If the only topic left is to complain about the management of the ASRG
list, it would appear that it's time to shut it down.
My hope when I took over ASRG was to encourage and coordinate, you know,
research. That means looking for problems, doing experiments, and seeing
how those experiments turned out. As an attempt to practice what I
preach, I did what I think was the first implementation of BATV and I've
experimented with a variety of forms of greylisting. I'll be giving a
paper on my greylisting experience at CEAS next month, and I'm in the
process of instrumenting my BATV so I can report on that in the future.
As should be apparent from recent arguments, I do not consider
unimplemented paper designs that are minor tweaks on other existing
systems to be meaningful research. Paper designs are a dime a dozen --
it's only with implementation experience that we have any hope of finding
out whether they work and what problems we might not have anticipated.
Hand waving arguments of the form "well, X might happen even though
nobody's ever observed it" are no substitute.
For example, when I tried various versions of greylisting, I ran into a
bunch of things I hadn't anticipated, like message retries that are almost
but not quite the same as the original, apparently newly regenerated from
databases rather than resending the same message. I also confirmed some
things that I expected to be true, like there's no point in greylisting
new mail from an IP that has recently done a successful retry. (This is a
flaw in the original and most popular implementation.) I had surprises
with BATV, too, which I'll write up when I have a chance.
There's tons of interesting topics that I would dearly love to see some
research on. Some, e.g., standardized report formats, are being addressed
elsewhere, but a lot, most notably reputation systems and standard
interfaces to them, are getting little or no effort.
So, are we going to do research, or not?
Regards,
John Levine, johnl(_at_)iecc(_dot_)com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet
for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, Mayor
"I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.
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