I usually would not take the time to respond to obviously flawed and
erroneous statements. However, for the sake of persons on this list that do
not know the details, I will spend just a few minutes stating the truth
here. As stated by Vernon Schryver: "I must observe that some of the
strongest condemnations in the list of whatever happened at the meeting came
from people who have made the some of the less well founded contributions to
the mailing list. From here I can't tell what happened, but I wonder if
sour grape sentiments from some people about their favorite solutions not
being adopted by acclamation colored other people's perceptions and so
reports of the meeting." Based on this and other responses, I fear that
without some clarity, others will continue to be confused by the few
radical, negative opinions that have been voiced. There were over 200
attendees and based on the positive feedback that I have heard, I do not
believe that the couple of negative opinions is an accurate reflection of
the thoughts of the attendees.
William, I am sorry that you are so upset that you were not able to present
at the meeting; however, that should not drive you to making clearly false
accusations about the meeting.
I sent a call for agenda items to the list on March 10th. There were a few
volunteers. I spoke with each of them and by March 12th each was able to
explain to me what they wished to present. For some reason, you were not
able to provide a clear explanation of what you wished to present until 3
days before the meeting on Monday March 17th; in this same email, you stated
"I'v[e] not 100% decided if I'll be able to attend". At this point, the
agenda was being finalized. Then suddenly two days before the meeting you
request a slot on the agenda.
Please see my comments inline.
-----Original Message-----
From: william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net [mailto:william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net]
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2003 5:13 PM
To: asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: [Asrg] My Opinion regarding ietf asrg session (it
went badly!)
Also it can be noted that AT&T presented technology
on which
they have some patents and IETF has very clear guidelines
that this is
dscoraged to say the least and group chairs should when two solutions
exist (one patented, one not) always choose non-patented
solution, same
applies for presentations, this should have been screened and
patent-related presentation made available if nothing else
similar exist.
As stated in Vern Paxson's email: "the IRTF does not have an expressed IPR
policy, though it appears one needs to be developed. I picture such a
policy requiring that, for any technology discussed within RGs that has
related IPR, that the presence of the possible IPR be disclosed; but not
beyond that. The AT&T presentation would be in compliance with such a
policy."
Also have to be noted that most presentations on the live
meeting were by
persons who did not try to participate at the mailing list
and are completely unknown to us
Unknown to whom? There a number of people that you may not know that have a
unique understanding of spam. Who is it that you don't know? John Morris?
Jon Praed? Philip Hallam-Baker? Balachander Krishnamurthy?
and this is also against
general policies for IETF and IRTF
as first what are supposed to be presented are work done as
part of mailing list efforts (i.e. general work area) usually
by people who are most active on the list and only afterwards
at the very end are there allowed presentations by other
organizations with similar interest or work area (and those
presentations should be carefully chose to minimize
commercial views).
As you know, I sent a call for agenda items. Everyone that responded and had
something to talk about was accepted. Commercial views were very minimized
if not non-existent. There were a number of commercial entities in the room
that talked about the problem and not about a product. Again, these may be
people that you don't personally know, but they are very familiar with the
problem. For example, Scott Banister from IronPort, Dick Hardt from
ActiveState, Ken Schneider from BrightMail, Karl Jacob from CloudMark, and
me and others from CipherTrust. There was absolutely no mention of these
products or any proprietary technology from any of these companies. These
are people that are at the meeting to participate in a research group
focused on the problem of spam. BTW, you might want to think about the
amount of spam that is stopped daily by these companies. Not to promote any
of these particular technologies, but my point is that we are quite familiar
with the problem and the state-of-the-art and we gather here to move forward
with better answers to the problem.
In short, like I said in previous email - the presentations were all
opinions of particular organizations and all commercial (even
spamcon is
really what I call "commercial" non-profit foundation, as
apposed to say
CAUSE) and were not individual submission as is supposed to
be done at
IETF and IRTF. As a result engineers who were attending IETF probably
got negative view of our group and our efforts.
These were presentations by individuals. The fact that many of the people
that have much to say about spam are affiliated with spam-focused
organizations is not a surprise.
The only
thing I can think
of why chair did something like that would have been to get
media exposure, I'm sure media not be research or engineering
centric would not see
serious downsides that I have noticed. Now I'n not against additional
media exposure, but I do not believe we're at the point where this is
really needed, what we need are people serious about working
on technical
solutions and media will provide information about our group
to general
user audience that would only bring more noise.
I tapped resources to provide background discussion and different views of
the problem as input to our research group work. This included a view from
the frontline, a view from mass mailers, a view related to endusers and a
view of the relationship between spam legislation and spam technology. Each
of these individuals was highly qualified and very informative. There were
remarks about the scientific merit of some of the stats in the first talk.
However, beyond that the audience was captivated by the information that was
being dispersed. As I explained, this was the inaugural meeting of the
research group that was started just three weeks ago. I felt that we needed
to consume some background information before we dive into the technical
details of our work. This session of the meeting including all four of these
talks was scheduled for 45 minutes; that is less than 1/3 of the scheduled
meeting time. Yes, it went over this time due to lengthy Q&A, speakers
overrunning their slots, and the chair not being extremely stringent on time
requirements. If you want to point out any of those last three things, those
are valid points. However, scheduling 1/3 of an inaugural meeting to focus
on background and relevant views of the area is acceptable and necessary.
I received many more positive comments after the meeting than I did negative
comments from the few people on this list with other ideas about how the
meeting should have been run. There were opportunties to bash the agenda
when it was sent to the list as well as the official agenda bashing portion
of the meeting. No such comments were made at either point. So, I appreciate
the fact that some of you have 20/20 hindsight, but I would be more
impressed with useful contributions.
In the future meetings done in connection with IETF (are we
meeting in
Vienna?) if we're going to have so many non-technical discussions, I
would strongly recommend separting into two sessions, one for this
general/media-centric and one for actual engineers to work on
technical
issues that we may have.
I do hope chair takes my comments seriously!
He really did a bad job today chosing what is to be presented
(i'm sure he
had multiple options),
As stated above, there were not as many options as you assumed. Everyone
that had a technical solution to discuss (that made this known more than 2
days before the meeting) was allowed to present.
keeping discussions short (so that
there was time
for additional presentations)
or in general being prepared
for this life
meeting (remember agenda is supposed to be reviewed by mail
list and be
announced well before the actual meeting, that is just one example).
RFC 2014 states that a draft agenda must be published to the list well in
advance of the meeting. Your comment about not being prepared is amusing.
This group was chartered the last week in February. Within three weeks, the
group was announced, mailing list started, work items identified, iterated
through drafts of certain work items, meeting during IETF was requested,
granted, and scheduled, agenda planned and confirmed, and meeting held.
Personally, I am content with the progress thus far. Understand that the
research group is three weeks old. Obviously, we will not solve the problem
in the first three weeks. But, we have made some progress and will continue
to make good strides. Just as I tried to explain to you this week, RFC 2014
also states that "A Research Group will conduct much of its business via its
electronic mail distribution list(s)." The way that we will continue to make
progress is from individual contributions. If you are sincerely interested
in helping to solve this problem, then please contribute work and ideas
rather than simply negative opinions. You sent a note to the group about
email address verification on March 12th stating that more detail will be
provided in the next couple of days. More detail was never sent. I look
forward to seeing some actual contributions from you.
Regards,
Paul
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