Thankyou for your forbearance regarding my two or three
postings here recently. By way of excuse, I would like
to explain my reasons for making them.
I was appalled when I saw the flood of energy and serious
engagement with Carron's outright nonsense that a number
people I know to be excellent network engineers put into
carefully reasoned responses when he started posting to
the RIPE anti-spam wg list, but not quite as appalled as
I was at seeing how quickly he could then construct
apparently meaningful - although, in fact, equally
nonsensical - extensions to his buzzword edifice out
of the quite undigested information he was thereby
obtaining, mainly because it seemed to me that that
ability could easily introduce, at this specific time,
serious political impediments to at least some serious
considerations of rational technical solutions.
With the best will in the world it is not possible to
describe the majority of today's politicians and leading
citizens, etc, as being particularly technically literate.
Equally, it is difficult to avoid the concluion that they
spend a lot of time dealing with their various impossible
tasks by clutching at straws.
Because of our unfortunate, species-wide inability to
perceive exponential trends until they resemble onrushing
locomotives rather more than they resemble trends, now is
the time when effecting solutions to the problem of spam
is being rapidly co-opted into the sphere of the political
rather than the technical. At such times, fraudsters of
all varieties, from simple intellectual on up (or down,
depending on your attitude to filthy lucre), are far more
easily able to grab the attention of besieged legislators
and others than in less stressful times, and some of them
have the energy to attempt it. That they can sometimes
succeed is evidenced by the numerous occasions when the
US Congress (say) has been considering three or even four
bills, each sponsored by different representatives acting,
without personal comprehension of the subject, on "expert
advice", some of it clearly received from highly suspect
"experts", all addressing the same technological matter.
And in such cases, those "experts" who can ALSO cloak
their presentations in an ambience of business, legal
and political attitudes and buzzwords (however shakily
deployed) are often able to command a hearing that their
technical theses alone should not objectively afford them.
Of course there are many more examples of this than just
those that can be found in the annals of the US Congress.
The political process, even in the most disciplined of
assemblies, is a highly fractured and unpredictable one,
and only seldom a broad clear path to a rational outcome.
From that point of view and from a perception that there
might not be much time to spare, I decided to try to provoke
Mr Carron into revealing the extraordinary paucity of his
understanding of the Internet in relation to spam or
anything else (even my cat, just from sleeping on top
of the monitor, has managed to pick up rather more :)
to as wide an range of genuine experts whose opinion was
likely to be canvassed in various quarters as possible:
it is by no means clear that bodies such as even the IETF
have any assured authority in the midst of mass political
hysteria, but the opinions of many of those associated with
it will certainly be sought on an individual basis.
Now that he has, in short order, told people like Phillip
Hallam-Baker that they will need to acquire an understanding
of networking technology in order to appreciate his ideas,
implied that engineers of the calibre of Esa Laitinen are
basically irrelevant Finns, dissed the elegant simplicity
of Steven Siirila's inputs, and much, much more (including
discomforting many with his PNW approach to "intellectual
property"), all in a persisting archive that would be hard
to assert had subsequently been hacked to discredit him,
I'm satisfied he has been sufficiently "outed" (to borrow
a technical term from another discipline) and will return
to my life of alternately dozing and eating, as before.
As an aside, and on the subject of archives, it has been
pointed out to me that the full perspicacity of Carron's
mathematical, chemical and physics insights (which will be
clear to many reading here) can be found in the archive at
http://web.archive.org/web/20000824014035/http://www.fortunecity.com/greenfield/bp/16/giza.htm.
The same material from his original ntlworld website is
also available on web.archive.org, but in a rather less
compact and easily read format. I suspect that those
reading here will be rather less able to assess the
egyptological quality of his thought, but it seems
likely that a rough guess would serve as well. (The URL
quoted above may need some manual concatenation to work).
Finally, I would like to make a point about a core value
(in the sense of its being extremely valuable to users)
of the original design of the Internet: that of end-to-end
connectivity. In terms of SMTP, that includes the ability
to operate a server. However much use of the Internet has
grown by numbers of hosts, users are users and what was of
value to them 20 years ago generally remains of value to
their successors today. Fairly recently I helped set up
some mail servers for the associates of a tiny charity
which, given the social value and overall cost of its
work, is grossly under funded (how unusual). Because of
the extreme sensitivity of much of their communication
in terms of client confidence and the reluctance of non
technical persons to deploy anything in the way of
cryptography, the small but significant security
enhancement that direct delivery of some communications
to their own servers, rather than to their ISPs' disk
based mail spools, can provide is of great value (and I'm
sure that theirs is not an especially unusual case, in
almost any context - personal, political, small business
or institutional). In my opinion, any solution would be
less than optimal if it involved sacrificing too much more
of the already much-diluted ability to establish end-to-end
connections or priced low budget MTAs out of existence
(although I see absolutely no problems with punitively
coercing them into compliance).
This has been the first time in a decade or more that I
have posted to a public forum and the first time I have
ever done so using a pseudonym (it means "dog in the
gutter" and is to be seen on many signs throughout
Holland and parts of Belgium - often with a graphic
resembling Mr Carron's musings - as an injunction to
urban animal lovers). It's been more fun than I care
to admit being vicariously rude to Mr Carron, and sorry
about the pseudonym: loony-kook filter and all.... I'll
go back to sleep now, using that faulty unsubscribe button -
what's that they say about "third time luc
--
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