to home ph# Address: 5 East Kirkwood Blvd. Grapevine Texas 75208
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
No, I don't care that having a moderator-in-the-middle filtering everything is in the spirit of the midcom charter and must be for my own good. I _really_ don't like the concept of an IETF-approved poster to a mailing list on an IETF-run server. Given how trivially easy it is to subscribe to midcom and other IETF mailing lists I'm not sure that it's appropriate to describe the filtering process as anything but completely loose. you're missing the point. one shouldn't have to jump through extra hoops (even if they're trivial to jump through) just to contribute to a working group discussion. I'm also not certain that I see the value in having people who don't read a mailing list posting to it, but okay, whatever. for midcom it's especially valuable, since a number of people in midcom seem to think that they have the right to redesign the architecture of the Internet. they definitely need clue inputs from elsewhere. Keith
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
you're missing the point. one shouldn't have to jump through extra hoops (even if they're trivial to jump through) just to contribute to a working group discussion. Please note: one doesn't have to jump through hoops. At any rate, I've opened up the mailing list, not because the arguments here have been particularly (or even mildly) compelling but because the notification that's sent to people whose messages are being held for manual release is misleading and a tad obnoxious and it can't be edited by the list admin. Better to get rid of it completely. Melinda
harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
Greg Minshall wrote: absolutely. i was very happy when we moved from the previous world to the (more or less pure) IP world. i will be very happy when we move from the NAT world to the (more or less pure) IPv6 world. Greg (who wrote email gateways in a past life) I think that it is a truism that homogeneous networks are simpler. However, if this becomes "the" reason not to use heteregenous networks (and NATs), then we are denying the usefulness of local solutions to local problems. We are also restraing locally controlled growth and optimizations. Since it is also a truism that a local maximum (or, minimum) does not have to be a global maximum (or, minimum), then we see that a homogeneous network must not be the best global solution either. In other words, that is why the Net never was and resists being be a homogeneous network. It would be a less efficient design. Thus, we need to be able to cope with diversity, not try to iron it out. The NAT ugly duckling, the misfit to some, may well be a harbinger. Cheers, Ed Gerck
Re: harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
Keith Moore wrote: Ed, We agree that the net has never been entirely homogeneous, and that it would be a Bad Thing if people were forced to make their local nets conform to someone's idea of the Right Way to do their networks. Yes. Thus, I have few problems with folks who want to use NATs within their local networks and who understand and accept the limitations of that approach - even though, as you are fond of pointing out, this is an example of a local optimization that is sub-optimal for the global Internet community. If it would be imposed. But IMO it is, however, globally optimal for the Internet community to be able to solve their problems locally. OTOH, I have a big problem with constraining and/or encouraging folks to use NATs, while misleading folks about their limitations; misleading is always bad. and with attempts to make NATs a part of the Internet architecutre and thereby forcing everyone to accept those limitations. This is where we seem to diverge. IMO: (1) NATs are part of the Net archictecture and a harbinger, not an intrusion or a misfit; (2) everything has limitations, but having no choice is always the worse limitation. So, rather than following the "let a thousand standards bloom" dictum, I think that NATs (and similar approaches) are actually a way to provide for interoperation and reduce heterogeneity -- and its effect, which is isolation. Cheers, Ed Gerck
Re: harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
Ed Gerck wrote: [..] Thus, we need to be able to cope with diversity, not try to iron it out. Depends why the diversity exists. Coping is the reaction of people who feel they cannot change the underlying causes. Apparently not everyone feels so powerless that NAT is their only answer. What you call "ironing out", others call "minimising the reasons for gratutitous diversity" cheers, gja Grenville Armitagehttp://members.home.net/garmitage/ Bell Labs Research Silicon Valley
Re: harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
Ed, We agree that the net has never been entirely homogeneous, and that it would be a Bad Thing if people were forced to make their local nets conform to someone's idea of the Right Way to do their networks. Thus, I have few problems with folks who want to use NATs within their local networks and who understand and accept the limitations of that approach - even though, as you are fond of pointing out, this is an example of a local optimization that is sub-optimal for the global Internet community. OTOH, I have a big problem with constraining and/or encouraging folks to use NATs, while misleading folks about their limitations; and with attempts to make NATs a part of the Internet architecutre and thereby forcing everyone to accept those limitations. Thus we are objecting to much the same thing - not only the attempt to constrain what people can do with their local networks (e.g. preventing folks from getting global addresses) but also the attempt to constrain the kinds of software that people can deploy. Keith
Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd)
At 10:12 AM 2/2/2001 -0500, James M Galvin wrote: I called it illegal because a localpart should be opaque outside its local environment. I tried to find a reference to this effect in some standard but couldn't. It may just be "practiced wisdom" but I can not remember a time when it wasn't true. MUST be opaque, not should be. Not only has it always been true, but it has usually caused problems when violated. The language in RFC822bis http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-drums-msg-fmt-09.txt is definitive, though not as obnoxiously forceful as seems to be needed, to make the point for this thread: 3.4.1. Addr-spec specification ... The local-part portion is a domain dependent string. In addresses, it is simply interpreted on the particular host as a name of a particular mailbox. Firewalls and proxies are exceptions that I personally explain in terms of their being authorized on behalf of the "particular host". There is some operational fantasy to that explanation, given that the agents are typically operated by a different group than the ones running the email user software, but it is the real theory that such agent services work on. That it, such agents are part of a common administrative domain which authorizes their messing with the data. Stray relays and services that are out it the great beyond of the general Internet are NOT so authorized. They are MUCH more likely to interpret the local-part incorrectly d/
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Re: harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
* * In other words, that is why the Net never was and resists being be a homogeneous * network. It would be a less efficient design. But the lesson of the Internet is that efficiency is not the primary consideration. Ability to grow and adapt to changing requirements is the primary consideration. This makes simplicity and uniformity very precious indeed. Bob Braden
redesign[ing] the architecture of the Internet
N.B.: I trimmed this: | From: Keith Moore [EMAIL PROTECTED] | To: "Melinda Shore" [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Subject: Re: Mail sent to midcom (fwd) | Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Down to this: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Keith Moore asserts: | for midcom it's especially valuable, since a number of people in | midcom seem to think that they have the right to redesign the | architecture of the Internet. they definitely need clue inputs | from elsewhere. Keith, who does have the right to redesign the architecture of the Internet, and under what circumstances? This is a serious question. Sean.
Re: harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
Bob Braden wrote: * * In other words, that is why the Net never was and resists being be a homogeneous * network. It would be a less efficient design. But the lesson of the Internet is that efficiency is not the primary consideration. Ability to grow and adapt to changing requirements is the primary consideration. This makes simplicity and uniformity very precious indeed. Is this now a semantic discussion? Ok, if you want to go than that slope, what I call "efficient design" of course includes "to grow and adapt to changing requirements," "simplicity" and "uniformity". Because "efficient" is all these and more -- efficient is "productive without waste" (Webster). BTW, a design that is too simple is not efficient, because it wastes resources and does not allow what could otherwise be possible. This is the other side of Ockham's razor, when all possibilities are tried in order to find the best one, not just the simplest one. Cheers, Ed Gerck Bob Braden
Re: harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
BTW, a design that is too simple is not efficient, because it wastes resources and does not allow what could otherwise be possible. granted that there is such a thing as too simple an answer for most design problems... but one can waste resources and be inflexible much more easily by making a design too complex than by making it too simple. moreover, the limitations of a too-simple design are usually much easier to identify and correct than those of a too-complex design. Keith
Re: harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
I too was a strong advocate and strongly disapproved of LANs that were not openly connected with full capabilities to the net, until I had my own home system and discovered that I had no interest in being totally visible and accessible at all times, especially when I was not always around to monitor things. So, now I am very happy behind my little XRouter NAT box, with an ISP service out there where I can have a login shell if I wish. But I do not find any need for a shell account and so do not have one, as long as I have POP or IMAP for my EMail, and an ISP that does not block any of my desired DNS destinations. Lets me sleep well! Without hiring a security staff;-)... But, I also note that I choose this because it is good for me locally, not because I cannot get an IP number for some reason. So, much of this argument appears to be based on the simple fact that IP numbers are scare, and so some companies have chosen to go along with NATS when they have no other reason than the shortage of available IP numbers. If so, then that is the problem to solve and leave those of us who want NATS alone in our happiness;-)... Even with IPV6, I would stay the way I am. In short, not everyone really wants their Internet to be totally homogeneous! Cheers...\Stef At 00:16 -0500 03/02/01, Keith Moore wrote: BTW, a design that is too simple is not efficient, because it wastes resources and does not allow what could otherwise be possible. granted that there is such a thing as too simple an answer for most design problems... but one can waste resources and be inflexible much more easily by making a design too complex than by making it too simple. moreover, the limitations of a too-simple design are usually much easier to identify and correct than those of a too-complex design. Keith
