From: "Alan DeKok" <aland(_at_)freeradius(_dot_)org>
...
Vernon's recent message is at least partially correct. Some current
anti-spam systems have made a difference for some people. What he's
missing is that they haven't made enough of a difference for people
like my friends grandmother. He's also shown his hand (IMHO), and
explained for the first time why he's opposed to solutions which
involve the IETF: his anti-spam system is a workable band-aid.
In point of fact, the DCC is responsible for keeping only a trivial
amount of spam out of my personal mail box. The vast majority is
filtered from my mailbox by other means. Besides, as I have said,
the DCC was not and is not intended deal with the current flood of
spam, although it does surprisingly well at it (again, not for my
mailbox). Instead the DCC is intended to deal with the spam that will
replace the current sort after the DMA has dealt with the current sort.
Mr. DeKok has shown his hand (IMHO) in his comment (again). He is one
of the respected leaders and gurus of spam fighting here to order the
efforts of the designers, coders, implementors, testers, and installers.
But band-aids aren't considered good patient care. Cures are.
By that reasoning, absolutely no spam solution is good, because
absolutely no spam solution can cure spam.
An interesting fact about medical care is that the vast majority of
patents get better despite the best medical care or are made sicker.
That's not to say that medical care is not very valuable, but that
except for a few ailments like broken bones, your main hope for getting
better is in providence. Worse, except for a very few special cases
like smallpox, there are only bandaids for individuals suffers and
no real cures, and the case of the final cure of smallpox is not clear.
Another fact about medical care is how much of what we spend on on
medical care goes to those who document, direct, and control its
delivery compared to those who actually deliver care or make drugs
or appliances.
...
What amazes me is the opposition to anything *other* than short-term
band-aids.
There's no opposition to *doing* things. You are welcome to stop leading
and teaching and switch to doing. You could take the best of the unjustly
criticized ideas and implement and deploy it, but you won't. You will
continue to tell us how wonderful things would be if only those of us who
do things would follow your advice, just as contributors to other IRTF
and IETF mailing lists have for years been pointing egregious flaws such
as TCP sequence numbers that count bytes instead of records and congestion
control that uses packet loss instead of explicit messages.
The most common response to my charge is something about the
unfairness of entrenched monopolies and that someone should force
the doers of the world to do as the self-described experts direct.
That's ever the case with real research. Van Jacobson didn't have
a fraction as much to say about the major problems in the Internet
as others did before (or after) he designed, implemented, tested,
and deployed slow start.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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