Re: Subscriber List Damage

2008-06-30 Thread Michael Thomas

1) Have you brought this up with the mailman folks? I've interacted with
   them and they seem like a responsive set of folks. I'm sure that 
this sort

   of thing would horrify them.
2) 3 years since the last backup? Oi.

  Mike

Glen wrote:

All -

I was asked by the IAOC to post a message to the IETF and SIP lists, 
to ensure that people were aware that the subscriber lists for the 
IETF and SIP lists were damaged as a result of an anomaly in TMDA and 
Mailman that occurred Thursday night.


Basically, TMDA misbehaved, and, in the process, caused Mailman to 
encounter a transient failure in the reading of its databases for 
these two lists.  As a result, rather than simply holding the mail and 
retrying it, Mailman decided to discard the current list databases and 
re-create them from 3-year-old data, for both the IETF and the SIP lists.


*sigh*

No email was lost to the system or the archives; however, some people 
may have missed some messages, or may still not be resubscribed to the 
list.


Of course we restored the files from backups; however, we want to make 
sure that everyone gets the mail they missed, and that everyone is 
subscribed to these lists who wishes to be subscribed.


So...

If you're reading this message in your email box, you're subscribed to 
the list identified in the subject line, and all should be okay.


If you're reading this message in the archives, wondering why you're 
not getting list mail, please take a moment to resubscribe yourself to 
the list, which should resolve your problem.


And regardless, if you feel you missed any mail, we do have the 
archives available for your reference.


IETF List Subscription Link:  https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
IETF List Archive Link:  http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/

SIP List Subscription Link:  https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/sip
SIP List Archive Link:  http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/sip/

We are in the home stretch of getting TMDA removed and replaced on the 
servers, and I apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue. 
Because server problems apparently happen only in the dead of night, 
you can be sure that we feel any and all pain anyone may be experiencing.


If you need any assistance, please contact the IETF Secretariat, using 
the links at:  http://www.ietf.org/secretariat/


Thank you,
Glen Barney
IT Director
AMS (IETF Secretariat)
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Re: WG Review: NETCONF Data Modeling Language (netmod)

2008-04-23 Thread Michael Thomas
Andy Bierman wrote:
> I don't think a formal WG process is needed to determine that
> the strongest consensus exists for the approach currently outlined
> in the charter.  The 15 people on the design team represented
> a wide cross section of those actually interested in this work.
> I am among the 10 - 15 people who were not involved in the design team,
> but agree with the charter.  That seems like a lot of consensus
> for this technical approach.
>
>   

There seems to be a repeating pattern here where a large cross section
of interested people manage to either mostly hash out their differences
or are committed to grin and bear whatever the consensus is only to
be thwarted by a small set of (self) appointed Internet Earls with little
or no stake in the game. The IETF should be fostering getting that
upfront ego-deflation, etc, done ahead of working group formation,
IMO, as it makes for functional rather than dysfunctional working
groups. But as it stands right now, those Internet Earls pretty much
have veto power through extremely vague "We are not pleased"
proclamations which the would-be working  group has no means
of clearing except for throwing open the entire can of worms again
(and again and again). This really sucks and is extremely demoralizing to
those who have invested more than a reasonable amount of time
on the work. What's even worse is that all the exercise does is create
delay since there was nothing actionable about the Proclamation in
the first place.

  Mike, knitting
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Re: [dkim unverified] Re: IESG Statement on Spam Control on IETF Mailing Lists

2008-04-14 Thread Michael Thomas
Eliot Lear wrote:
> Russ,
>
>   
>> When IETF lists are housed somewhere other than ietf.org, they are 
>> supposed to include an archive recipient so that there is an archive 
>> available at ietf.org (perhaps in addition to the one kept at the 
>> place where the list is housed).
>>   
>> 
>
> I'll agree with Phill's conclusion on this one.
>
> I think there is probably convenience value to housing the mailing lists 
> at the IETF.  It allows for a single whitelist, reduction in those 
> annoying monthly messages that we eventually all filter into the 
> bitbucket.   Also, it  probably is easier to effect and audit policy 
> (such as we have any) in terms of message retention, uniform access, etc.
>   
The other things is when we start DKIM signing (HINT HINT), it will
give a single identity for reputation, etc to latch onto.

   Mike
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Re: Blue Sheet Change Proposal

2008-04-04 Thread Michael Thomas
Eric Rescorla wrote:
> At Thu,  3 Apr 2008 20:10:12 -0400 (EDT),
> Scott O. Bradner wrote:
>   
>> Ole guessed
>> 
>>> My understanding is that the blue sheet serves mainly as a record of 
>>> "who was in the room" which I think is largely used to plan room 
>>> capacities for the next meeting.
>>>   
>> the "blue sheets" are required as part of the basic openness  
>> process in a standards organization - there is a need to know 
>> "who is in the room" (see RFC 2418 section 3.1 for the actual
>> requirement)
>>
>> the blue sheets become part of the formal record of the standards
>> process and can be retrieved if needed (e.g. in a lawsuit) but are not
>> generally made available 
>>
>> as pointed out by Mark Andrews - email addresses can be useful in 
>> determining the actual identity of the person who scrawled their 
>> name on the sheet - so it is an advantage to retain them
>>
>> I'm trying to understand how the blue sheets contribute in any
>> significant way to the spam problem - someone whould have to be 
>> surreptitiously copying  them or quickly writing down the email 
>> addresses - both could happen but do not seem to be all that 
>> likely there are far more efficient ways to grab email addresses
>>
>> so, my question is "is this a problem that needs solving"?
>> 
>
> The only reason I've heard is that some claim that people don't
> write their names on the blue sheets out of concern over spam.
>   
This doesn't seem very reasonable to me... if you post on any public
list -- like this one -- your likelihood for harvest is far, far higher. 
Let's
face it, in 2008 trying to have "private" email addresses as a spam defense
strategy is oh so 1998.

  Mike
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Re: Possible RFC 3683 PR-action

2008-03-25 Thread Michael Thomas
Noel Chiappa wrote:
> > From: Michael Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > So I've never met you, Noel. And I certainly don't have any reason to
> > believe that this email I'm responding to wasn't forged.
>
> (Responding to the point of your message, rather than the actual words... :-)
>
> I think there are two parts to the problem: the first is "does this electronic
> identity correspond to a real person", and "how can that electronic identity
> securely post messages". (I assume that was your point, yes?)
>
> As to the first, something like a PGPmail web of trust would work. E.g. you've
> never met me, but you probably have met Dino or TLi, and they have met me, and
> can confirm (in both directions) that we're real.
>
> As to the second, well, basic email isn't terribly secure (alas); however,
> there are a number of heuristics. First, for any list I'm on, I will
> certainly notice if a fake "jnc" starts posting! And you can look at the
> Received-from: headers to make sure the email came from where it says it came
> from. And it's easy enough to track me down and call me on the phone (again,
> people you know can verify that the phone number is real). Etc, etc...
>   

The point that I was trying to make is exactly that this is all rather 
squishy
as you  I'm sure agree with. Given the squishy nature of this, it seems
rather difficult to try to enforce broad authorizations (= anonymity vs. 
consensus
in this particular case). I'm not even sure I understand what 
"anonymity" means
in that particular context... that I can't google the email address and 
get enough
confirming evidence of non-doghood? I suspect that if we ever tried to 
codify
this sort of stricture, we'd soon wish we hadn't.

  Mike, could be a dog too
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Re: Possible RFC 3683 PR-action

2008-03-25 Thread Michael Thomas
Noel Chiappa wrote:
> > From: Peter Constable <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> > Frankly, it strikes me as somewhat odd that a body acting as a
> > standards-setting organization with public impact might allow any
> > technical decision on its specifications to be driven by people
> > operating under a cloak of anonymity. Expressing an anonymous
> > [criticism]? No problem. Influencing determination of a consensus with
> > public impact? That should not be allowed, IMO.
>
> Excellent point.
>
>   
So I've never met you, Noel. And I certainly don't have any reason to
believe that this email I'm responding to wasn't forged. How do I know
that you're not a dog?

   Mike
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Re: IONs & discuss criteria

2008-03-11 Thread Michael Thomas
Dave Crocker wrote:
> Mostly, we agree on these points.  Handled properly, placing review items in 
> an 
> issues list can be helpful to all parties, as long as each issue is clearly 
> stated and possible resolutions or constructive guidance are included.
>
> One caveat:  Sometimes it is the aggregate review that is most significant 
> and 
> breaking it into constituent 'issues' loses the broader concerns.
>   

I can't imagine dealing with something even vaguely contentious
without the issue tracker.  However as I've seen it used, there's a fair
amount of power in being able to declare on a wg list that something
is an ISSUE that needs to be tracked. In particular, I've seen a lot of
cycles expended on 'issues' that clearly have little or no following. It
can be pretty time consuming and disruptive.

Maybe we need some better gating functions to the issue tracker, but
it would have to be careful to not squash comments/issues from left field
(ie, from cross-area, disinterested, etc) with some crushing new process.

   Mike
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Re: a thanks to the Gen-ART reviewers

2008-03-08 Thread Michael Thomas
Andrew Newton wrote:
> To Eric, Spencer, and all the other Gen-ART reviewers:  Thank you.
>
> My experience with Gen-ART reviews has been very positive, and I  
> appreciate your work and effort.  I realize you weren't seeking public  
> praise, but your volunteer contribution to the good of the IETF should  
> be recognized.
>   

I have to say that I really like these and the cross area reviews a lot. As
an author/editor having to digest zillions of posts on the lists mixed with
time and entropy, it gets really hard to look at the draft with the 
critical eye
of somebody who might have to actually try to make sense of it. Not to
mention trying to determine what the draft says versus the lore that's
built up around it.

If I could make a suggestion, what might really be useful as well is 
collecting
implementation notes, and especially what throws people off when coding
up the draft, or implements things in new and unintended ways. Unintended
can sometimes be very cool, but often it's that the draft isn't 
sufficiently
precise.

  Mike, who tries to do this but given a cookie cutter form 
might do better

> On Mar 7, 2008, at 2:45 PM, Eric Gray wrote:
>   
>> Minimally, as one of the people to whom that has happened, it would be
>> nice if at least an initial ("thanks for the review and comments")  
>> mail
>> included the commenter, in every case.  Even a "I wish you would stop
>> bothering us with all of these silly comments" would be a response.
>> Of course, I presonally would prefer that that sort of response was  
>> not
>> addressed to the list, with or without me on it.  :-)
>> 
>
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Re: Transition status (was Re: ISO 3166 mandatory?)

2008-02-22 Thread Michael Thomas
My $.02 -- the new list software being used was using a new version
of Mailman that was stripping DKIM signatures out (which will be
fixed in later versions of Mailman). I contacted the support folks with
a config patch to stop doing that and it was implemented a day later.
I'd say that's pretty damn impressive.

   Mike

Dave Crocker wrote:
> Bill Fenner wrote:
>   
>> On 2/20/08, John C Klensin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> 
>>>  How much more of this will it take before you conclude that we
>>>  have a problem?
>>>   
>> John,
>>
>>   Forgive me for saying so, but this sounds like a very extreme
>> response to me.  (Unless the expected answer is "A lot")
>> 
>
>
>
> Since a) I'm a ready critic of anything IETF, and b) since John and I have 
> tended to agree about IETF operational problems, here's my own view on the 
> current status of the transition:
>
> Seems to be going pretty well and maybe even excellent.
>
> (My grammar engine tried to write 'excellently' but failed.)
>
> We flogged the issue of the strategic approach to changing IETF operations, 
> back 
> when it was moved from CNRI. While I thought, and think, that the strategic 
> issues were handled badly by the IETF -- no matter what criticisms of CNRI 
> one 
> might subscribe to -- that ship has long sailed, so current -- hmmm. pun. 
> current.  get it? -- concerns ought to focus on current operations.
>
> I was taught a long time ago to use a different model for operations quality 
> assessment than for engineering quality assessment. The difference is due to 
> the 
> jobs having different types and degree of control over output, as well as 
> tending to have differences in rewards.  Engineers are usually praised with 
> praise.  Operations (and especially administration) is usually "praised" by a 
> low complaint rate. It is easy to appreciate good engineering. All too often, 
> folks fail to communicate appreciation of good operations, but I think the 
> IETF 
> community has been better than average in expressing appreciation of IETF 
> operations staff.
>
> The cost of making a transition like this be nearly flawless would be very 
> high 
> and the sequence would be very slow, since it would include massive amounts 
> of 
> pre-testing and careful, iterative  consultation with IETF management and/or 
> the 
> IETF community.  The IETF doesn't run on that kind of budget or schedule, so 
> my 
> own criteria for a transition like this are:  1) is a problem due to 
> someone's 
> outright thoughtlessness or silliness, or 2) is the recovery from a 
> transition 
> problem handled badly -- for any reasonable definition of badly.
>
> I would not expect inherited tools to have been documented well or written 
> for 
> optimal portability.  So I'd expect the tools to present some challenges. 
> Equally, I'd expect new staff to demonstrate a learning curve, and that means 
> rough edges. Given that this is the IETF's second change in operations 
> administration in a very short time, I'd expect the current transition to be 
> particularly difficult.
>
> The number, type and rate of transition problems hasn't struck me as all that 
> remarkable.  Maybe low; maybe not.  Certainly hasn't seemed high.  To me, it 
> is 
> more important to ask how the problems that have occurred have been handled, 
> and 
> the handling has seemed quite good, both in the details and the tone. Fixed 
> quickly and with whatever adjustments as are needed to minimize damage -- as 
> opposed to inconvenience -- to those affected in the IETF community.
>
> If there are specific, higher-level changes to the transition or to basic 
> operations that ought to occur, we probably ought to see them raised 
> individually.
>
> d/
>   

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Re: [dkim unverified] Re: I-D Action:draft-rosenberg-internet-waist-hourglass-00.txt]

2008-02-14 Thread Michael Thomas
Jonathan Rosenberg wrote:
>
>> More heresy: maybe we should work on hacks to TCP to allow it to
>> have non-reliable e2e delivery so that it was more friendly to real time
>> protocols built on top of it.
>
> As you probably know folks absolutely have done this for exactly the 
> reason you cite.

No actually, I didn't know that... is this some kernel specific hacks to 
deal
with the head of line blocking problem? Or something else entirely?

   Mike
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Re: [dkim unverified] Re: I-D Action:draft-rosenberg-internet-waist-hourglass-00.txt]

2008-02-14 Thread Michael Thomas
Jonathan Rosenberg wrote:
> Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
>   
>> While I disagree with Jonathan's assertion that we should insert an 
>> entirely useless (for all but NAT) UDP header in front of all new 
>> protocols we design,
>> 
>
> Well, I'd hardly characterize, "allowing it to work across the public 
> Internet" as a property that is useless. Statements like, "useless for 
> all but NAT" trivialize what the Internet has evolved into. There is NAT 
> everywhere. Lets accept it and design for what the Internet is, and not 
> for the Internet as we wish it would be.
>
> You may not like it, but its reality.
>   

Well, if we're talking about reality, why don't we talk about UDP?
UDP is an imperfect fit for NAT's and firewalls because it's stateless
and the stateful ALG needs to educe state from those packets. If
it's an protocol riding on top of UDP, the ALG is bound to get it wrong
at times.  Which as far as I've heard happens all the time. As in, UDP
is no panacea.

If you really want to put a stake in the ground here, it seems to me that
TCP is on a lot firmer ground. Why else would a lot of these IM protocols
and things like Skype use TCP fallback? It's because it's the only thing
that reliably works and they're not in the business of navel gazing about
whether they shouldn't do that because of its architectural ugliness.

More heresy: maybe we should work on hacks to TCP to allow it to
have non-reliable e2e delivery so that it was more friendly to real time
protocols built on top of it.

   Mike


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dkim sign ietf lists

2007-12-20 Thread Michael Thomas

Lucy Lynch wrote:


As an old multicast warrior and a long time NOC volunteer I'd point 
out that we've been eating our own dog food for years. The world 
didn't end and the network never melted completely ;-). All the fine 
folks involved in *hard* technologies like DNSSEC, DKIM, mobility, 
multicast, new routing solutions, etc. should be following this 
discussion with a mixture of dread and befuddlement.



I'm not sure I'd say DKIM is a "hard technology" but... what would it take
to get all of the IETF lists signing with DKIM? How can I help?

  Mike

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Re: Spammers answering TMDA Queries

2007-10-04 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:

the problem I have with DKIM filtering is that it is only effective
for domains that can reasonably insist that all of the mail
originated by  users at that domain go through that domain's
submission servers.   this is a corner case, not the general case.   
  

Back in the day, we didn't have any of this VeePeeEn tomfoolery. I
could just telnet in and that was that. I'm sure that our IT folks
paid dearly in time, equipment, and support to throw up that wall, yet
they did it and as far as I can tell we all survived the move.  I
don't see anything especially different with mail: if you want
accountability, you have to do real live work -- part of which is
placing restrictions on access. TANSTAAFL.


what you are failing to see is just how much reliance on VPNs (and
source IPs) to do authentication cripples the network.  sure it's better
than nothing, but it's also very inflexible and an architectural dead end.
  


C'est la guerre. In fact, I'm well aware of all of those things, and 
I'll even allow
that our IT folks were probably aware of all of those things too -- they 
undoubtedly
took a lot of flak from the Eldar who probably said the same thing. I'm 
also pretty
sure that they would dismiss anybody who told them to tear out their VPN 
gear
because it cripples the network and is an architectural dead. Same goes 
for email.



sure the spammers will learn to not use DKIM domains, but they'll
just move to other domains, 
  

This is a feature, not a bug: I don't have to outrun the bear, I just
need to outrun you.


I'll remind you that as a condition to working in IETF we are all
pledged to use our judgment as to what's best for the Internet as a
whole...not just for those who can run faster than others.
  
I guess I must have been in the bar when they had that pledge of 
allegiance. But
even allowing that there is any such pledge, to the degree that we 
enable domains

to control who uses their name and be accountable when they behave badly is
certainly a net good thing IMO. Your original makes it sound like 
there's some
inherent right to be heard. There isn't. If you don't want to be 
accountable, then

maybe I just don't want to bother sorting your wheat from chaff.

  Mike

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Re: Spammers answering TMDA Queries

2007-10-04 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:

the problem I have with DKIM filtering is that it is only effective for
domains that can reasonably insist that all of the mail originated by
users at that domain go through that domain's submission servers.   this
is a corner case, not the general case.   


Back in the day, we didn't have any of this VeePeeEn tomfoolery. I could
just telnet in and that was that. I'm sure that our IT folks paid dearly 
in time,
equipment, and support to throw up that wall, yet they did it and as far 
as I
can tell we all survived the move.  I don't see anything especially 
different
with mail: if you want accountability, you have to do real live work -- 
part

of which is placing restrictions on access. TANSTAAFL.


sure the spammers will learn
to not use DKIM domains, but they'll just move to other domains, 

This is a feature, not a bug: I don't have to outrun the bear, I just need
to outrun you.

  Mike

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Re: Spammers answering TMDA Queries

2007-10-03 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

Speaking personally, I think annual reconfirmation is quite reasonable.
The message sent to the user should make it clear that it is an
annual process.


Except... the annual confirmation is probably going to get accidentally
deleted by a lot of people because they think it's the monthly notice.

If this is a real problem, wouldn't it be better to take it up with the 
mailman
folks since I'd expect that it's not just ietf? I've been working with 
them on

dkim related stuff and they are quite reasonable folks. Maybe they have some
ideas on this front.

  Mike

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Re: Spammers answering TMDA Queries

2007-10-02 Thread Michael Thomas

Paul Hoffman wrote:

At 6:49 PM -0400 10/2/07, Russ Housley wrote:

1025 mail addresses have "confirmed" their address.  I would bet that
at least 20% of the confirmed are spam addresses (or autoconfirmed
addresses)


Thoughts?


How was that 20% number guessed at?. If 200 spammers (or even 20!) 
were on the TDMA list, we should be seeing tons of spam on the lists; 
so far, we are not.

Maybe they're just harvesting addresses?

  Mike

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Re: ideas getting shot down

2007-09-19 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:

Paul Vixie wrote:
  


which is why i'm proposing a standard of "demonstrable immediate harm" rather
than the current system of "that's not how you should do it" or "that's not
how i would do it".
  


That's the wrong standard, it sets the bar way too low.  IETF shouldn't
endorse anything unless it has justification to believe it is good; IETF
should not discourage anything unless it has justification to believe it
is bad.   And that justification should come from engineering analysis
(or measurement, if it's feasible).  Sadly, a lot of people in IETF do
not have engineering backgrounds and don't understand how to do such
analysis.  This is something we need to change in our culture.
  


Feh, that seems awfully self-important to me (where "self" == "ietf").
"The IETF" (putting aside that it isn't a hive mind) isn't the ultimate
arbiter of good and bad, or useful/useless. Often there is utility to the
notion of "if you're doing to do this questionable thing, at least do this
questionable thing consistently". What you're advocating toes the best
is the enemy of the good line. Nothing would make the IETF
irrelevant faster than crossing that line.

  Mike

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Re: Symptoms vs. Causes

2007-09-12 Thread Michael Thomas

Christian Huitema wrote:

There are a large number of protocol designs--even existing
protocols--which are compatible with the general paradigm of "user U
proves possession of password P to server A without giving A a
credential which can be used to impersonate U to server B".
HTTP Digest, TLS-PSK, SRP, and PwdHash all come to mind. The
difficult parts are:

(1) putting a sensible UI on it--including one that isn't easily
spoofed (see the extensive literature on how hard it is
to build a secure UI.
(2) Getting everyone to agree on one protocol.



Please add:

(3) The chosen solution is immune to dictionary attacks.
  

Well if we're going here then:

   (4) The chosen solution requires that I have to remember zero or fewer
 non-dictionary passwords

  Mike

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Re: DNS as 1980s technology [was Re: The Internet 2.0 box Was: IPv6 addresses really are scarce after all]

2007-08-24 Thread Michael Thomas

Roger Jørgensen wrote:

On 8/24/07, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

  

No reason to attack him like you did and I specifically want to address
this because mailing lists have a much larger audience than their
participants. If such attacks are not answered it creates barriers for
new blood to enter into the IETF process. Please don't do this.



A wild guess from my side, I think quite some fresh blood are scared
of by the path they have to follow to get through with their ideas or
thoughts.

Not so much the way their questions are answered but it certainly
don´t help to be bitched at either:)
  

IMO, there is almost no point days of trying to engineer a protocol in the
IETF that doesn't have some real world grounding ahead of time. At the
very least, it shows that somebody(s) have made more of a commitment
than just getting another RFC number on their resume. This also neatly
routes around the damage of being shouted down while an idea is in its
infancy, and spares the ridicule if it really was a bond-headed idea since
you can abandon it instead of taking it to IETF. No such escape valve exists
for ungrounded/untested protocols, unfortunately.

I wonder what percentage of RFC's are stillborn these days.

  Mike

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Re: Review of draft-hartman-webauth-phishing-05

2007-08-22 Thread Michael Thomas

Sam Hartman wrote:

Ah.  I must admit that I find the whole concept of informational
documents a heck of a lot less useful, but your reading of 2026 is of
course correct.  I'll probably still end up treating informational
documents as close to ietf consensus statements (but not
recommendations) in my head because honestly I cannot find any other
way to think about it that makes any sense to me.  I certainly view an
informational docmuent that has gone through an ietf last call as a
statement from the IETF.  We'll add this to one of the many areas
where I completely fail to get RFC 2026.


I definitely don't want to block other work with this document.  I
think that to be particularly useful I'd like to get to a point where
we can say that having authentication schemes that meet these
requirements would be useful and that for some value of we
significantly greater than me, we think that would be a useful step
along the road to combatting phishing.  I thought I was trying to have
that discussion here; you at least seem to think that is not the case.
At some future point we might charter work with the goal of doing
something similar to those requirements; in such a case, we might
decide to hold that work to these requirements.  We're not discussing
doing that today.

If I believe there is a reasonable chance of success I'm willing to
put in significant effort towards achieving my goal.  Absent that
belief I'm more interested in getting something out and working on
running code.


So, Here is a proposed IESG note that I think is consistent with my
intent and RFC 2026:

This document proposes requirements for HTTP authentication that are
intended to help combat the problem of phishing.  These requirements
attempt to reduce the consequences of a user being tricked into using
a server provided by an attacker instead of the server they intended
to trust.  These requirements have no normative force; publication of
these requirements does not bind future work to follow them.
  


Sam, I guess the question I have is why an individual submission is actually
the right vehicle for this sort of document. From the outside -- though 
pretty
interested in the phishing problem -- I'd think that a more community 
consensus

type of document with more teeth (ie, some normative force) would be a
Good Thing if consensus could be found. I read quite a few of these 
comments

as being more of the nature that there wasn't a very good forum to shape the
content. I can sympathize with the notion that comments on IETF list during
last call for a document as important and likely controversial is 
insufficient.

This list is noisy enough after all.

  Mike

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requirement documents

2007-08-22 Thread Michael Thomas

Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
Part of the problem may be historical: Requirement documents are a 
relatively recent phenomena and likely postdate 2026. I suspect the 
original intent of informational documents was to document non-IETF 
protocols for the benefit of implementors, as well as record various 
other non-standards items such as April 1 poetry or workshop results, 
where it is pretty clear that this is the opinion of the author or 
some definable group, such as the IAB.


On the other hand, I have yet to see working group-issued requirements 
documents being used for anything except shadow boxing (and, 
occasionally, recording some early WG thinking), so maybe we shouldn't 
take them too seriously.

I have a less jaded view of requirement documents than Henning, but I
suppose I should since I've written a couple. They can certainly function
as Henning says, but for the last one I took on writing, the situation was
pretty dire: endless email threads, people talking past each other, complete
non-clarity on what the end goals -- and challenges -- really were, etc, 
etc.

If you add on top of that egos attached to concrete drafts which are often
not at all apparent what problems _they're_ trying to solve, it makes it
nearly impossible to even know what people even disagree on, let alone
agree on.

For that kind of situation, biting the bullet seems like a sensible way 
forward.

It's a pretty thankless job in many ways though in those situations: wading
through endless threads trying to make some sense of the cacophony is not
much fun. Yet it did settle things down to a great extent, even if it 
was mainly

from sheer exhaustion.

  Mike

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Re: e2e

2007-08-22 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:

I have no problem breaking bounce/redirect. Yes, it has its uses, but
so do open relays, which we don't have anymore. The current levels of
mail abuse means that it's necessary to throw away a little baby with
the bathwater to keep the toxic waste out of the bath.


sorry, this is a nonstarter.  being able to set a forwarding address is
extremely important, and breaking Sender is indefensible.  (Sender is
useless unless it preserves the original identity of who or what sent
the message.)

  

Yet, mangling forwarders which break signatures -- like this list -- are
indistinguishable from every day forgery. I agree that destroying
mailing list functionality is unacceptable, but we shouldn't kid ourselves
that there aren't unintended consequences from the original everybody-
trusts-each-other-group-hug assumptions present in the design.

  Mike

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Re: e2e

2007-08-20 Thread Michael Thomas

Fred Baker wrote:


What we need to do is figure out how to let the intelligent network 
core work cooperatively with the intelligent edge to let it do 
intelligent things. Right now, the core and the edge are ships in the 
night, passing and occasionally bumping into each other. 


Isn't that the essence of the problem though? That is, signaling between
trust domains is an inherently difficult thing to scale up? It seems to me
that even setting up static relationships within a semi-trusted domain is
pretty hard (say, so-called "Voice lans" or suchlike), but managing the
complexity of signaling just makes the eyes of operators to glaze over.

When I wrote that draft on rsvp vs. mobility vs. security ages ago, it
quickly became obvious that the combinatorics get quickly out of hand,
and that draft was just about the _theory_ of doing such a thing; gawd
help what the actual real life complexity is with different vendors, buggy
software, people trying to game such a system, etc, etc. Out of it I came
away with new appreciation for the power of Brute Force, and Ignorance
with respect to just throwing bandwidth at the problem.

So I guess I have to wonder whether ships in the night is such a bad
thing. One thing we do know is that reality has a tendency to distort
and magnify warts, even with seemingly "simple" applications. As
you add edge "tussles", the complexity seems to go through the
roof. Maybe these kinds of things can be done in small, centrally
marshaled  deployments, but for the whole internet?

  Mike, not advocating end-complexity-as-faith either

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Re: New models for email (Re: e2e)

2007-08-20 Thread Michael Thomas

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

I have a slightly different take from John here.

My strong belief is that a proposal for a new protocol that does the same thing 
as SMTP but slightly better is a total non starter. No matter how much better 
the protocol is the cost of transition will dominate.

The only way that I see a new email infrastructure emerging is as a part of a more general infrastructure to support multi-modal communication, both synchronous and asynchronous, bilateral and multilateral, Instant Messaging, email, voice, video, network news all combined in one unified protocol. 
  


You mean SIP?

  Mike

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Re: e2e

2007-08-15 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:

this is  not a way to make the network more robust.
  
  

Robust for what? Spammers? The simple fact of the matter is that the
alternative is to just shut down port 25 given the growth in both volume
and complexity to filter.  That ain't robust either. Dealing with false
positives is the cost of doing business on the internet these days.
Welcome
to reality.


people who cite "reality" generally do so because they lack
justification for their statements.
  


The thing is, Keith, I don't lack justification. I've seen the numbers with
my own eyes in our own largish organization with an IT staff that's
super paranoid about about false positives (free clue: guess who some of
our customers undoubtedly are?)

find a way to make reputation servers accountable to both sender and
recipient, then we can talk about robustness.  until then, they're just
another form of DoS attack.
  


Attacking people in the field as "DoS attackers" who are just trying to
get by given the escalating onslaught is... something. In that Cluepon
short of a Happy Meal kind of way.

  Mike

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Re: e2e

2007-08-15 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:

The communication system isn't being a filter, properly speaking - it
is simply routing some traffic to black holes using standard routing
technology. And it doesn't relieve the application of the burden of
filtering. But it can help reduce the volume of crapola at the
application. 


...at the cost of dropping legitimate traffic.  the thing is, the set of
valid senders for you and the set of valid senders for everyone at cisco
is very different, and the latter set is much fuzzier.  and those
reputation services won't take responsibility for the mail that you lose
by trusting them, nor are they accountable to the senders either.

this is  not a way to make the network more robust.
  

Robust for what? Spammers? The simple fact of the matter is that the
alternative is to just shut down port 25 given the growth in both volume
and complexity to filter.  That ain't robust either. Dealing with false
positives is the cost of doing business on the internet these days. Welcome
to reality.

  Mike

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Re: Do you want to have more meetings outside US ?

2007-07-30 Thread Michael Thomas
Would it really be so horrible to, say, have a per day rate? I know that 
there

are a lot of people who are only interested in one or two wg meetings and
would just assume go home instead of hanging around, kibbutzing in wg's
that you're only peripherally involved, etc. That in and of itself may help
improve the SNR...

  Mike

Edward Lewis wrote:

At 15:51 -0400 7/30/07, Matt Pounsett wrote:

I was talking to a couple of people this week about what I consider 
to be a
related issue: the fact that for the two or three wg meetings I'm 
interested

in, there's little point in me being at the meeting for a whole week.


I can relate, I left Chicago on Tuesday.

What about holding two or three meetings smaller meetings a year for 
each

area, and then just one big meeting for the full IETF?  That would bring
down the cost of the individual area meetings and therefore the 
admission
fee, make them smaller and therefore capable of fitting into a wider 
range
of hotels, and would likely result in fewer nights of hotel stay for 
a lot

of people.


This idea has been tossed around before.  The rationale for 
maintaining large meetings, all under "one roof" has been to maintain 
coherency across all of the areas.  I was told that there have been 
times in some other standards bodies where one area will develop a 
standard that is completely incompatible with a standard developed by 
another area.  ("I was told" meaning that I have forgotten  all the 
particulars of the story by now.)  While all we should need is the 
IESG to be present together, by the time you count up the areas and 
weeks in a year and the ability of the IESG to travel...we just keep 
up having our large conventions.


Take a look at this for an extreme counter example:
   http://www.itu.int/events/monthlyagenda.asp?lang=en


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Re: Updating the rules?

2007-07-07 Thread Michael Thomas

Robert Sayre wrote:


Also from the draft:
"At least for the strong security requirement of BCP 61 [RFC3365], the
Security Area, with the support of the IESG, has insisted that all
specifications include at least one mandatory-to-implement strong
security mechanism to guarantee universal interoperability."

I do not think this is a factual statement, at least when it comes to
HTTP, which is where my interest lies. [...]


On the other hand, I've seen with SIP where forcing the working
group to do this has been extremely counter productive. The reason
is that since it was backend loaded, ramming in S/MIME and TLS
was rife with mistakes and in the case of S/MIME was a solution in
search of a problem. Since we're talking about how things actually
turn out from process, it would be good to acknowledge that the
process in this particular case was ultimately counter productive:
instead of taking the time to get security right, we institutionalized
incorrect/non-interoperable behavior.

I seriously doubt that SIP is the only offender here as general clue
as to how to do this right is still arguably lacking, and it most
certainly doesn't get done in a fevered month before last call. IMO,
the process needs to take into account the reality of when we are
trying to graft security protocols onto implemented/deployed
protocols like SIP, SMTP...  It's an effort unto itself and needs
to be carefully considered, and hopefully by a group of people
whose goal is to make something that's _useful_ and _interoperable_
rather than just squeaking through the IESG mandated process.

  Mike

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Re: Should I* opinions be afforded a special status? (Re: [saag] Declining the ifare bof for Chicago)

2007-06-28 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

On 2007-06-27 17:42, Michael Thomas wrote:

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

One thing that would make a significant difference would be if WGs
really took responsibility for their own quality control. Even at the
trivial level, the IESG still gets drafts that don't pass ID-nits
(but that is getting better, thanks to PROTO shepherding). But maybe
we should be pushing harder to make WGs responsible for getting
final external reviews done (and responded to). That would just be
more delegation along the path that's been followed for the last
several years.


Part of the problem with cross area review is that there's such a flood
of documents that it's pretty impossible to know unless somebody 
tells/asks

you to review it that you should care.


Indeed. The current reviews such as Gen-ART and secdir reviews don't just
happen spontaneously; specific reviewers are triggered by a "dispatcher."


As I said, I'm a little skeptical about
"expert review", but for so-called experts as well as the laity in 
other areas,

it might be nice to have some indexing when it touches areas which are
known to contain land mines.


We also need reviewers to look for land mines in unexpected places.



We already do this to some degree with Security Considerations, but they
often read as a "Full Disclosure" part of a contract rather than the 
basis of

how operation security is intended in the draft itself.

What might be nice is to have some cross domain Cliff's Notes capturing
the jist of how this draft uses or affects other areas? So that 
people in other

areas can determine more easily if something whacky might be going on
and pique their interest in reading it? Were this done sooner in the 
process
rather than later, we well might be able to nip more whackiness 
before it

bubbles all the way up to the IESG.


It sounds like that would be done before passing the document
on for AD review. Is that your idea?


Yes -- well before. Maybe something something along the lines of
what it builds on, might impact, might be applicable to, etc. The
problem that I see is that there a fair amount of beg, borrowing and
stealing (good) and that is often done without the keepers of those things
knowledge until pretty late in the game (bad). Take DNS for example
since it's a favorite franken-building block. Would anybody in the
namedropper crowd be likely to know if, say, the routing crowd
was using DNS in some new way? Probably not. If, however, we
had a dashboard which named out the cross-area dependencies in,
oh say, the area section or the working group page or somewhere
like that it would at _least_ give you a clue that there might be something
interesting to look at in an area you normally pay no attention to.
  
  Mike


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Re: Should I* opinions be afforded a special status? (Re: [saag] Declining the ifare bof for Chicago)

2007-06-27 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

One thing that would make a significant difference would be if WGs
really took responsibility for their own quality control. Even at the
trivial level, the IESG still gets drafts that don't pass ID-nits
(but that is getting better, thanks to PROTO shepherding). But maybe
we should be pushing harder to make WGs responsible for getting
final external reviews done (and responded to). That would just be
more delegation along the path that's been followed for the last
several years.


Part of the problem with cross area review is that there's such a flood
of documents that it's pretty impossible to know unless somebody tells/asks
you to review it that you should care. As I said, I'm a little skeptical 
about
"expert review", but for so-called experts as well as the laity in other 
areas,

it might be nice to have some indexing when it touches areas which are
known to contain land mines.

We already do this to some degree with Security Considerations, but they
often read as a "Full Disclosure" part of a contract rather than the 
basis of

how operation security is intended in the draft itself.

What might be nice is to have some cross domain Cliff's Notes capturing
the jist of how this draft uses or affects other areas? So that people 
in other

areas can determine more easily if something whacky might be going on
and pique their interest in reading it? Were this done sooner in the process
rather than later, we well might be able to nip more whackiness before it
bubbles all the way up to the IESG.

  Mike

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Re: On Experts [Re: Should I* opinions be afforded a special status? (Re: [saag] Declining the ifare bof for Chicago)]

2007-06-18 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

On 2007-06-15 18:04, Michael Thomas wrote:

Thomas Narten wrote:


If a respected security expert (one who has reviewed many documents,
contributed significantly to WG efforts, etc.) comes to a WG and says
"there is a problem here", but 5 WG members stand up and say "I
disagree and don't see a problem", do you really expect the security
expert's opinion to be given strictly equal weight and to just be
overruled since 5 voices are greater than 1?
  

Context matters here. I've seen situations where the so-called "expert"
is unable to articulate the problem, is rocking a personal hobby
horse of theirs, is expressing a general philosophic point without much
attention to the actual problem (see "unable to articulate"). Etc. Also:
it may just be me, but this gradual creep toward "experts" having a
named, and different status is bothersome ("expert review"). It sweeps
under the rug that this is really a continuum of cluefulness, 
experience,

as well as frankly political considerations, some of which are more
odious than others.


Mike, just to try clarify the "expert review" issue. That term comes
up specifically for IANA assignments that are controlled more than
First Come First Served and less than RFC Required. There's a full
discussion in draft-narten-iana-considerations-rfc2434bis but my
short version is: we can't expect IANA to have in-house expertise
for every registry, and we don't want an IETF debate about every
relatively routine assignment. Having designated experts seems to
be the only reasonable and scaleable solution.


Yet, this not the only place where I've seen "expert review"...


I prefer personally to use a term like "specialist" for review
of drafts, or "generalist" in the case of Gen-ART reviews. You
can be a specialist without being an expert :-)

which I take to be what you're referring to here. Let me say that
I'm happy to get cross functional review whenever I can get it. But
the way that Thomas posed his question "should 5 wg ignorants
overrule one `expert'?" shows that there can be a downside when,
in fact, the `expert' is off in the weeds for the reasons (and more)
I mentioned above. Since "expertry" is really a continuum of
competence and that becoming a recognized "expert" is one part
clue, one part clique, and probably one part availability, we shouldn't
give their expertise _too_ much power -- especially on well worn
ratholes. Also: as this "expert review" thingy becomes more popular --
and powerful -- parceling it out to a single person has a tendency to
pave over what happens when subject area experts meet: they often
disagree. Therein lies danger for the unhappy working group on
the receiving end: you're just postponing that fight for later in the
process. Worse is when the "expert" demands satiation of a favorite
hobby horse, typically of the kind that other experts find either
uninteresting, or not worth the fight since there's no skin off their
nose.

So getting back to Thomas' question: as always with engineering,
"it depends.", and I hope that those sending out the "experts" are
cognizant of that as well.

  Mike

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Re: Should I* opinions be afforded a special status? (Re: [saag] Declining the ifare bof for Chicago)

2007-06-15 Thread Michael Thomas

Thomas Narten wrote:


If a respected security expert (one who has reviewed many documents,
contributed significantly to WG efforts, etc.) comes to a WG and says
"there is a problem here", but 5 WG members stand up and say "I
disagree and don't see a problem", do you really expect the security
expert's opinion to be given strictly equal weight and to just be
overruled since 5 voices are greater than 1?
  

Context matters here. I've seen situations where the so-called "expert"
is unable to articulate the problem, is rocking a personal hobby
horse of theirs, is expressing a general philosophic point without much
attention to the actual problem (see "unable to articulate"). Etc. Also:
it may just be me, but this gradual creep toward "experts" having a
named, and different status is bothersome ("expert review"). It sweeps
under the rug that this is really a continuum of cluefulness, experience,
as well as frankly political considerations, some of which are more
odious than others.

  Mike

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Re: consensus and anonymity

2007-06-01 Thread Michael Thomas

Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
This is not some hypothetical case. In that WG, there had been no 
consensus for a year+ and it seemed unlikely that one would emerge, 
except by exhaustion. Thus, the ADs proceeded with a vote, with the 
properties described previously, which was then used as a basis for a 
protocol decision. (Disclosure: I was at the losing end of that 
decision.)


You could have always done what megaco did: flip a coin. At least that's
pretty hard to game.

  Mike, "before we flip that coin, lets be clear on the question again:
  'heads I win, tails you lose' right?"


On Jun 1, 2007, at 2:02 PM, Michael Thomas wrote:


Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
The current process doesn't work very well when voting is required, 
after hum-style consensus has been inconclusive.

Why should voting be required? If the goal is consensus, "inconclusive"
shows that you haven't achieved it. Right? That seems to me that the
process is *working* as intended.

  Mike


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Re: consensus and anonymity

2007-06-01 Thread Michael Thomas

Henning Schulzrinne wrote:
The current process doesn't work very well when voting is required, 
after hum-style consensus has been inconclusive.

Why should voting be required? If the goal is consensus, "inconclusive"
shows that you haven't achieved it. Right? That seems to me that the
process is *working* as intended.

  Mike

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Re: consensus and anonymity

2007-06-01 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

On 2007-05-31 22:08, Michael Thomas wrote:

One thing that occurs to me is that in my initial message I implicitly
felt that the room hands/hums were a more accurate assessment of
consensus than the list. I guess that I should fess up that I've always
felt that the "consensus is determined on the list" is something of a
charming myth.


I don't think people unable to travel to meetings would agree. Since our
objective is to discover technical problems with a proposed consensus,
I think it's essential to allow any netizen to raise problems. One
email technical comment pointing out a serious flaw has far more weight
than a hundred people in a room going "mmm".


It seems that people have read more into my initial idea than I had really
meant. I only meant it to be limited to consensus calls on the mailing list
where somebody might not be comfortable publicly saying their +1.
This is orthogonal to the question of anonymity of somebody who doesn't
feel comfortable bringing up a technical problem on the list ala the example
of Dean on the SIP list recently.

The reason I say it's a charming myth is that the list is pretty lousy 
since it's

usually a very small set of people who will speak up. Ie, the protagonists.
At meetings, you get a broader sense including the intensity. As somebody
who hasn't been to the last few IETF's, I well aware of the "not being 
there"
part. Still, I think it's a myth that these hums are *just* the sense of 
the room

and no more. They're clearly a lot more than that as it almost always brings
a conclusion to some point of contention, and when it's brought up again on
the list you can almost always be guaranteed a "but we decided this in 
Oslo!".

Myth, meet reality.

  Mike

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Re: consensus and anonymity

2007-05-31 Thread Michael Thomas

Andy Bierman wrote:

Michael Thomas wrote:

I think the inability of the IETF to make decisions in
an open, deterministic, and verifiable manner is a major flaw.
It promotes indecision and inaction.


Is there any human decision making process that has all of these
characteristics? Or that even believes that those are axiomatic?


Dishonesty by the management is a problem regardless of what system we
have. Most wg's these days have two chairs, so collusion would need 
to be
at least that deep, and probably require an AD to be on board too. If 
that

really were the case, I doubt any system is likely to perform very well.



Only transparency can prevent corruption.


Preventing corruption is not the end product of the IETF. Producing
good/useful protocol specs is the end product of the IETF. Thus
"corruption" is just one consideration. Life is messy that way.


But this cultural thing does bug me. It seems unsatisfying to me that 
our

pat answer to cultural differences is "become more western".  The
language issue is already asking quite a lot of the rest of the world.



I don't see the cultural bias here.


Which culture are you from?

  Mike

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Re: consensus and anonymity

2007-05-31 Thread Michael Thomas

Andy Bierman wrote:

Spencer Dawkins wrote:

Just following up here...

From: "Lakshminath Dondeti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


But, I wonder why anonymity is an important requirement.  The 
mailing list verification has at least two properties that are more 
important to the IETF: the archives provide for anyone to be able to 
verify the consensus independent of the IETF hierarchy (chairs, ADs 
and whoever); further the archives provide a means to verify the 
consistency of any IETF participant, chairs or ADs at any given 
moment, candidates for WG chair and I* positions, and anyone in 
general.


We've been telling new WG chairs for several years that

- they really need to have most discussions in public/on mailing lists,

- we recognise that some people aren't comfortable challenging others 
in public, and


- we recognise that this discomfort may be more common in some 
cultures than in others.


So, for reasons that both John and Lakshminath identified, we've been 
asking WG chairs to encourage participants to engage in public 
discussions, but to be receptive to private requests for assistance 
on how to carry out those discussions.


The alternative - a WG chair who tells the working group that the 
apparent WG consensus on the mailing list is being overruled because 
of anonymous objections that the WG chair cannot share with the WG, 
or because of private objections that the WG chair is "channeling" 
from a back room - would make voting seem reasonable (or, to use Mark 
Allman's characterization in another thread, "seem charming").




This is not an alternative.
If you are not willing to make your technical objections to a technical
specification publicly, then they cannot be part of the IETF 
decision-making

process.


If that's true, then why do we have hums at wg meetings at all?
A hum doesn't give the reasoning; it's a binary quantity.


What's to prevent a WG Chair from "padding" the anonymous "votes"?
If 5 people in public (WG meeting or mailing list) are for some
proposal, and the Chair says, "I heard from 6 people who
are against this, but don't want their identities known, so the
proposal is rejected."  Not acceptable.


Dishonesty by the management is a problem regardless of what system we
have. Most wg's these days have two chairs, so collusion would need to be
at least that deep, and probably require an AD to be on board too. If that
really were the case, I doubt any system is likely to perform very well.

But this cultural thing does bug me. It seems unsatisfying to me that our
pat answer to cultural differences is "become more western".  The
language issue is already asking quite a lot of the rest of the world.

  Mike




Thanks,

Spencer


Andy

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Re: consensus and anonymity

2007-05-31 Thread Michael Thomas

One thing that occurs to me is that in my initial message I implicitly
felt that the room hands/hums were a more accurate assessment of
consensus than the list. I guess that I should fess up that I've always
felt that the "consensus is determined on the list" is something of a
charming myth. Of course if we went with the room consensus,
gaming the system would just be done by different means, so my
feeling shouldn't be taken as endorsement of that as an alternative.

  Mike

Lakshminath Dondeti wrote:
Oh, I understand cultural sensitivities, but I have never heard of not 
wanting to challenge in the public (except the disagreeing with the 
employer thing).  The problem with that is that if people don't like 
something and can't speak up or will only speak through a chair or an 
AD, it allows natural avenues for abuse.  The chair or the AD might as 
well be making decisions at that point.


Even anonymous voting has verifiability as the crucial part of 
requirements.


If our consensus process is not independently and openly verifiable, 
we might as well close shop!


Lakshminath

PS: BTW, I agree with Melinda that we should not allow a minority to 
block progress; in any type of consensus process, unfortunately some 
of us will be at the losing end of things.


On 5/31/2007 12:33 PM, Spencer Dawkins wrote:



The alternative - a WG chair who tells the working group that the 
apparent WG consensus on the mailing list is being overruled because 
of anonymous objections that the WG chair cannot share with the WG, 
or because of private objections that the WG chair is "channeling" 
from a back room - would make voting seem reasonable (or, to use Mark 
Allman's characterization in another thread, "seem charming").


Thanks,

Spencer


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consensus and anonymity

2007-05-31 Thread Michael Thomas

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

The problem with consensus is how you decide to count the undecideds/neutrals. 
In most cases of controversy there will be a small group pro, a small group con 
and the bulk of the WG will be somewhere inbetween. If the breakdown is 
25%/25%/50% a biased chair can effectively decide the outcome by choosing to 
interpret 'no objection' as 'no support' or vice versa.
  
One thing that occurs to me is that there is usually a huge disconnect 
between
the participation in hums at a meeting and the email equivalent on the 
working
group list. I'd say that it's typically between one and two orders of 
magnitude
at a meeting more hands/hums than on the list. And of course, on the 
list it's
usually just a rehash of the same active participants with a few 
stragglers thrown

in.

Maybe part of the problem with the "official" consensus taking on the 
list is

that it isn't sufficiently anonymous? It's pretty easy in a crowd to hum or
put up your hand in a sea of others; on the list, it requires quite a 
bit more

conviction. Apathy is the other likely reason, but there's not much we can
do about that short of working group demolition derby videos or suchlike.

So might having the ability to contact the chairs in private to register 
their

preference be reasonable? I don't recall seeing this in any of the working
groups I've participated in.

  Mike

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Re: [Geopriv] Confirmation of GEOPRIV IETF 68 Working Group Hums

2007-04-20 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian Rosen wrote:

The cable systems use the MAC address of the DOCSIS modem to determine which
subscriber is asking for location.  It's not perfect, because it is possible
to move a DOCSIS cablemodem from one house to another within some area
(often the service area of the CMTS, but in many systems, less than that).
The ability to move without detection is a problem the have for other
revenue sources and there is some effort being put into systems to detect
that kind of thing.  The incidence of moving the cablemodem without notice
is apparently very small.

You don't get the location of the server, you get the location of the
client.
  


That's only because there's an out of band arrangement with the MSO
and the subscriber. DHCP itself gives no such information. Wireless
substantially confuses the matter too. All it takes is two Pringle's cans
to cast that relationship in doubt.

  Mike

Brian

  

-Original Message-
From: Michael Thomas [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 9:39 AM
To: Brian E Carpenter
Cc: 'GEOPRIV WG'; 'Dawson,Martin'; ietf@ietf.org; 'Allison Mankin'; 'John
Schnizlein'
Subject: Re: [Geopriv] Confirmation of GEOPRIV IETF 68 Working Group Hums

Brian E Carpenter wrote:


On 2007-04-20 09:21, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
  

DHCP is not a great choice in a mobile environment and also not when
it comes to more complex location representations.


Why can't a mobile system have a locally valid DHCP record (+/- the
length
of a wireless link)? For that matter, why couldn't a DHCP server have
real-time triangulation data, if it exists at all?

Do you mean more complex than can be expressed by RFC 4776 and RFC
3825 together?
  

If you look at DOCSIS cable, a single head end can subtend a huge amount
of cable in a single bridged domain. I seem to recall that in a rural
Canadian
MSO I worked with it was 10's if not 100's of miles. I have no clue how
accurate GEOPRIV tries to be, but it sure seems that if the location of
the
headend/dhcp relay is only piece of information you have, your accuracy is
going to be pretty lousy in many cases. If this information is intended
for
first responders, it seems that all you're doing is pointing to the
right haystack
to start searching for the needle.

   Mike, who probably shouldn't open his mouth here

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Re: [Geopriv] Confirmation of GEOPRIV IETF 68 Working Group Hums

2007-04-20 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

On 2007-04-20 09:21, Hannes Tschofenig wrote:
DHCP is not a great choice in a mobile environment and also not when 
it comes to more complex location representations.


Why can't a mobile system have a locally valid DHCP record (+/- the 
length

of a wireless link)? For that matter, why couldn't a DHCP server have
real-time triangulation data, if it exists at all?

Do you mean more complex than can be expressed by RFC 4776 and RFC 
3825 together?

If you look at DOCSIS cable, a single head end can subtend a huge amount
of cable in a single bridged domain. I seem to recall that in a rural 
Canadian

MSO I worked with it was 10's if not 100's of miles. I have no clue how
accurate GEOPRIV tries to be, but it sure seems that if the location of the
headend/dhcp relay is only piece of information you have, your accuracy is
going to be pretty lousy in many cases. If this information is intended for
first responders, it seems that all you're doing is pointing to the 
right haystack

to start searching for the needle.

  Mike, who probably shouldn't open his mouth here

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Re: Tracking resolution of DISCUSSes

2007-01-16 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

On 2007-01-15 17:11, Michael Thomas wrote:



Michael Thomas, Cisco Systems

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007, Brian E Carpenter wrote:




Why not simply:
- copy all Comments and Discusses to the WG mailing list
- hold all discussions on the WG mailing list until resolution


Why would we do this for technical typos and other things that
are essentially trivial? I'd expect an AD to enter WG discussion
when raising fundamental issues, but not for straightforward
points.


  This seems sort of like a red herring to me: typo posts
  typically don't elicit much wg discussion in my experience.
  But please help me here: it seems that DISCUSS as currently
  instantiated is a conversation between the authors/wg chairs
  acting as liasons with the IESG. This sets up sort of a
  representative democracy kind of situation vs. a direct
  democracy that would be a conversation directly on the wg list.
  I can understand the IESG's desire for filtering, but that does
  place a lot of power in the hands of the wg's representatives.
  And power always begats abuse at some point... is this really
  what was intended?


Abuse wasn't intended, obviously, but delegation was.

Put simply, ~200 WG Chairs scale better than ~16 ADs.

 

This rather assumes that the chairs and/or authors are always able
to remember not only the material that is currently before the IESG, but
also the history of how it got there. As an author, it's hard enough to
keep track of the former and the latter is back in the realm of the 
super-human

again. So when you get a DISCUSS which may well involve the intricacies
of a very long and hard slog in the working group where many competing
parties finally agreed to a consensus... how as the representatives do 
you know

whether you are telegraphing the will of  the working group? It's very hard,
and at a late date it is *very* easy to make very basic mistakes again which
not only negate the consensus of the working group, but are potentially
just plain wrong. And that's assuming that there are no agendas, hidden or
otherwise.

So all in all, for an otherwise rather direct democratic kind of 
institution, I

find the implied(?) representative nature of the backend linkages, non-
transparency of process,  and the juxtaposition of a 
fresh-but-disinterested

ruling body next to the inured-but-interested working group sets the stage
for a lot of potential process problems/abuses/surrender-and-ship-it kind of
outcomes. That doesn't seem right.

 Mike
 


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Re: Tracking resolution of DISCUSSes

2007-01-16 Thread Michael Thomas



Michael Thomas, Cisco Systems

On Mon, 15 Jan 2007, Brian E Carpenter wrote:




Why not simply:
- copy all Comments and Discusses to the WG mailing list
- hold all discussions on the WG mailing list until resolution


Why would we do this for technical typos and other things that
are essentially trivial? I'd expect an AD to enter WG discussion
when raising fundamental issues, but not for straightforward
points.


  This seems sort of like a red herring to me: typo posts
  typically don't elicit much wg discussion in my experience.
  But please help me here: it seems that DISCUSS as currently
  instantiated is a conversation between the authors/wg chairs
  acting as liasons with the IESG. This sets up sort of a
  representative democracy kind of situation vs. a direct
  democracy that would be a conversation directly on the wg list.
  I can understand the IESG's desire for filtering, but that does
  place a lot of power in the hands of the wg's representatives.
  And power always begats abuse at some point... is this really
  what was intended?

Mike

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Re: IESG Success Stories

2007-01-05 Thread Michael Thomas

Spencer Dawkins wrote:

I strongly agree with John's reasoning here. But please keep reading...


[]

I really didn't want to take this off on this well trod tangent because
it was... pretty much a tangent. And I definitely didn't mean this turn
into some sort of grudgathon  :)
Now, backing off a few billion nanometers, When Michael kicked off 
this thread, his posting began:



So what occurs to me is that a reasonable question to ask is whether
there are some legitimate success stories where a DISCUSS has actually
found big or reasonably big problems with a protocol that would have
wreaked havoc had they not been caught. I ask because ...


My impression is that drafts that capture experience with IETF working 
group dynamics are painful and useful (thinking specifically of the 
case studies in the draft that became 
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3669.txt). I think Michael's question is 
important enough to answer. I think I can think of some examples where 
the answer is "yes", but this isn't about what *I* think, it's about 
what our experience has been.


Do other people think that collecting DISCUSS success stories is helpful?

I have two points to add -

- Michael asked specifically about SUCCESS stories. The level of 
cynicism in the circles I run being sufficiently high, I'm asking 
about the same thing Michael is asking about, where "success" matches 
the dictionary definition.


- if people want to collect DISCUSS "success" stories, of the more 
ironic nature, I ask that we do this, going forward, and not looking 
backward. Depending on how you count Jon Peterson, we seated new ADs 
for almost half the IESG last year, and we know that we will pick up 
at least a few more new ADs this year, because some people have 
already said they will not return. We don't need to replay 30 years of 
history, and even going back to the beginning of ID tracker use would 
be less than helpful.


If you have relevant deep dirt from the recent past, please feel free 
to file recalls and provide NomCom input, of course. But I hope 
everyone already knows that.

Right... my point here is that metrics are often eye opening -- for all
parties concerned. Even somewhat flawed and subjective metrics, so
long as they are taken with the proper grains of salt. My sense is that
if we did things like track DISCUSSes, time to resolution, length of
DISCUSS in proportion to, oh say, the length of the draft or oh say
the amount of time the working group took to get it to the IESG it
might frame some of these debates in something resembling reality.
Or as my initial suggestion about tracking whether these DISCUSS's
are paying off when you factor in that all engineering is a tradeoff.
As in, how do we know if the process is working? How do we know
if the angst from us non-IESG folk about delay is justified, or would
it have better spent trying impose discipline on the working group?

I guess I'm just a gprof kind 'o guy.

  Mike

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Re: IESG Success Stories

2007-01-05 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

Michael,

1. ADs physically don't have time to read intermediate drafts oustide
their own Area. So while they may suspect that a WG is heading in
a worrisome direction, they aren't in a position to do much about it.

2. ADs are collectively instructed by our rules to act as the reviewers
of last resort - it's the IESG that takes the final responsibility
to say a document is good enough.

3. Unfortunately, WGs do sometimes agree on drafts that prove to
have signifcant defects when critically reviewed outside the WG.

Put these facts together and you *will* get a reasonable rate of
significant (i.e. hard to resolve) DISCUSSes, and in the nature of things
they will come from ADs outside the Area concerned.

Brian --

My focus was actually a lot more narrow: I wasn't trying to insist
that AD's be super-human, and I honestly believe that the job they
do is extremely difficult. My gripe is when an outside AD takes an
interest in the work, goes to the f2f meetings, maybe reads the drafts
but then waits to IESG evaluation time to DISCUSS their issues. If
they know they have a problem(s), it would be *far* better to air that
sooner rather than later for all parties concerned. Doing this leads to
the perception of a imperious and capricious IESG.

This is a very different situation where you get a DISCUSS where
it's a surprise to all parties from an AD not involved at all; the former
should have been resolved  before it got to last call, the latter is the
process working correctly. IMO.

  Mike

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Re: IESG Success Stories

2006-12-30 Thread Michael Thomas

John C Klensin wrote:


If an AD who was responsible for a WG came up with an issue about that 
WG's work and raised it only during or after Last Call, I'd expect 
either a really good explanation or a resignation.  I certainly would 
not expect it to happen often. But, IMO, we have an IESG and, indeed, 
an IETF rather than a collection of different organizations addressing 
per-area issues precisely to increase the odds of catching serious 
cross-area and cross-perspective issues before things go out.  Like it 
or not, unless the relevant WG makes an effort to get broad reviews at 
critical "early" points, there will always be a risk of late surprises 
as someone --in the community during Last Call or on the IESG-- 
suddenly wakes up and says "but how does this relate to XYZ".


I was obviously not clear enough on my first post because I wasn't referring
to the shepherding AD or the poor AD's who have paid no attention at all
who are then tapped to do their job. It's really the in between AD's that I
think really exasperate the wg participants -- if they've paid enough 
attention

to attend the wg meetings and perhaps even subscribe to the mailing list and
registered concerns, I really think they owe it to the working group to 
either

get them out when the working group is in active issue resolving mode, or
to... well, just live with it. Or something. Frankly it does a lot of 
damage to
the IESG's reputation when you know that there's likely going to be 
trouble,

but there is nothing you can do to fend it off ahead of time because those
AD's have only given vague allusions to their non-amusement. It promotes
the vision of the unitary IESG which I think is a bad thing.


With regard to textual nit-picking and evaluation of worthiness of 
prose, I tend to agree with what I think you are saying. However, if a 
document is too badly written to permit interoperable implementations 
to be constructed without clarifying conversations among implementers, 
authors, and/or the WG, then the document is a failure and needs 
pushback.  As with late surprises, somewhat more proactive effort on 
the part of WGs could prevent many of the problems we see, but...


I was using "wordsmithing" rather broadly. My probably idiosyncratic meaning
of "wordsmithing" here was "will this DISCUSS change the mechanics of the
protocol or not". If the answer is no, we're really just making the document
more ready for publication IMO. Something that does bring that possibility
is obviously a lot more serious. It's been my admittedly limited 
experience that

my version of "wordsmithing" is a lot more common, and the source of a lot
of delay to varying degrees of dubiousness.

  Mike

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IESG Success Stories (was: "Discuss" criteria)

2006-12-30 Thread Michael Thomas

So what occurs to me is that a reasonable question to ask is whether
there are some legitimate success stories where a DISCUSS has actually
found big or reasonably big problems with a protocol that would have
wreaked havoc had they not been caught. I ask because it seems to me
that the main things that wreak havoc with protocols tend to be rather
subtle and not likely to be very visible to someone whose sum experience
with the work is their assignment to read the current draft. That's not a
slap at the people whose job is to review, only that it seems to me to
be asking for super-human abilities.

From my limited experience with DISCUSS -- and last call for
that matter -- is that the focus is far more geared toward wordsmithing
than actual mechanics of the protocol (from relatively disinterested
parties, that is). While I have no issue with tightening up drafts for
publication, it doesn't seem reasonable to be holding up the works
for endless amounts of time _just_ because  somebody -- or some
faction of bodies -- isn't convinced that a draft is the prose they
deign worthy.

The other thing that occurs to me -- and I know this has been brought
up in many different forms -- is that if an AD _was_ following the
working group to some degree, why is it legitimate for them to wait
for IESG evaluation to voice comments that affect the protocol's
operation? That is, why aren't they held just like anybody else to voice
those in WG last call when the WG is far more responsive to dealing
with issues? These "IESG Surprises" really hurt the community by
leading to the general perception that the IESG is capricious in a
royally anointed kind of way.

  Mike

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

More recalls?

How many have we had?

I looked into what it would take to engage the recall process. I don't think it 
is possible to use it without tearing the whole organization appart.


With reference to John's recent campaigns I note that we still have a situation 
where IETF practice is to employ a two stage standards process but the process 
documents describe a mythical three stage process.

The IESG appears to be unwilling to either change the process document to 
reflect reality or to begin applying the three stage process. And I don't even 
have visibility into the process to know which individuals are the holdouts. 
The only response I am ever going to get back is the passive voice 'people on 
the IESG were not happy with the proposal'.


This is a real business issue for me, not a theoretical one. I spend too much 
time having to counter FUD claims that some IETF protocol or other is 'merely' 
draft and that it should not therefore be considered. People in the Internet 
area understand the mendacity but this is not the case in banking. I can 
explain the fact that according to the IETF HTTP 1.1 is still a draft standard 
but in doing so I have to conceed the fact that the IETF processes are broken 
at which point the proprietary FUD peddled chips in.


There are cases where consensus does not work. This is one of them. There is 
clearly no consensus in the IESG to either follow the process document or to 
fix it to match current practice. So we have the organization stuck in a decade 
long deadlock.

This is where you need to have leadership (another thing that the NOMCON 
process is expressly designed to exclude).
 

  

-Original Message-
From: John C Klensin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Saturday, December 30, 2006 8:57 AM

To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: "Discuss" criteria

Dave, Scott,

At the risk of repeating what a few others have said in 
different form, a few observations.  Please understand that 
these comments come from someone who has been more 
consistently and loudly critical about even a hint of IESG 
arrogance and assertions of their power than either of you 
and who has formally proposed a significant number of ways of 
dealing with those problems --real or imagined-- than, I 
think, anyone else in the community... none of which 
proposals have gone anywhere.


I believe that, ultimately, the IETF has to pick IESG members 
who can do the job of evaluating documents and consensus 
about it and then let them to do that job.  And we had better 
pick people to do that job who technical judgment and good 
sense we trust.  If we can't do that, then we are in 
big-time, serious,
trouble: trouble from which no set of rules or procedures can 
rescue us.   Much as it makes me anxious, I think we ultimately 
need to let an AD raise a Discuss because he or she has a bad 
feeling in his or her gut... and pick people who will use 
that particular reason with considerable care and who will 
challenge each other and work to understand the objection and 
either better document it or remove it as appropriate.


If that discussion is abused in particular cases, I think it 
means that we need more appeals and, if there is a pattern, more 
recalls.   In a long-term tradi

Re: draft status links on the wg pages?

2006-12-18 Thread Michael Thomas

Dave Crocker wrote:



Bill Fenner wrote:

Mike,

 Check out http://tools.ietf.org/wg/ and see if that gives
you the view you're looking for.


Bill, thanks.  I suspect that's what Michael has in mind, except for 
one minor enhancement:  Put a link to that page on the working group's 
main IETF page.


A working group's main page really is its home page and, therefore, 
ought to bring together references to all relevant information.


Given that the Tools folk have created yet-another useful mechanism, 
making each working group's page have a link to its related status 
information now becomes a trivial effort, with substantial benefit.



Right, this is really cool -- although a link from the ietf wg page would be
nice, the tools version almost looks like wg page v2.0 with a few additions
(like the charter, milestones, etc.)

cheers, Mike

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draft status links on the wg pages?

2006-12-14 Thread Michael Thomas


First I have to say that I really like the draft tracker, and kudos for
those responsible for making it happen. In fact, I like it so much that
it seems to me that it would be nice to have a link directly to it from
the working group page with its list of drafts. Ie:

draft-foowg-bardraft-00.txt (link to draft) sts (link to the status tracker)
Even nicer might be to display the actual tracker state as, say, the button
itself.

  Mike

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Re: SRV records considered dubious

2006-11-22 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:

I don't expect there to be very many standards based protocols in the
future that are not Web Services.


I've seen lots of fads come and go, and so far I've seen nothing to
convince me that Web Services is not yet another fad.  Time will tell.


Angle brackets are now as inescapable as ASCII was twenty years ago.


Only for people who can't actually evaluate the consequences of protocol
design decisions at the presentation layer.

Admittedly, some things do get chosen by evolution.  We have 
power-of-two word sizes now, and all hardware these days has to deal 
reasonably efficiently with eight-bit bytes.  That's because these 
were found to work well over several decades of experience.  But there 
are lots of reasons to avoid representing all data in a format that 
requires all of that data to be examined looking for delimiters, 
sometimes multiple times, by every machine that touches it.



The point is that if you use a DNS Domain Name as the index you want
to use the DNS as part of the distribution mechanism.


The point is that the distributed information store that we currently 
know as DNS is separable from the protocol that we call DNS, and we 
can (if we are careful) design a new protocol that will let us access 
that information store more flexibly while still keeping the views 
consistent between the DNS protocol and the new protocol.

Sure, but is the trust anchor that DNS more importantly provides? On today's
internet with all of the vested interests could the devil we don't know 
possibly

be any better than the one we do? I can imagine the only reasonable name for
a working group that attempts that is BLACKHELICOPTERS.

  Mike

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Re: draft-kolkman-appeal-support

2006-10-17 Thread Michael Thomas

Gray, Eric wrote:


Sam, et al,

I doubt that noting an appeal has been determined to have merit
is especially useful.  As Sam implies below, it is possible to have 
controversy over this point, and any controversy is likely to mean no

annotation of "merit" will occur in many cases.

Ignoring for the moment the potential for recursion (do we need
to have supporters for the "merit" of an appeal after the fact?), it 
seems to me that it might be more useful to treat any appeal for which

there was not an absolute consensus that "no merit" could be ascribed
to the appeal, as an appeal with merit.
 



The reason I asked is because this is in the context of a (d)dos attack on
the appeals process. Some people are clearly more litigious than others, but
if the appeal at least has merit that seems a lot more acceptable than
those who keep bringing up baseless junk.

Maybe we need an IESG work duty program for problem appealers. No more
appeals until you've done X amount of community duty. I guess that requiring
that they wear orange jumpsuites might be a little over the top.

  Mike


--
Eric

--> -Original Message-
--> From: Sam Hartman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
--> Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 11:11 AM

--> To: Michael Thomas
--> Cc: John C Klensin; Ned Freed; ietf@ietf.org; Eliot Lear
--> Subject: Re: draft-kolkman-appeal-support
--> 
--> >>>>> "Michael" == Michael Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
--> 
--> Michael> John C Klensin wrote:

--> >> (1) The "supporter" procedure/requirement should be triggered
--> >> only is someone shows symptoms of being a vexatious 
--> appellant.

--> >> People who are entering their first appeals don't trigger it.
--> >> People whose last appeal was successful, even in part (that
--> >> would need to be defined, of course, and that might not be
--> >> easy) don't trigger it.  The only folks who need to look for
--> >> supporters are those who have appealed before and 
--> whose appeals

--> >> have been rejected as without merit.
--> >> 
--> >> 
--> 
--> Michael>   Can an appeal be rejected with merit?
--> 
--> Yes.  I think Robert's recent appeal was rejected that way.  I

--> personally think that Jefsey's appeal against the LTRU registry doc
--> set was a reasonable appeal although we declined to make 
--> any changes.
--> I suspect many people may disagree with me and argue that 
--> this appeal

--> was without merit.
--> 
--> I think the SPF and Sender ID appeals clearly had merit.  
--> I'm not sure

--> whether we rejected them though.
--> 
--> 
--> ___

--> Ietf mailing list
--> Ietf@ietf.org
--> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
--> 
 



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Re: draft-kolkman-appeal-support

2006-10-14 Thread Michael Thomas

John C Klensin wrote:


(1) The "supporter" procedure/requirement should be
triggered only is someone shows symptoms of being a
vexatious appellant.  People who are entering their
first appeals don't trigger it.  People whose last
appeal was successful, even in part (that would need to
be defined, of course, and that might not be easy) don't
trigger it.   The only folks who need to look for
supporters are those who have appealed before and whose
appeals have been rejected as without merit.
 



  Can an appeal be rejected with merit?

  Mike



(2) The definition of someone permitted to be a
"supporter" must, as several people have pointed out
(Ned, IMO, most eloquently), be broad enough to include
active IETF contributors who don't attend meetings.
One class of action that might need appealing would be a
procedural decision that would [further] impede the
ability of those people to effectively get work done in
the IETF and they _must_ have standing to appeal such
measures by themselves or in conjunction with others who
are similarly impacted.

I would have no problem with a requirement that someone
actually be a human being with some active interest or
involvement in the IETF -- what some other standards
bodies describe as a "materially concerned party".  But
requiring meeting attendance as proof of that seems to
violate all sorts of IETF principles.

(3) The idea that, if someone successfully appeals, or
supports an appeal, on one action, they should be
permanently barred from supporting similar appeals in
the future is seriously broken.  It could only have a
chilling effect on the generation of appeals, legitimate
ones as well as bogus ones, because one would want to
save endorsements for important-enough occasions.  It is
also at variance with a principle that has been
discussed recently on the IETF list wrt mailing list
behavior and complaints: how an appeal is processed and
considered should depend on its substance and merits,
not on the identity of the submitter.  This is
particular important if someone who is relatively more
familiar with IETF processes and fluent in English is
asked to prepare an appeal on behalf of someone who is
not -- a situation that, if anything, we want to
encourage since I believe that well-drafted appeals tend
to take less IESG and IAB time than ones in which those
bodies have to spend time figuring out what the real
problem is or what is wanted.

Now, clearly, the above has the implication of "one free appeal
per customer".  If the bad guys whom Olaf is trying to protect
against got themselves organized into a cabal, they could manage
a denial of service attack.   But I'm not sure that is a real,
as distinct from theoretical risk and, more important, I think
it is a risk we have to run if we want to have a viable appeals
process.

However, as I read the above, I wonder if the model of the I-D
is backwards and your observation about "vexatious litigants"
should be carried a bit further.  Suppose we consider this
situation as somewhat more like the mailing list abuse issue
than one in which we assume that every person filing an appeal
is the enemy until proven otherwise.  If we adopt a model of
that sort, then:

We change the possible responses to an appeal from, broadly,
"yes" or "no" to "yes", "no", and "no, and this is irrational
and/or obviously totally without merit".  The latter, which
could itself be appealed but not by the subject (only by someone
else on his, her, or its behalf),  would imply something
analogous to posting restrictions: a period in which the person
was barred from appealing, or needed supporters, or something
else.  Similar to posting restrictions, the requirements/
barriers could be escalated if they needed to be applied
additional times.

That is obviously just an outline with a number of details that
would need filling in, but it seems to me it has the important
property of shifting the balance from "everyone who considers
filing an appeal is presumed to be an attacker on the process"
to "those who abuse the appeals process get their leashes
shortened".  Since I believe that the ability to easily appeal
silly or inappropriate actions is a key part of our process
model --one that wards off the need for much more heavyweight
and complex procedures-- it seems to me that is the right way to
balance things.

john

p.s. for those who have had in-the-hall discussions with me
about appeals and prevention of DoS attacks in the last few
years.  Yes, I have changed my mind.   Making things harder for
those who use the appeals mechanisms to insist that the IETF
follow its own pro

Re: NOMCOM term limits... Re: Now there seems to be lack of communicaiton here...

2006-09-05 Thread Michael Thomas

todd glassey wrote:


I originally said two...and would prefer that.

What I am saying is that there should be a total of two or three instances
as a NOMCOM candidate and that is a much different statement than figuring
who is in office now and who is eligible...As to what it prevents-career
Internet Standards jockey's.

And since the purpose is to keep the IETF honest, I want the same term
limits for any and all IETF positions, including the TRUST as well.
 


I usually route around ietf political damage as much as possible, but the
real life experience at least here in California is that this is a load 
of hooey.
Term limits don't do any of these things, they just rearrange the deck 
chairs.
There will always be "Internet-Standards-Jockeys", it's just a question 
of whether
the power they wield is transparent or not. Making them move to the 
shadows --

as power brokers always do when they can't be in power themselves -- changes
the dynamic, but it doesn't do what you claim. The one thing that it *does*
do is create clue scarcity when that wasn't a necessary outcome before. 
Which

of course benefits the power brokers, not the process or constituency.

But if you really want to prevent "career Internet Standards Jockey's", why
not go to the root of the problem: IETF participation in general. Why 
wouldn't

it be a good idea to prevent people who've been participating for, oh say, 5
years to participate anymore? That would really clear out the dead wood.

  Mike

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Re: LA -> San Diego transportation (Was: Re: Meetings in other regions)

2006-07-19 Thread Michael Thomas

Dave Crocker wrote:


Clint Chaplin wrote:
 


One data point: IEEE 802 is in San Diego this week, and I've met at
least one attendee who flew through LAX to get here; that is, he took
LAX -> SAN as his last leg.
   



the flight is so short, one can feel guilty taking it.  however the effort to
rent a car from an airport, drive through Southern California traffic, and then
either have the car sit for a week or try to dump it upon arrival, all make
taking that short flight a reasonable choice.
 


Or go through SFO. Given the fixed time costs of getting a plane in the air
at all, the time difference between SFO and LAX are probably negligible.
Of course one must make certain that SFO's runways are both open...

  Mike

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+1

2006-07-15 Thread Michael Thomas


Is it just in my part of the ietf woods, or is this becoming a widespread
phenomenon? If so, is this a good thing or a bad thing?

On the one hand, it can be really difficult to get a feel for consensus on
a mailing list where silence may mean agreement, boredom with the
topic, or just... silence. And then there's the general problem that since
we're engineers  articulations of agreement generally start with some
form of "it depends". So maybe a short hand way of saying "this is
good enough for me, let's not go into the weeds by my agreeing for
potentially different reasons" is a generally Good Thing.

On the other hand, it sure seems like this sort of thing can be gamed.
That is, somebody posts something and three or four of the usual suspect
chime in with their +1 and lo and behold it looks a lot more like consensus
than the previous "it depends" tomes. But is it really consensus, or is it
just (benignly) a way for the usual suspects to signal to each other that
they are willing live with another's proposal (which is not to say that
that is necessarily a small thing in itself)? And what about when it's not
benign? Could it be that +1 could be a way to short circuit inspection and
debate in er, um, more, um, politicized settings?

That and it seems all so very me too!

  Mike

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Re: are we willing to do change how we do discussions in IETF?

2006-06-28 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:


I am still waiting to see a description of the defects you believe that you 
have identified in either forum. I have asked you to describe them here several 
times, you have refused.
   



And I've already partially explained why I'm not doing things that
way.  But in addition to that - mailing lists discussions are much
better at elicting knee-jerk reactions than encouraging thoughtful
reflection, and this is something that needs thoughtful reflection.

 


Let me see:

1) you don't want to read the wg mailing list
2) you don't want to have issues opened up on the issue tracker
3) you can't be bothered to write an ID when you said you were going
   do two years ago
4) we're approaching last call, and I'm going to assume you think you're
   entitled to have us stop and wait until you do write something up
5) in mean time, we're just going to have to take your word about the
   weapons of mass destruction^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
   problems with DKIM.

Is this your idea of "adult supervision" and "pipelining" that should be
emulated for and wide across IETF working groups?

  Mike

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Re: are we willing to do change how we do discussions in IETF?

2006-06-28 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:


No, Dave, you insisted on interrupting me and shouting me down when I tried
to raise these issues in the BOFs - doing your best to prevent me from making
my case.  


We had three bof's, and Dave was a chair of bof #2 only.

And you're not just one voice, you are one of the document authors.  
 



No he isn't.


As for rough consensus, you seem to forget that there are two necessary
conditions for standardization - one is rough consensus, the other is technical
soundness.  
 


Thus far, I see a huge amount of effort on your part at making disparaging
oblique remarks with no substance that anybody could act on if they were
so inclined. The last round produce the same harrangue with promises to
tell us why we're all screwed up and... no follow through. Until we see
some real follow through with real issues, I have to assume that you're
more interested in the art of harrangue than saving DKIM from the heathens.

  Mike

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Re: not listening

2006-06-26 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:


I also know that others have raised similar issues on the DKIM list
since then, and fairly recently.  But the current documents don't
reflect any awareness of those issues or attempt to address
them.   That's why I said "not listening".


 


We have from day one had an issue tracker. Please be specific.
   



I haven't looked at the issue tracker.  I've seen messages that were
posted to the list that were saying much the same things I said at the
BOFs and before the WG was chartered, and I've read the current
documents and seen that the issues are not addressed or acknowledged.
 

Which is to say that we have a process -- that we've published and 
followed --
and you couldn't be bothered to use it. Our issues tracker has been 
ridiculously
open to issues too, but still no issues, no specific complaints. The 
prerequisite of

listening is utterances somewhat crisper than "Harrumph".

  Mike

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not listening

2006-06-26 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:


I also know that others have raised similar issues on the DKIM list
since then, and fairly recently.  But the current documents don't
reflect any awareness of those issues or attempt to address
them.   That's why I said "not listening".
 


We have from day one had an issue tracker. Please be specific.

  Mike

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Re: are we willing to do change how we do discussions in IETF? (was: moving from hosts to sponsors)

2006-06-24 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:


There's already a means for "external reviewers" to do so: read the drafts,
make comments, add issues to the issue tracker. It's really  not rocket
science.
   


That's not quite sufficient, because most WGs aren't proceeding according to 
good engineering discipline (e.g. they're doing things in the wrong order, like 
trying to define the protocol before the problem space is understood), there's 
little external visibility of what the WG is doing (so it's difficult to make 
timely input without actually following the entirety of the mailing list 
discussion), and often, nobody with any authority over the WG is checking to 
see whether the WG is actually responding appropriately to such comments.  A 
more formal process is necessary.
 



By whose standard? If you think that's going on, I'd think it would be
appropriate to take it up with the relevent WG chairs and AD's. Last
I heard, they're the stakeholders.

Having some new sclerotic "pipeline" involved with the life 
blood of a

working group sounds like a recipe for working group infarction to me.
   



In other words, we don't want to distract WGs with useful input ... better that 
they should keep their heads in the sand for the entire 2-3 years of their 
existence and then produce irrelevant or even harmful output.  And that way, 
maybe a few influential people within the WG can coerce the WG into producing 
something that favors their employers' short-term interest even if it harms 
other interests or glosses over important limitations.
 


I repeat:


There's already a means for "external reviewers" to do so: read the drafts,
make comments, add issues to the issue tracker. It's really  not rocket
science.
 


What you seem to want is some sort of cabal of dilettants who
don't actually have to pay very much attention, but by their
rank alone get to exercise veto power. Yuck. I don't suppose 
you have anybody in mind for such an IETF version of landed gentry?


Mike

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Re: are we willing to do change how we do discussions in IETF? (was: moving from hosts to sponsors)

2006-06-24 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:

True.  Which is why it's necessary to handle the reviews in a pipelined rather than a stop-and-wait fashion.  But part of the reason IETF's process is so slow is that the 
only meaningful checks we place are at the end - so a working group typically labors to the point of exhaustion without having received any external feedback, so when the feedback does arrive the working group is so dysfunctional that it's nearly incapable of fixing anything (and it is often in denial about what is wrong).  Providing more early feedback will speed up the process rather than slow it down.
 


There's already a means for "external reviewers" to do so: read the drafts,
make comments, add issues to the issue tracker. It's really  not rocket
science. Having some new sclerotic "pipeline" involved with the life 
blood of a

working group sounds like a recipe for working group infarction to me.

 Mike

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Re: are we willing to do change how we do discussions in IETF?

2006-06-23 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:


On Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:18:40 -0400
"Burger, Eric" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

 


I would offer that in *some* groups the running code bar is reasonable.
   



I would have little objection to requiring running code as a test of 
feasibility of a new idea.  I would object strongly to an argument that just 
because someone has running code, means it's a good indication of adequacy of 
the protocol...DKIM is a great example of a poorly designed protocol that has 
been justified by running code.
 


This is simply untrue. The fact that we had running code across multiple
disparate code bases was offered only as an indication as to the maturity
of the draft. We never said that was the only reason or even the primary
reason that the working group should be formed and that it progress to
PS.  None of the participants that I've come across think that running
code trumps rough consensus -- both of which has been chugging alone
nicely, I'll add.
   
 Mike


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Re: are we willing to do change how we do discussions in IETF?

2006-06-23 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:


I would have little objection to requiring running code as a test of
feasibility of a new idea.  I would object strongly to an argument that
just because someone has running code, means it's a good indication of
adequacy of the protocol.
 

Specific examples aside, I agree.  Running code should be a necessary 
condition for something to progress, but not a sufficient one.
   



I think we would do well to require a reference implementation as a condition 
for Proposed Standards from new working groups or individual submitters...but 
there are other conditions that we should impose that are far more important.  
Such as, a requirement for formal cross-area review of the design goals 
document and of preliminary specifications as a prerequisite before producing a 
reference implementation.
 



How utterly sclerotic. And what is the IETF, the code police? If ever
there were a need to make the IETF utterly and completely beside the
point, this suggestion would be the perfect way.

  Mike

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ASCII is dead, long live ASCII (was: Image attachments to ASCII RFCs)

2006-06-16 Thread Michael Thomas

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:


John,

You mean that we should update the current medieval print format to 
take advantage of the best technology available to the Victorians?

Why go to all that trouble to create infrastructure to support an 
obsolete document format when we can get all the infrastructure required to 
support a modern, open format that delivers professional results for free?

	Moreover there is a much higher probability that third party tools will support a common W3C/IETF format than an IETF only format. 
 

Which tools would those be? Cat, tr, emacs, vi, grep, cut, sed, curses, 
wc, more or less?


Am a Luddite. I like ASCII. I despise PDF, and most especially its 
hideous anti-aliased
fonts. As software engineer, I don't need drawings that I can use to run 
a lathe or a
milling machine. Simple stick figures, ladder diagrams, and boxes for 
bits and bytes
are about all I really need to see to transform an RFC into code. As 
protocol designer,
the fewer Paper Clips sent by Beelzebub himself, the better. If it can't 
be edited using

the buffer gap method, I'm not interested.

Victorian? Pah. The death of Prince Albert of Ascii would require a 
minimum of a
year of  mourning, and a smart new black wardrobe for Phill. Not to 
mention a

cross sovereign.

  Mike, we are not amused.

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Re: Best practice for data encoding?

2006-06-07 Thread Michael Thomas

Theodore Tso wrote:


On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 08:21:29PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
 


More precisely -- when something is sufficiently complex, it's inherently
bug-prone.  That is indeed a good reason to push back on a design.  The
question to ask is whether the *problem* is inherently complex -- when the
complexity of the solution significanlty exceeds the inherent complexity of
the problem, you've probably made a mistake.  When the problem itself is
sufficiently complex, it's fair to ask if it should be solved.  Remember
point (3) of RFC 1925.
   



One of the complaints about ASN.1 is that it is an enabler of
complexity.  It becomes easy to specify some arbitrarily complex data
structures, and very often with that complexity comes all sorts of
problems.  To be fair, though, the same thing can be said of XML (and
I'm not a big fan of a number of specifications utilizing XML either,
for the same reason), and ultimately, "you can write Fortran in any
language".

Ultimately, I have to agree with Steve, it's not the encoding, it's
going to about asking the right questions at the design phase more
than anything else, at least as far as the protocol is concerned.

As far as implementation issues, it is true that ASN.1 doesn't map
particularly well to standard programming types commonly in use,
although if you constrain the types used in the protocol that issue
can be relative easily avoided (so would using XML, or a simpler
ad-hoc encoding scheme).  I don't think there is any right answer
here, although my personal feelings about ASN.1 can still be summed up
in the aphorism, "Friends don't let friends use ASN.1", but that's
mostly due to psychic scars caused by my having to deal with the
Kerboers v5 protocol's use of ASN.1, and the feature and design bloat
that resulted from it.
 

Here's my down in the trenches observations about XML and to some degree 
ASN.1.
XML gives me the ability to djinn up a scheme really quickly with as 
much or as
little elegance as needed. If nothing else, XML quite rapidly allows me 
to hack up
intpreters that would otherwise been another parsed text file casuality 
residing in /etc.
And most likely, if they could read the previous text encoding, the XML 
is about as
transparent. This is a very nice feature as it allows common parsers, 
leads to common
practices about how to lay out simple things, and common understanding 
about what
is right and wrong. So, for my standpoint XML is "no more ad hoc 
parsers!", which
is good from a complexity standpoint, especially when you look at how 
spare the

base syntax is.

That said, anything that requires nested structure, etc XML is probably 
just as

inadequate as anything else. And who should be surprised? Don't blame the
Legos that they self-assemble into a rocket ship. One big plus about XML is
that I can just _read_ it and hack up pretty printers in trivial time. 
ASN.1 that is,

um, abstract necessasrily needs to go through a translation layer which IMO
is never as fun and convenient -- and absolutely discourages dilitante 
hacking (when
is the last time you fiddled with an XML file vs. the last time you 
fiddled with

ANS.1? never for the latter?).

I guess that what part of what this devolves into is who we're writing these
protocols/schemes for: machines or people? That, I think, is a huge false
dilemma. We clearly are writing things for _both_ (the executors and the
maintainers) ; the only question in my mind is whether an easy for human
to maintain encoding is too inefficient on the wire for its task. In some
cases it clearly is, but those cases are becoming the outliers -- especially
at app layer -- as the march of memory and bandwidth plods on.

So with all of these wars, the sexy overblown hype ("yes of course XML can
solve world hunger!") often eclipses the routine and mundane tasks of 
writing
and maintaining a system (golly, I need a config file for this, it's 
been a while

since I wrote a really crappy parser. woo woo!). C'est la vie.

  Mike

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Re: Best practice for data encoding?

2006-06-05 Thread Michael Thomas

David Harrington wrote:


I agree that complexity breeds bug-prone implementations.

I wasn't around then; did anybody push back on SNMPv1 as being too
complex? http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2002-03.html is mainly
about SNMPv1 implementations. ;-)
 



I wasn't there to push back, but when I got asked to implement it back then
the Simple part such seemed like something between a fib and the Big Lie.
Did we really need ASN.1 to define a debug peek/poke-like protocol?

  Mike


dbh

 


-Original Message-
From: Steven M. Bellovin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 8:21 PM

To: David Harrington
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; ietf@ietf.org
Subject: Re: Best practice for data encoding?

On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 20:07:24 -0400, "David Harrington"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

   

Hi 


The security problems identified in
http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2002-03.html "Multiple
Vulnerabilities in Many Implementations of the Simple Network
Management Protocol (SNMP)" are not caused by the protocol choice
 


to
 

use ASN.1, but by vendors incorrectly implementing the 
 


protocol (which
   


was made worse by vendors using toolkits that had the problems).

If "Multiple Vulnerabilities in Implementations" were used 
 


to condemn
   


the encoding methods of protocols that have been incorrectly
implemented, then we would have to condemn an awful lot of IETF
protocols as being very (security) bug prone: 

 


Works for me

More precisely -- when something is sufficiently complex, 
it's inherently
bug-prone.  That is indeed a good reason to push back on a 
design.  The
question to ask is whether the *problem* is inherently 
complex -- when the
complexity of the solution significanlty exceeds the inherent 
complexity of
the problem, you've probably made a mistake.  When the 
problem itself is
sufficiently complex, it's fair to ask if it should be 
solved.  Remember

point (3) of RFC 1925.

I'll note that a number of the protocols you cite were indeed 
criticized
*during the design process* as too complex.  The objectors 
were overruled.


--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb

   




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Re: IETF lists as RSS?

2006-04-26 Thread Michael Thomas

Alexandru Petrescu wrote:


Is it possible to read content of the IETF lists (WG discussions,
announce, etc) as RSS feeds?  I think the IETF doesn't provide it as
such, but is there maybe a gateway mailman-rss that would allow to read
it so?

Please excuse if the technical formulation is aberrant, I'm just getting
familiar with RSS feeds.  The problem I have is that I'm subscribed to a
relatively many IETF (and non-IETF) lists, some that I browse more often
than others, and the mailbox is quickly exceeding my provider's
capacities, as well as many other providers' I guess.  Changing
subscriptions to all lists is painful (even if IETF offers a IETF-wide
change option, not all do) and I wouldn't go through it again, but maybe
one last time.


Perhaps this is unhip and in the way, but mail2news might be a solution
here.

  Mike, gnus r00lz

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Re: Jabber chats (was: 2 hour meetings)

2006-03-25 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

Just a general comment: I think that as far as decision-taking
is concerned, we need to treat WG jabber sessions (and
teleconferences) exctly like face to face meetings - any
"decisions" taken must in fact be referred to the WG mailing
list for rough consensus. Otherwise, the people who happen
to attend a particular jabber session or teleconference have
undue influence.

So, it would be OK for a WG chair to write to the WG

"On yesterday's jabber session, there was a strong consensus
to pick solution A instead of B. The arguments are summarized
below and the full jabber log is at X. Please send mail by
 if you disagree with this consensus."

It would not be OK to write

"On yesterday's jabber session we decided to pick solution A."


Yep, that's exactly what I had in mind -- a proxy for actual
f2f meetings to hopefully cut down on the thashing about on
the list itself as people are just trying to understand one
another.

Mike

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Jabber chats (was: 2 hour meetings)

2006-03-24 Thread Michael Thomas

Keith Moore wrote:
sometimes I find remote participation (via audio streaming and jabber) 
more effective than actually attending the meeting.  I sometimes am 
surprised to find that the extra distance makes it easier for me to see 
what is relevant.  I also think it might be less distracting to attend a 
meeting from my own office than to be in a room full of people who 
aren't paying attention.


Maybe there's an intermediate between email and full f2f time?
Something like having well known jabber chats to simulate the
quickness of f2f conversation without having to be there? There
is some amount of precedence for this with the IESG's telechats.
They could be structured like regular wg meetings with moderation,
etc for well known ones, and the same room could be reused for
ad hoc/sidebar discussions when not in use.

Mike

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Re: Guidance needed on well known ports

2006-03-20 Thread Michael Thomas

Noel Chiappa wrote:

> From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

>> Another option, now that I think about it, though, is a TCP option
>> which contained the service name - one well-known port would be the
>> "demux port", and which actual application you connected to would
>> depend on the value in the TCP option.

> Like tcpmux, port 1, RFC 1078?

You know, as I was typing that, I was thinking "I'll bet someone has something
that does this, and I just don't know about it, and I'm going to look dumb as
toast"... Sigh... :-)

Which leaves us the obvious question: why aren't more people using TCPMux, if
it already exists?


Because port 80 exists?

Mike

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Re: Venue requirements - canoe?

2006-03-20 Thread Michael Thomas

Sounds a lot more like a distributed denial of service attack
to me.

Mike

Gray, Eric wrote:

Sounds to me like this comes under the Transport Area - at least
as far as flooding control is concerned.  Avoidance of flooded
paths, on the other hand, might be a routing Area problem.

--> -Original Message-
--> From: Steven M. Bellovin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
--> Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 11:09 AM

--> To: Tim Chown
--> Cc: ietf@ietf.org
--> Subject: Re: Venue requirements - canoe?
--> 
--> We clearly need to tell the Routing Area to work on better flooding

--> algorithms.
--> 
--> 		--Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
--> 
--> ___

--> Ietf mailing list
--> Ietf@ietf.org
--> https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf
--> 


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Re: "too many notes" -- a modest proposal

2006-01-31 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:


Eliot Lear wrote:


Douglas Otis wrote:


I suspect that at the moment, I am the guilty party in consuming
bandwidth on the DKIM list.  With the aggressive schedule, the
immediate desire was to get issues listed, corrected, and in a form
found acceptable.  



Without going into all the reasons why here, I asked Doug to separate
out issues into separate messages.



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.


Is there really a working group that can realistically deal
with a dozen separate issues in parallel? I know that when I
see a dozen or so issues posted to a mailing list, my eyes
glaze...

Mike

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Re: IETF65 hotel location

2006-01-27 Thread Michael Thomas

John Levine wrote:

Cue ten further emails describing various Google Earth mashups that
correlate restaurants with capacity, wait time and geek acceptability 



If we could morph it into a signup system that distributed people
according to restauant capacity and avoided the problem that someone
says "I hear there's a burrito place on X street" and a herd of 300
IETFers shows up there, since they don't know any other places to go,
then you'd really have something.


I'm afraid it's beyond IETF's expertise to come up with
distributed burrito processing protocols.

Mike

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"too many notes" -- a modest proposal

2006-01-25 Thread Michael Thomas

It seems to me that a lot of what causes working group lists to
melt down is simply the volume of traffic -- usually with plenty
of off-topic banter, or exchanges of dubious value, with the resulting
conjestive collapse of our wetware buffering. On good days, the
drop algorithm may be more sophisticated than tail drops; on
bad days...

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".

in all modesty, Mike

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Re: bozoproofing the net, was The Value of Reputation

2006-01-04 Thread Michael Thomas

Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
[]

Sigh. Can I suggest that a little exponential backoff on
all parts may be appropriate? As one of the authors of the
dkim draft, this has been an extremely painful thread to
watch.

Mike

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Re: WG Review: Domain Keys Identified Mail (dkim)

2005-12-22 Thread Michael Thomas

John C Klensin wrote:

In addition, there is, I think, one other approach that might be
appropriate, but only in very limited circumstances.  That
approach applies where there is a well-thought-out approach with
design team consensus, evidence of implementation, and no
clearly-identified technical concerns.Then, and only then, I
think that an approach of "the WG gets to challenge the base
spec and assumptions, but to change them only if there is good
reason and consensus to do so" is plausible with a standards
track target.  I think that XMPP, and the XMPP language,
probably is an instance of that case.

Other than claims and counterclaims, I've seen little that would
permit the IETF community to form a consensus about exactly what
stage the DKIM work (and implementation, deployment, and
demonstrate that it accomplishes whatever is being claimed) is
really at, a consensus that seems to me to be necessary to
determine whether it should be chartered as a WG if  there are
going to be any restrictions at all on what that WG can
consider.  That strikes me as sad since, beyond philosophical
debates, it seems to me to be the key issue.


I obviously think it's closer to #4 than anything else. Note
I wasn't weighing in about whether this piece of word-smithy
vs that was better or not, just my concern that the lack of
negotiation/feedback make the backward compatibility problem
far more nettlesome than other protocols that have that
luxury. There is a substantial risk that a bunch of gratuitous
thrashing around -- or worse a greenfield makeover ala MEGACO --
will cause this effort to crater. Given MARID, I don't think
we get many chances and that this is really a situation where
the best is the enemy of the good.

As such, I think it's reasonable for the charter to limit the
scope of changes to those that will really tighten up the mature
parts of the specs instead of a, IMO, futile -- and destructive --
trip back to first principles. False dichotomy? Maybe, but not
out of the question if there is no limit at all, and that's
pretty bothersome for those of us who advocated taking this
to ietf and tried really hard to make this look like
something that would pass ietf muster.

Finally, I understand that for many people there are larger
principles at stake about the nature of ietf, etc, etc. I can't
tell you how thrilled I am that we are the posterboy for _that_
argument.

Mike

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Re: WG Review: Domain Keys Identified Mail (dkim)

2005-12-22 Thread Michael Thomas

Cullen Jennings wrote:

My current understanding is that the deployments
are small enough that changes are still easy and that non backwards
compatible changes are already expected. 


Mail is, in fact, pretty different than most IETF protocols
insofar as it's a store and forward system where there can
be no expectation of end to end negotiation which is generally
helpful for smoothing out protocol botches and incompatible
changes. With mail every time you make an incompatible change,
you have to hope that the receiver at the far end is in synch
with that incompatible change or you're pretty well hosed. With
each one the utility of the protocol is divided and conquered.

I'm not sure who Keith was talking about with his broad brush
assertion -- there are probably about 30+ people who've had
a hand in the creation of the current drafts before we ever
brought it to IETF, but my concern is that given complete
lattitude the resulting thrashing around will produce an
extremely narrow intersection between compatible senders
and receivers. Which will constitute failure in all likelihood.

On the other hand, I think its really a stretch to say that
we are unwilling to listen, or that we're looking for a rubber
stamp. We have already agreed to -- and incorporated -- a
substantial backward incompatible change (the canonicalization)
due to feedback (and threats) we got. What I'm hoping for
is that there is a sufficiently high barrier that cosmetic
changes not be good enough reason to make a backward incompatible
revs. Equally disasterous would be to throw this entire area
open for a greenfield design; considerable time and effort
has been expended, and frankly Keith's observations don't
strike me as new or novel -- we've been at this for many
years at this point, and his points have been hashed and
rehashed many times over the years by the people who have
been paying attention to this more than just the week
before and after a BOF.

Mike

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Re: Petition to the IESG for a PR-action against Jefsey Morfin posted

2005-09-30 Thread Michael Thomas

Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

It doesn't make me feel good either. But the alternatives I saw were:

- Don't do anything, and let Jefsey continue doing damage
- Make a solo proposal (or one with its supporters gathered privately) 
to the IESG for a PR-action

- Be public, and see who else agreed with my opinion


what about:

- killfile the person and encourage others to do the same?

Is Usenet really that distant of a memory? And the dynamics
would probably work the right way too: on Usenet, there can
be an amusement factor associated with the abuse bottom's
torment which makes for a sustained feedback loop. But this
is a professional organization, not an electronic cocktail
party so I'd expect convergence more often than the feedback
loop.

This leaves the chairs who would have to deal with the person,
but one would assume that it would eventually get lonely doing
write-only posts and eventually go away. Only if that didn't
work should the posting death penalty be contemplated, IMO.

Mike, with no opinion on the specific case

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Re: delegating (portions of) ietf list disciplinary process

2005-09-28 Thread Michael Thomas

Dean Anderson wrote:
[adhomirama]

Regardless of all of this officialdom, might it be useful
to put together a list of h:j equivalents for Thunderbird
and other popular mail clients to make this list a more
enjoyable read?

Mike

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Re: net.stewards [Re: BitTorrent (Was: Re: [Isms] ISMS charter broken- onus should be on WG to fix it)]

2005-09-16 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

Michael Thomas wrote:

I know that we aren't the net.cops, but are we not
net.stewards either?



Up to a point, but there are limits to what we can do.

We can request that the RFC Editor not publish things we think
are damaging. The IESG does this a few times a year. Similarly,
we can request that IANA not register things we think are
damaging, or at least to label them as potentially dangerous.

We can publish screeds about damaging practices. The IAB does this
a few times a year.

We can try to develop non-damaging solutions for requirements where
the easy solutions are damaging, and we can try to repair our own
damage (as HTTP 1.1 repairs HTTP 1.0)


This is more or less what I had in mind. Correct me if
I'm wrong, but http 1.0 wasn't the invention of the ietf,
but sprang forth outside of its purview. Http 1.1 was a
response to the many difficulties placed on the net because
of http 1.0, and there was an active feedback loop between
the http world and the net (ietf) world to adapt both at
layer 7 as well as below. Http, after all, was The Big
Thing for all parties, so it's not surprising that there
was active cross interest.

What facinates me about p2p is that it was clearly the
next Big Thing, but there seems to be no feedback loop
operating whatsoever. I guess that surprises me. Thomas
brought up qos/diffserv and operator business models which
is certainly something ietf clue level could assist on, but
it seems that we neither know them, nor do they know us and
that both sets of people seem satisfied with that. I'm not
saying that it's bad -- it's just a very surprising outcome.
Ought both sides be that confident that the net as engineered
today is what it needs to be for this Big Thing and the
Big Thing after that? Or that our fertilization is really
the correct mix to prepare the ground for the next Big Thing?


But we can't prevent people from deploying solutions that we
didn't develop, and we shouldn't even try to IMHO.


I wasn't suggesting control, but much more that the cross
pollination of clue isn't happening and whether we should be
alarmed about that. In particular, what does that say about
ietf? Some have suggested that it means that we've done our
job, but that strikes me as a wee bit too self-satisifed
for my taste.

Mike

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Re: BitTorrent (Was: Re: [Isms] ISMS charter broken- onus should be on WG to fix it)

2005-09-15 Thread Michael Thomas

Scott W Brim wrote:

On 09/15/2005 17:09 PM, Paul Hoffman allegedly wrote:


At 1:50 PM -0700 9/15/05, Michael Thomas wrote:


Which is pretty much the elephant in the room, I'd say. How
much of the net traffic these days is, essentially, not in
any way standardized, and in fact probably considers ietf
old and in the way?


Not sure why this is an elephant; who cares? I have seen numbers that
show that a huge percentage of traffic is P2P of various flavors, but I
haven't seen anyone saying that this is having any negative effects.



The metaphor I'm trying to use this week is that the IETF is
landscapers and we provide a fertile, beautiful area for people to go
wild and create excellent gardens.  What you're describing is not a
bug, it's feature.  It means the IETF have done their job.  If there
were interoperability problems in the fundamental and/or widespread
technologies being used in the Internet, then there would be a problem
(we're working on those).  Congratulations.


Perfect. And then someone with less clue decided to
plant Kudzu. We have nothing to say about that?

I know that we aren't the net.cops, but are we not
net.stewards either?

Mike, asking.

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Re: BitTorrent (Was: Re: [Isms] ISMS charter broken- onus should be on WG to fix it)

2005-09-15 Thread Michael Thomas

Paul Hoffman wrote:

At 1:50 PM -0700 9/15/05, Michael Thomas wrote:

Which is pretty much the elephant in the room, I'd say. How
much of the net traffic these days is, essentially, not in
any way standardized, and in fact probably considers ietf
old and in the way?



Not sure why this is an elephant; who cares? 


  I'm not sure; maybe it's really a mutual non-admiration
  society, and everybody's happy? But it's an elephant
  insofar as it's pretty darn big trafficwise, and the
  fact that ietf doesn't seem concerned?

I have seen numbers that 
show that a huge percentage of traffic is P2P of various flavors, but I 
haven't seen anyone saying that this is having any negative effects. 


  I don't think this is _entirely_ true: p2p stuff definitely
  has, um, interesting effects on, say, voip at home, and some
  of the p2p apps -- especially the earlier ones if I recall
  correctly -- had some pretty nasty effects on various networks.

  Are we to believe that they are largely self-healing problems
  as bad p2p apps will eventually correct themselves since it's
  in their interest? Is it reasonable to believe that there is
  enough general clue that they could be expected to do that?
  And the collective clue of the ietf is not really needed to
  help this along?


I'll note that many protocols -- good and bad -- spring from
somebody's head. Some of them become successful too. Very
successful. And ietf has no say about them at all. Is this
the new reality?



But for layer 7 protocols, file sharing 
may be the only major market that has wholly ignored the IETF.


  This isn't that unusual really, but what facinates me
  is that the reverse seems true as well.

Yes, if one that has bad congestion control becomes popular. But, given 
the mindshare of BitTorrent these past few years, that seems pretty 
unlikely.


  But surely BitTorrent isn't the last one that will come
  along. I guess the base question is this: is the net robust
  enough to really allow experimentation with flash crowds of
  millions of alpha testers? So far it has, but we're layering
  more and more stuff onto the net too -- like voip -- that
  are pretty sensitive to average expectations (I'm thinking
  about things like Vonage, not managed services). Is that
  a danger for the overall internet architecture? That is, is
  there a price for this benign neglect that has yet to surface?

Mike

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Re: BitTorrent (Was: Re: [Isms] ISMS charter broken- onus should be on WG to fix it)

2005-09-15 Thread Michael Thomas

Paul Hoffman wrote:

At 5:32 PM -0700 9/14/05, Michael Thomas wrote:

You mean we could invent Bitorrent? :)



BitTorrent (note the spelling) does a lot of very nice things, but not 
those. For those interested, the BitTorrent protocol is described at 
<http://www.bittorrent.com/protocol.html>.


Always the risk when one is being flippant, but I only
meant that the world outside of ietf seems to be taking
on a lot of these issues without ietf's advice and consent.




Mike, doesn't it strike others as odd
 that ietf is completely outside of the
 p2p bizness?



In this case, there is no advantage to the developer of the protocol to 
have it worked on in the IETF, nor even published as an RFC. It came out 
of one person's head, he was able to experiment with it live on the net, 
and he retains the ability to tweak the specs whenever he feels like it. 
It has worked remarkably well, given the variety of clients and servers 
available for the protocol, and the huge amount of traffic that is moved 
daily over it.


Which is pretty much the elephant in the room, I'd say. How
much of the net traffic these days is, essentially, not in
any way standardized, and in fact probably considers ietf
old and in the way?

I'll note that many protocols -- good and bad -- spring from
somebody's head. Some of them become successful too. Very
successful. And ietf has no say about them at all. Is this
the new reality? Sure seems like it to me. Should we be
concerned? Might there be film at 11 at some point because
of it?

Mike, or is it too soon for another
 ietf ossification thread?

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Re: [Isms] ISMS charter broken- onus should be on WG to fix it

2005-09-14 Thread Michael Thomas

Ned Freed wrote:

Ned Freed wrote:
> If I were to object to Eliot's proposal (I don't - in fact I strongly
> support
> it), it would be on the grounds that the IETF should be taking a long
> hard look
> at the issues surrounding call home in general, not just in the special
> case of
> SNMP.




I'll bite: what could the IETF do if it looked
long and hard?



Well, the one approach that immediately comes to mind is that the 
introduction

of a third party might provide a means of getting timely information about
software updates without sacrificing user privacy.

Such a third party would act as a repository for update information 
provided by

vendors. Applications would then "call home" to one of these repositories
rather than directly to the vendor. Various anonymyzing tricks could be
employed to minimize information leakage even if the third party was
compromised.


You mean we could invent Bitorrent? :)

Mike, doesn't it strike others as odd
 that ietf is completely outside of the
 p2p bizness?

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Re: [Isms] ISMS charter broken- onus should be on WG to fix it

2005-09-14 Thread Michael Thomas

Ned Freed wrote:
If I were to object to Eliot's proposal (I don't - in fact I strongly 
support
it), it would be on the grounds that the IETF should be taking a long 
hard look
at the issues surrounding call home in general, not just in the special 
case of

SNMP.


I'll bite: what could the IETF do if it looked
long and hard?

Mike

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Re: ISMS working group and charter problems

2005-09-07 Thread Michael Thomas

Margaret Wasserman wrote:


Hi Mike,

At 8:41 AM -0700 9/7/05, Michael Thomas wrote:


In answer to Margaret's question about how it would know
where to "call home", it seems to me to be about the same
problem as with traps/informs. I haven't had anything to do
with this wg, but it seems pretty plausible that you'd
initiate the session from the agent using a trap/inform
over tcp/ssh/whatever and then just reuse the connection
for subsequent pdu's sort of akin to http 1.1 reuse. It
would just all sort of fall out of the overall snmp
architecture.



So, every time a notification sender sends a trap or notification it 
would set-up a TCP connection to each of the notification receivers in 
its list and keep that connection up indefinitely?  Would it reestablish
ithose connections when they fail?  How long would it keep a connections 
up if it never receives a command request on that particular 
connection?  Please remember that not all notification receivers _are_ 
command requestors, and not all command requestors are notification 
receivers.


I think there's a fair amount of room between "never" and
"indefinitely" on how/when to keep a connection up. As I
mentioned, http 1.1 seems to handle this and if nothing
else we certain have a lot of data about its efficacy.

I do think that if you built a mechanism for a command responder to open 
a connection to a command requestor, the MIB for configuring the new 
mechanism might resemble the MIB that is used to determine notifications 
should be sent, but I don't think that it will be identical and I do not 
think that the current MIB should be overloaded in this way.


Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that http 1.1 was
pretty spartan on any sort of settings and/or negotiation
of the kinds of parameters you brought up. That is, each
side decides for itself what those values ought to be, and
the provisioning of them is out of scope. Since the web is
essentially an any-any kind of environment, is there some
reason to believe that a more restrictive relationship --
as one would expect manager to managed to be -- would bring
new or  different considerations than we already have a lot of
experience with?

BTW, nothing about your note explains to me why you think that this 
mechanism should be defined in a Security area WG that is working on a 
completely separable problem.  If you really think that defining call 
home for SNMP is something that the IETF should do, I would encourage 
you to get together with Eliot and request a BOF in the OPS area.


That's because I haven't formed an opinion on it. My main point
is that this doesn't seem to me to be any sort of wildly divergent
architectural proposition, at least on the front of who "initiates"
a connection. As Harald pointed out, I really can't see how you'd
prevent some industrious developers from using SNMP in this way
regardless of how the working group is chartered, and from that
standpoint it might be better to get ahead of the ball on it if
it were inevitable, and it does seem to have a fair number of
security considerations.

The question I have for Eliot though is why he believes that SNMP
is the right vehicle for this kind of "call home" functionality
in the first place. Maybe it's my own prejudice, but SNMP seems
a little klunky for what I'd envision "call home" is trying
to achieve.


Mike

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Re: ISMS working group and charter problems

2005-09-07 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:
And just BTW: I find "call home" reasonable to specify too, once 
you've done TCP. It's obvious enough that I think it will be added to 
implementations whether or not we specify it, so we should have very 
strong reasons not to do so.



"Call home" is IMHO a fairly radical departure for SNMP and
raises trust model questions that I don't find easy to get
hold of. It seems quite distinct from both firewall traversal
and NAT traversal, conceptually, even if they might be
a side-effect of calling home.


Really? What is a trap/inform but a "call home" by another
name?

In answer to Margaret's question about how it would know
where to "call home", it seems to me to be about the same
problem as with traps/informs. I haven't had anything to do
with this wg, but it seems pretty plausible that you'd
initiate the session from the agent using a trap/inform
over tcp/ssh/whatever and then just reuse the connection
for subsequent pdu's sort of akin to http 1.1 reuse. It
would just all sort of fall out of the overall snmp
architecture.

Mike

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Re: what is a threat analysis?

2005-08-17 Thread Michael Thomas
This thread began as a complaint against a particular requirement being 
imposed on a particular pre-working group effort. 


No it did not. Stop imputing my motives.

Mike

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Re: what is a threat analysis?

2005-08-16 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

Ned Freed wrote:


Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> Michael, you've had some quite concrete responses which I hope
> have clarified things, but I really want to say that making
> Internet protocols secure isn't a hoop jumping exercise; it's
> more like a survival requirement, and has been for ten years
> at least.





Where did I say that?




Of course you didn't, and the implication that you did say that was 
nothing but
a strawman, a tactic I'm sad to say often seems to crop up in 
discussions on

the IETF list.



Excuse *me* but Mike's note that I was responding to said (in part):


So, if this is going to be yet another hoop that the IESG and IAB
sends working groups through like problem statements, requirements
documents and the like, I think it ought to be incumbent on
those people demanding such things to actually both agree and
document what it is that they are demanding.



He explicitly raised the question of hoop jumping, which for me at
least carries a strong implication of pointlessness. That's what
I was responding to.


So you've fixated on the word "hoop". Fine. Delete it
and the original question still stands.


More recently he said:


Do you seriously think you could write a "threat analysis"
given the definition in 2828?



which reads
  "$ threat analysis
   (I) An analysis of the probability of occurrences and consequences
   of damaging actions to a system."

As a glossary definition, that seems admirably clear. 


I repeat: could you write a threat analysis based upon the
definition in 2828? That was suggested by somebody as being
adequately defined for my original question.


For a complex case,
I'd expect to ask some experts for help in determining the type of
threats to be considered in particular. And I would study 3552 carefully,
warts and all. But the bottom line is that this is hard work to get
right - compare the Security Considerations of RFC 3056 with RFC 3964
for example.


The reason I brought this to this list is because there's
no clarity about what is meant by a "threat analysis", though
it seems to be cropping up more and more in the IETF process
(look ma! no hoops!). If it's going to be part of our process,
then I think its incumbent on those who want to impose the
process to be clear about what they're asking for, and for
that process to not be an idiosyncratic. The waste of time
here is not the process per se, but the work on drafts,
etc, that are not what the person making the demand is asking
for. Do you have an objection to clarity in process?

Mike

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Re: what is a threat analysis?

2005-08-12 Thread Michael Thomas

Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:

One small point.

--On 11. august 2005 07:52 -0700 Michael Thomas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:


Brian E Carpenter wrote:


Michael, you've had some quite concrete responses which I hope
have clarified things, but I really want to say that making
Internet protocols secure isn't a hoop jumping exercise; it's
more like a survival requirement, and has been for ten years
at least.



Where did I say that? My issue is that if people are going
to invoke process, they should be prepared to define what
the process is. And not just hand waving; concrete pointers
to documents that have been through the rough consensus
mechanism so that all parties can shoot for a common
goal.



I did not hear at any stage Russ claiming that asking for a threat 
analysis was "invoking process". He was asking for information that 
would allow him to make up his mind about whether or not to support DKIM 
becoming a WG.


Then maybe we can call it a "process gate", or something else
entirely. My main point still remains: if you're going to
impose conditions, it seems only fair that the conditions
be understandable by all concerned, and most especially if
multiple people are calling for the same process gate that
they actually _agree_ on what constitutes at least the form
of fulfillment. This conversation here has thus far not
relieved any of my unease that there really is any such
agreement across all those who think this is a good process
gate.

As far as I know, there is no formal process called "ask for a threat 
analysis". Some people would argue that there should be, and if that 
argument were to be adopted, it should certainly have guidance attached 
to it.


My feeling is that it's probably a good thing for requirements
drafts to talk about. In the case of a security protocol, it
seems very reasonable that requirements are derived at least in
part from the threats they are intended to address. Non-security
protocols would probably do very well to consider up front what
the security requirements are in any solution space.

Mike

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Re: what is a threat analysis?

2005-08-11 Thread Michael Thomas

Stephen Kent wrote:

Folks,

I thought that what Russ asked for was not a threat analysis for DKIM, 
but a threat analysis for Internet e-mail, the system that DKIM proposes 
to protect. The idea is that only if we start with a characterization of 
how and why we believe adversaries attack e-mail, can we evaluate 
whether any proposed security mechanism, e.g., DKIM, is appropriate, 
relative to that threat analysis.


That's pretty much my guess, but at least 2 other people
guessed completely wrong. Which is really why I'm vexed
by this -- why should we have to be guessing in the first
place? As I said, at least 5 members of the IESG or IAB
piped up about this as if it were self evident.

Here's something I wrote a while back which I intend to
dust off and propose as the basis for a formal requirements
draft that we have promised in our charter. Sections 4 and
5 are kind of what I would think of as being asked here as
a threat analysis, but as I've stated, I'm not really sure
that this jibes with what other people think is being asked
for.

http://www.mtcc.com/standards/draft-thomas-mass-req-00.txt

Mike

PS: this still needs some editing, especially in the requirements
section, so don't take this as my current position...

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Re: what is a threat analysis?

2005-08-11 Thread Michael Thomas

Brian E Carpenter wrote:

Michael, you've had some quite concrete responses which I hope
have clarified things, but I really want to say that making
Internet protocols secure isn't a hoop jumping exercise; it's
more like a survival requirement, and has been for ten years
at least.


Where did I say that? My issue is that if people are going
to invoke process, they should be prepared to define what
the process is. And not just hand waving; concrete pointers
to documents that have been through the rough consensus
mechanism so that all parties can shoot for a common
goal.

And to answer your question, no it hasn't been answered
because I've yet to hear from the people -- and there were
many on both the IESG and IAB -- who were asking for it.
Do you seriously think you could write a "threat analysis"
given the definition in 2828?

        Mike



   Brian

Michael Thomas wrote:


Having a "threat analysis" was brought up at the plenary by Steve
Bellovin as being a Good Thing(tm). At the MASS/DKIM BOF we are
being required to produce such a thing as a prerequisite to even
getting chartered as a working group. The problem that I have (and
Dave Crocker at the plenary) is that there doesn't seem to be
any definition of what a "threat analysis" is. Contrary to what
it seems many people demanding such a thing suppose, the term
isn't self evident. Maybe I've missed it but I'm not sure that
I've ever seen one. Worse, I'm not very sure that the people who
were telling us that we needed one could easily be able to come to
consensus on what constitutes a threat analysis.

So, if this is going to be yet another hoop that the IESG and IAB
sends working groups through like problem statements, requirements
documents and the like, I think it ought to be incumbent on
those people demanding such things to actually both agree and
document what it is that they are demanding. This is not just
annoyance at yet more process on my part, but a real desire to
not have people waste a lot of time producing documents that
fail to meet a definition that is otherwise only determined by
multiple iterations of "that's not what we want". This is, in
fact, what happened this time around, and has happened in the
past with the SIP wg.

Mike

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what is a threat analysis?

2005-08-10 Thread Michael Thomas

Having a "threat analysis" was brought up at the plenary by Steve
Bellovin as being a Good Thing(tm). At the MASS/DKIM BOF we are
being required to produce such a thing as a prerequisite to even
getting chartered as a working group. The problem that I have (and
Dave Crocker at the plenary) is that there doesn't seem to be
any definition of what a "threat analysis" is. Contrary to what
it seems many people demanding such a thing suppose, the term
isn't self evident. Maybe I've missed it but I'm not sure that
I've ever seen one. Worse, I'm not very sure that the people who
were telling us that we needed one could easily be able to come to
consensus on what constitutes a threat analysis.

So, if this is going to be yet another hoop that the IESG and IAB
sends working groups through like problem statements, requirements
documents and the like, I think it ought to be incumbent on
those people demanding such things to actually both agree and
document what it is that they are demanding. This is not just
annoyance at yet more process on my part, but a real desire to
not have people waste a lot of time producing documents that
fail to meet a definition that is otherwise only determined by
multiple iterations of "that's not what we want". This is, in
fact, what happened this time around, and has happened in the
past with the SIP wg.

Mike

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Re: Port numbers and IPv6

2005-07-15 Thread Michael Thomas

Ned Freed wrote:
 Mind you, I'm not saying that TCP needs to be redesigned ASAP to  allow

for a
larger number of source ports. IMO the pain would probably outweigh the 
gain.
But that doesn't mean nobody is hitting the 65536 limit imposed by 
source port

numbers. They are, it causes problems, and this needs to be kept in mind.



Out of curiosity, doesn't SCTP have a bigger port space (or its
moral equivalent)? If so, would that be a better option?

Mike

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Re: BOF: SLRRP

2005-02-24 Thread Michael Thomas


On Wed, 2005-02-23 at 10:32, Marshall Rose wrote:
> may i draw your attention to the Simple Lightweight RFID Reader 
> Protocol BOF being held at IETF 62?

Isn't putting not just one, but _two_ diminutives
into a name severely tempting the gods?

Mike


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RE: Excellent choice for summer meeting location!

2004-12-31 Thread Michael Thomas
On Fri, 2004-12-31 at 12:39, Glen Zorn (gwz) wrote:
> > let's keep going to minneapolis for as long as they'll tolerate
> us,
> > and let's try to find summertime destinations that are equally
> > appalling to the MFLD community.  paris, in that regard, should be
> > OFF the table.  
> 
> Don't worry, O Calvinist Guardian of Virtue: there is little
> pleasure to be found in Paris in August; the cafes will be
> shuttered, even the cab drivers will have left the city.  

IETF puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, 
somewhere might be having a bottle of Lamarche
Vosne Romanee "La Grande Rue".

Mike, '88 was a pretty good year


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Re: Why, technically, MIP and IPv6 can't be deployed

2004-11-09 Thread Michael Thomas
I think that this begs the question of where the
larger problem lies: while IP can run over pigeons,
bailing wire and quite possibly chewing gum, there
are clearly some media that IP runs over better. Looking
at the various wireless media, they are either somewhere
between completely hopeless (cellular with its purpose
built PSTN roots) to "overhelpful" (bluetooth) to sort
of ok for a first order approximation (802.11). IMO, what we
need are radio networks whose L1/L2's are built with IP in
mind first and foremost -- not afterthoughts, not "one of
many". 

There are surely some things that IP -- both v4 and v6 -- could do
better, but what they will never be able to do is 
work well over a broken L1/L2. Until we have  wireless
media which are trying to work with rather than at cross
purposes with IP, it really doesn't matter what IETF 
specifies.

Finally: I rather get annoyed when L1/L2 people tell me
"that's not the way our L1/L2 works!", blah, blah, blah.
Fine. Engineer us something that does work; stop telling
us to engineer for broken media. IP has won in the
marketplace in case they have been asleep for the last 10 years.

Mike

On Tue, 2004-11-09 at 04:14, Masataka Ohta wrote:
> Tim Chown wrote:
> 
> IPv6 is defective in so many ways. But, w.r.t. WLAN, here is the
> reason.
> 
> > Could you describe why exactly IPv6 can't run on the (layer 2?) WLAN
> > infrastructure?
> 
> That ND extensively, without any valid reason to do so, use
> multicast, which is not acknowledged at WLAN L2, means IPv6
> or its ND is unreliable over congested WLAN. If multicast
> ND packet is lost by congestion, it is not retransmitted by L2.
> 
> MIP failed mostly because there has been no standards MIP over
> link technologies, which are adaptation layers between L2 and L3.
> 
> RFC2002 does not specify anything about how CoA addresses can
> be obtained, which is fine, if and only if there are other
> specifications on link or provider dependent ways to do so.
> 
> IPv6 made it worse by trying to standardize ND as *THE* adaptation
> mechanism, even though the mechanism *MUST* depend on details of
> L2 and *MUST* be different L2 by L2.
> 
> As a result, IPv6 won't stably run over WLAN, multicast over which
> has characteristics much different from wired Ether.
> 
>   Masataka Ohta
> 
> 
> 
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Re: IETF60: time needed for check-in at San Diego?

2004-07-22 Thread Michael Thomas
Michael Richardson writes:
 > -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
 > 
 > 
 > > "Fred" == Fred Baker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
 > >> Try to get a direct flight or through San Francisco.
 > 
 > Fred> I hear that. But (west coast perspective...) I avoid SFO like
 > Fred> the plague. When fog sets in, they shut down one runway, and
 > Fred> flights throughout the US get delayed. And what is San
 > Fred> Francisco famous for?
 > 
 >   Ah, but that's why the lineup at SFO is so much shorter!
 >   And, if the flights are delayed, it's okay if the lineup is longer.

It's clear and sunny here today. Can't imagine
what this scurrilous "fog" hearsay that Fred's on
about.

Mike, but west of twin peaks
  doesn't count


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Re: Chinese IPv9

2004-07-05 Thread Michael Thomas
JORDI PALET MARTINEZ writes:
 > Complete compilation of news at 
 > http://www.ist-ipv6.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=622
 > 
 > But I guess is an hoax ?

   Or the revenge of J*m Fl*mm*ng?

  Mike, 4 is to 6 as 6 is to 9?

 > 
 > - Original Message - 
 > From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 > To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 > Sent: Monday, July 05, 2004 5:05 PM
 > Subject: RE: Chinese IPv9
 > 
 > 
 > > See also:
 > > 
 > > http://www.chinatechnews.com/index.php?action=show&type=news&id=1405
 > > 
 > > Google gives about 4000 hits for IPv9.
 > > 
 > > Including of course RFC 1606
 > > 
 > > :-)
 > > 
 > > Gordon
 > > 
 > > -Original Message-
 > > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
 > > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 > > Sent: Monday, July 05, 2004 3:15 PM
 > > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 > > Subject: Chinese IPv9
 > > 
 > > 
 > > Hi,
 > > 
 > > a german computer magazine reported that China
 > > is developing their own IP address scheme as
 > > IPv9 ( http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/48859 )
 > > in order to improve "security" (probably spelled: censorship).
 > > They cite
 > > 
 > > http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-07/05/content_1572719.htm
 > > 
 > > It is to be used inside China, and they will have routers
 > > as gateways to ipv4 and ipv6 and the borders of China
 > > (obviously not letting everything pass through).
 > > 
 > > Does anyone know details about this protocol?
 > > 
 > > What's the IETF's opinion (if IETF does have anything like an 
 > > IETF's opinion) about such an effort?
 > > 
 > > regards
 > > Hadmut
 > > 
 > > 
 > > 
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 > 
 > 
 > **
 > Madrid 2003 Global IPv6 Summit
 > Presentations and videos on line at:
 > http://www.ipv6-es.com
 > 
 > This electronic message contains information which may be privileged or 
 > confidential. The information is intended to be for the use of the individual(s) 
 > named above. If you are not the intended recipient be aware that any disclosure, 
 > copying, distribution or use of the contents of this information, including 
 > attached files, is prohibited.
 > 
 > 
 > 
 > 
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Re: spoofing email addresses

2004-05-31 Thread Michael Thomas
Perry E. Metzger writes:
 > I think the easy solution is just to block port 25 

   You can stop right there. The rest is so much
   wishful thinking.

   Mike

 > unless someone asks
 > for it to be opened. Average users have no idea what
 > port 25 does or even what TCP is, so they won't care.
 > 
 > Perry
 > 
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