BenefitsAll
Dear Friend Sorry to impose, but we got your name from an Internet search of venture capital contacts. I am sure you get these requests all the time...YES, we are ANOTHER "Dot Com " company. We are called BenefitsAll. Can you help us, or lead us in the right direction, to investors, or help us to get the word out ? Our site is up, running and being "soft marketed". Our results are quite impressive. We have hundreds of retailer partners and member/shoppers signed up. We also have dozens of organizations who have signed up with us and all with WITH NO ADVERTISING. At this point we have a small dedicated staff and a highly professional board of advisors from various industries. Our staff and advisors have helped us achieve goals we would have never thought possible. We completed our business plan a few months back and are only now today 2/5/01) presenting it to investors. We wanted to make sure we had a workable concept before we asked others to risk their money. Our Business plan is available upon request. Below is a quick summary. Call or email us for more information. Our phone # is 818 707 1723. Ask for Donn Delson at ext 4# Company Overview BA is an online fundraising site that will link nonprofit organizations and their members with major online retailers, wherein they can shop and earn rebates. BA will retain 35 percent of the rebate given by the retailer as the nonprofits' shop online. BA's goal is to create a portal that will bring shopping traffic from the site to the retailers. The demographic value of this traffic will eventually create a secondary revenue stream from advertisers. Founders Donn Delson and Robert Breines strongly believe in this concept. Rather than selling a product, carrying inventory, and shipping it, BA intends to carry minimal overhead. Instead it will be the "Black Box" intermediary that will provide a service, charge a small percentage fee for each transaction, and is the conduit for these transactions. Once the software is developed, the majority of expenses will be devoted to sales and marketing. Delson and Breines feel so strongly that they have chosen to invest the initial seed capital to build, test and validate the working model before asking others to invest. Industry Analysis and Competition The universe of online shopping rebate sites consists or about 12 companies, of which the majority are focused on schools exclusively. One of these incorporates schools and charities and a few target charities only. There is one site that caters to religious organizations and none to the knowledge of BA that targets civic/arts, service organizations and clubs. None offer the winning combination of high rebates, depth of retailers, ability to change and channel contributions. One of the challenges for BA will be to build awareness of its uniqueness as the only site that serves the broad spectrum of organizations. Competitive Edge BA starts with a critical competitive edge: there is no competitor known to us that can claim to afford the user the almost limitless choice of beneficiaries for their online shopping rebates. Each time a consumer or business agent shops through the BenefitsAll site they can choose which organization they desire to benefit from the rebate earned. Furthermore, BA offers significantly more merchant choices than any other site, with more than 350 retailers versus 250 for the next closest competitor. It promotes the availability of rebates up to 30 percent of purchase price, compared to a high of 20 percent from the next closest competitor. BA has experienced positive initial success. To realize its growth goals, BA requires additional capital to fully implement its advertising and promotional efforts, develop brand awareness, secure new organizations, and to build awareness and regular use by their membership. Thank you in advance for your consideration. Please contact us for the full plan that we can email and or discuss with you personally
Re: STD-2 is obsolete
Joe Touch wrote: >> I was not aware that there was ever a proposed STD-1 I-D and/ >> or last call. > STDs are labels of existing standard RFCs which go through > the usual procedure. But, neither I was aware that there was ever an I-D and/or a last call for RFC-2600 or RFC-2700. >> 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? > The procedure would generally be to update RFC1700, > resubmit it, and _then_ have STD-2 point to that new RFC. > (something IANA would do) I believe this is a problem. Accurate information exists, but it can not be published because it is not in a traditional RFC format :-(. > As far as I know, the recent status is supposed to be > at the top of the RFC. > As to where to get them, that's already in rfc-index.txt > (which is in the same directory as the RFCs): Unfortunately, it is not so obvious (especially for the one who has no idea about the RFC-Editor mechanism) that rfc-index.txt exists. regards, -- Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim - VLSM-TJT - http://rms46.vlsm.org - Good bye hegemony - http://sapi.vlsm.org/DLL/linuxrouter
Re: "redesign[ing] the architecture of the Internet"
*> *> Keith, you lived through the OSI Wars, the explosion of the Web and the *> exponential growth of the past 15 years. To now write about things being *> "done slowly and deliberately" suggests that you missed something here. *> The "Internet Architecture" didn't spring full blown from the brow of a *> collective benevolent elite, and the role of the IETF today isn't to You have one thing right... it wasn't "collective" in the modern IETF sense. Otherwise, this discussion seems to bear little relationship to the actual background history of Internet development. Not that the actual history is particularly relevant to today... Bob Braden
IETF50 event social register page
http://www.lucent-ietf.com/registration.html the webpage is silent about if the credit card information gets sent securely, or insecurely. in fact, it gets sent securely over https (Submit button points to an URL starts with "https"). it would be better if there's some mention about it, otherwise people will start yell about this :-) itojun
Re: "redesign[ing] the architecture of the Internet"
Peter, It does often seem to be the case that poorly designed short-term solutions to problems are adopted before well-designed things that work well in the long-term, particularly when the long-term solutions come with a greater transition cost. NATs made more sense than IPv6 for a certain subset of popular applications meeting certain criteria; the error was in people assuming (or being misled) that these were the only applications of interest. Now people are proposing solutions to the NAT problems which are more complex than IPv6, at a time when IPv6 is becoming available "off the shelf". The "fight" isn't "over" because the Internet continues to grow, and to evolve quite rapidly and probably will continue to do so for quite some time. Neither NAT nor IPv6 (as we know it now) will be the terminal state. And while I would be the first to admit that the entire Internet suite of protocols didn't spring fully formed from Athena's head, neither do I buy an argument that assumes that everything worthwhile occurs organically and that natural selection in the marketplace is the only force that matters. A great deal of the success of the Internet is due to some good solid design in IP and TCP. These did not crop up at random, and they did not come from a private vendor; and they proved superior to competing technologies from both vendors and ISO. And if for example OSI had won instead of TCP it is difficult to imagine how the web would have succeeded under such conditions. In the physical world, bridges are designed, not discovered. It requires substantial investment and usually inconvenience to build them; they don't just happen by accident. But when a bridge gets too weak or the traffic load gets too large for it, we don't argue that the bridge is as Nature intended. Instead, we build a better bridge. Keith
Re: "redesign[ing] the architecture of the Internet"
> Today we have transparent proxies, reverse caches, global DNS redirectors, > and all sorts of other amusing Things. You can say they're not part of the > architecture. But what does it mean? They're there because the > functionality needs to be there and otherwise wasn't. The same could be > said about NATs, as bad as they are. Remember Ritchie's famous quote, "you > can fill a void and it could still suck"? The fact is X is here as opposed > to something better. no argument about that. so now that these things are here and we understand their deficiencies, let's work on something better! Keith
Re: "redesign[ing] the architecture of the Internet"
g'day, Keith Moore wrote: . . . > To make fundamental changes to the architecture of the Internet would > affect a great many people with widely varying interests. Such an > effort would therefore need to be done slowly and deliberately, with > broad input, a great deal of care in its management, sound technical > foundation, a design team or teams of *very* talented people to > evaluate multiple approaches according to previously-established > criteria, with iterated review and feedback from a wide variety of > interests. In short, it would need to try to get at least rough > consensus from the whole technical community. Okay, I now I've gotten that out of my system, I encourage you to read the "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" books that arose from the BBC series of the same names. The authors brilliantly skewered the sometimes overwhelming pomposity of both the British Civil Service and the British Political Class who seek to manipulate the system to their own, sometimes even benevolent, ends. Of particular relevance would be any one of the several explanations offered up by Sir Humphrey Appleby as to what the Civil Service would do to any idea that they regarded as "too brave" or "radical". I'm sure that if I spent five minutes leafing through my now somewhat tattered copies I'd find passages that were completely in sympathy with yours. Keith, you lived through the OSI Wars, the explosion of the Web and the exponential growth of the past 15 years. To now write about things being "done slowly and deliberately" suggests that you missed something here. The "Internet Architecture" didn't spring full blown from the brow of a collective benevolent elite, and the role of the IETF today isn't to preserve this legacy for all time against the infidels. It's to continue the good work that got us here. If the IETF really were to slow down as much as your message seems to indicate you want it to would simply doom the organization to irrelevance. Fortunately, there is little evidence that the group is following your lead on this, but this is getting a little tiresome. > The IPv6 effort tried to approximate this idealized process. It > was a painful struggle. A lot of people weren't happy with the result, > and hardly anyone is happy with all of the result. But at least > there was an attempt to get broad input, consider a variety of > approaches, and to craft a compromise that served the needs of a > wide range of interests. Oh, and by the way - so far, it hasn't solved the problem it was designed for (because it hasn't been widely adopted), is poorly understood by people who should be using it and the market has supplied a host of competing, sometimes crusty (and yes sometimes downright ugly) alternatives to some subsets of the problem. This is what we have to look forward to, if we can save "the architecture" from NATs? BTW, the above sentiment is *NOT* intended as a slight on the many smart people who put a lot of effort into IPv6. I just want to caution you that your "slow and deliberate" process wont necessarily get you where you want to go. Sadly, the real world moves too fast, and people will tend to do what they feel is in their own best interests. Your goal should be to harnass that energy for good. You don't do that by fiat or commandment. You've fought the good fight against NATs. Unfortunately, you lost. Perhaps this is due in some small part because your fundamental approach has been to claim omnipotence for the IETF (or, as you put it "for IETF", what's with the missing article, anyways??). You chastize the apostates, attempt to abrogate concepts by exercising a non-existant moral authority supposedly due the IETF because of its past successes and heck, now you even claim that the IETF "essentially 'owns' the Internet Protocol specification and has change control over it". Wow... As if the IETF can or should attempt to maintain its technical leadership role by hiding behind intellectual property or patent law. Boy, has anyone around here read "Animal Farm" lately? "Four Layers Good, Seven Layers Better", anyone?? . . . > Contrast this with the kind of effort (and there have been a few > things like this in recent years, so I'm not singling anyone out in > particular) that says "we'll just tweak this one thing here to solve > our immediate problem" even though this tweak creates problems for > other interests who aren't represneted in the working group. The bottom line is that the "IETF way" was a success more because it embraced just such Darwinian Selection than because it embraced the measured, slow-paced path to architectual purity you now advocate. Nobody likes *all* of the somewhat interesting, if architecturally implausible, organisms sometimes thrown up for consideration by the Darwinian process. But only *some* people hate the fact that it lead to humanity (and thus, IP! :-) Keith, you really should trust the process a lot more than you do...
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Re: "redesign[ing] the architecture of the Internet"
> I strongly disagree. IETF essentially "owns" the Internet Protocol > specification and has change control over it. Well, I still disagree, but at least you've taken a step in the right direction by being more specific. Internet Architecture is an amorphous blob. > > A small group individuals with a cute idea can have dramatic impact, > > no matter what the IETF thinks. Witness WWW and NAT. > > no argument that such a group can have "dramatic impact" (for good > or ill) but that's not the same thing as changing the architecture. Today we have transparent proxies, reverse caches, global DNS redirectors, and all sorts of other amusing Things. You can say they're not part of the architecture. But what does it mean? They're there because the functionality needs to be there and otherwise wasn't. The same could be said about NATs, as bad as they are. Remember Ritchie's famous quote, "you can fill a void and it could still suck"? The fact is X is here as opposed to something better. Did the people at MIT have the right to write X???
Re: NAT isn't a firewall Re: harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
Jon, this is a nit, two digressions off the main thread, so I'll take it off-list. More mail soon. ...Scott On 4 Feb 2001 at 17:29 +, Jon Crowcroft apparently wrote: > > In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Scott Brim type > d: > >>Although address obfuscation through combining NAT with your firewall > >>can provide a small amount of additional security. > > > against which attacks ? it doesnt provide better privacy, or non > repudation, or access control, or any normal service that one would > regard as an enhancement of security - in fact, having one address > shared by multiple host s means there are less things an attacker > needs to remember :-) > > > cheers > >jon
Re: NAT isn't a firewall Re: harbinger, Re: [midcom] WG scope/deliverables
In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Scott Brim type d: >>Although address obfuscation through combining NAT with your firewall >>can provide a small amount of additional security. against which attacks ? it doesnt provide better privacy, or non repudation, or access control, or any normal service that one would regard as an enhancement of security - in fact, having one address shared by multiple host s means there are less things an attacker needs to remember :-) cheers jon
Re: FAQ: The IETF+Censored list
At 09:43 01/02/2001 +0700, Rahmat M. Samik-Ibrahim wrote: >Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote: > > >The IETF+Censored mailing list > >I believe that that message itself does not comply >BCP-45/RFC-3005. The "inappropriate" list from that document includes: > - Unsolicited bulk e-mail > - Discussion of subjects unrelated to IETF policy, meetings, > activities, or technical concerns > - Unprofessional commentary, regardless of the general subject > - Announcements of conferences, events, or activities that are not > sponsored or endorsed by the Internet Society or IETF. Which of those categories do you think it falls under? > Furthermore, the filter itself is somehow >out-of-date. > >http://www.alvestrand.no/cgi-bin/hta/ietf+censored-filters > >May I be listed in that filter anyway :^)? requests to be added are routinely denied by the administrator .-) -- Harald Tveit Alvestrand, [EMAIL PROTECTED] +47 41 44 29 94 Personal email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]