From: "Alan DeKok" <aland(_at_)freeradius(_dot_)org>
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.
Unlike others here (pointedly pointing), I've never claimed to be a
leader, an expert, a guru, or any other kind of wonderful person
relating to spam fighting. I do, however, claim to believe my
opinions are worth something.
Pundits don't get to set the value of their own coinage. The value
of your opinions, like the value of mine, is determined only by
those who receive our opinions. For my part, when I hear opinions,
I value those based on relevant experience, measurements, or
experiements more than other sorts.
I also claim to be able to show logical
errors and inconsistencies in the arguments of others.
Your repeated claims of expertise in logic sound strange. I doubt
my substantial post-graduate education in math with a concentration
on what is called in some circles "logic and foundations" is needed
to see the many errors and inconsistencies in your contributions.
I've never claimed or tried to "order the efforts" of anyone.
On the contrary, you did exactly that in this very message where you
objected not only to my words but to my silences. Not only would do
you direct my coding and deploying away from "band-aids" like the DCC
toward your "cures," but you would control my criticisms.
Vernon, please don't create & attack straw men. It wastes your
valuable time.
Except for reading the messages about Greylisting, all my time spent on
this mailing list has been a dead loss for my spam fighting efforts.
Because I found sufficient Greylisting descriptions and comments at
least as trenchant elsewhere, even that doesn't count for ASRG.
I continue to be flabbergasted that the levels of relevant technical,
social, business, or political clues and of self-proclaimed but
otherwise baseless expertise on spam and spam fighting are respectively
far lower and higher in ASRG than in news.admin.net-abuse.email.
I guess that shows how naive and unthinking I remain. Someday maybe
I'll understand Sturgeon's Law.
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.
Once again, you're stuck on absolutes. As my messages to this list
have repeatedly demonstrated, I do not propose or believe in
absolutes, or perfect solutions. The only way my statement can be
intrpreted as an absolute is by ignoring all of my previous history in
this list.
Perhaps it would be interesting to turn your great talents and skills
in logic on your own statements. As far as I can tell, logic applied
to your statements about "band-aids" not being "cures" for spam imply
that you favor spam "cures" or "absolutes, or perfect solutions."
There's no opposition to *doing* things.
I disagree. You have consistently opposed (or silently ignored) any
request which would even potentially discuss having you change your
network behaviour.
So by not commenting on ideas I'm opposing them? Yes, my words about
opposition to doing things were chosen poorly. There is no effective
opposition to people doing their own things, but there is opposition to
self-proclaimed experts directing the efforts of doers, by the doers
themselves. "Go-ers" are a standard problem in standards committees.
...
You could take the best of the unjustly criticized ideas and
implement and deploy it, but you won't.
<shrug> Another absolute statement from someone who's unaware of my
off-ASRG activities.
On the contrary, your fame didn't exactly precede you, but it certainly
arrived soon after. Or perhaps I checked too many of the wrong places.
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.
... which leads to very nice dictatorial regimes for the experts,
and horrible evil for everyone else.
just as I predicted.
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.
Ah, that's my mistake. I had assumed that ASRG was here to allow us
to reach consensus on the problem, and approaches to a solution. I
see now that we should go back to *real* experts like Van Jacobson,
and not self-appointed experts, like, well..., not me.
But who decides, Vernon?
Those who do will continue to decide what they will do. Those whose
contributions involve applying great skill and talent in logic will
also continue.
Consensus is required only for those approaches that involve major
changes to existing protocols or other efforts coordinated among many
people (who not incidentally are doers instead of go-ers). For various
general reasons, I doubt that any such broad-action spam solution is
possible and desirable, except for non-technical efforts like laws
that are out of the scope of the IRTF and IETF.
One of my failings is being slow about knowing when to quit. I'm
outta here for at least the next month. Feel free to construe my
silence as opposition to anything and everything.
Vernon Schryver vjs(_at_)rhyolite(_dot_)com
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