ietf-asrg
[Top] [All Lists]

[Asrg] 3a. Requirements - User Needs

2004-02-04 12:34:48
[Subject changed as per posting guidelines, was "[Re: [Asrg] Its all
over for Challenge Response". Mod.]

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

Suppose that is the price we pay with education - we expect others to have the same level of knowledge and that they understand us and our reasoning.

No, the users know far more about the Internet. They use it
more aggressively than the establishment for a start.


Comments on why people want or do not want to do certain things will not
help, and can be expressed elsewhere.

However, many of you are correct in stating that the needs of Internet
users is what determines change. The question is who are the users? Is
it the ISPs, or perhaps the backbone operators? Or is it the end-users?

Why should we care about the end users and ISPs, if they do not care about the rest of the Internet? A lot of spam is being sent by
hijacked machines. MyDoom spread like wildfire around the Internet, not
because of some security hole in MS Windows, but because ignorant users
clicked on the attachements. ISPs refuse to cooperate on abuse reporting and other anti-spam measures. Governments refuse to allocate money to law enforcement to go after spammers using existing laws. Countries do not want to help by tracking down spammers and those who help them.

The answer is because we must - if we are going to recommend and implement changes for the entire Internet, we have an inherent responsibility to answer to the user base of the Internet.

However, you must determine who you care about. Any change will be painful, especially here. Anything that is proposed,or implemended will affect some proportion of users somewhere. Do we care about the majority of the users who will gain benefit, or the minority who will lose out? When does the minority become strong enough so we care about them? Do we care about ISPs, more than end users? Or perhaps about end users rather than ISPs? Do we care about software companies and large corporations more, or perhaps about governments? Do we want to help political dissidents while that will also help terrorists?

All of these have no easy answers. The major problem with all of these debates is that every person participating in it has a different answer to the questions above. There is also an inherent presence of certain preconceived notions such as "Company XXXX or organization YYYY is evil".

My question to all of you is: how can we get something useful going out of all of these, instead of engaging in debates? Is there anything useful that we can do as a group to solve the problem?

Yakov

-------
Yakov Shafranovich / asrg <at> shaftek.org
SolidMatrix Technologies, Inc. / research <at> solidmatrix.com
"Some lies are easier to believe than the truth" (Dune)
-------


_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg



<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>