On Tue, 7 Jun 2005, John R Levine wrote:
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.
It certainly was not my intent to complain if it was not for the fact
that there is a problem and all the evidence I gathered so far has only
confirmed that you did blacklist/moderated my address. Probably best if
you agree to have somebody else assigned and act as list administrator
because its not the first report of you making rush decisions based
largely on private discussions unrelated to the list.
Note that I don't have problem with you being group chair, but its not
unusual that group chair is not necessarily the best person to also
act as mail list administrator especially for large list such as this.
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.
ASRG has always been means to exchange information and ideas and as such
it is still good to have. We discuss both theoretic and practical situations
every month, just last week as you remember it was discussed and understood
why certain spammers try specific domain address as means to bypass outsourced
spamfilter and go directly to ISP mail server. I consider it to be practical
discussion and very good one at that.
Obviously we also engage in theoretical discussions and ideas building and
that is what research is. When research goes out of theoretical it becomes
R&D and I'm sure you know it too. This group is supposed to do both research
and R&D, but it seems to always been primarily focused on research and
discussions of ideas, where as you want of "D". Well - go ahead and do
something about that and use your connections to get more developers in here,
but please dont say that there is no research being done because that is
certainly not so.
As far as little progress for specific topics (i.e. subgroups) this seems
to indicate lock of direction or leadership in those groups. If it was not
like that we'd not see spam reporting now being done in separate venue.
For example, when I tried various versions of greylisting,
That reminds me. I received report from a fairly good size ISP that I
helped on some topics that described their custom-built anti-spam system
and how it works. I've been meaning to work more on that and turn it into
practical anti-spam paper. It is on topic of greylisting, if I get to it,
you should see it end of the summer.
Nevertheless I consider that work on theoretical ideas is as much or even
more important because ultimately its new ideas that make the difference
as we've already tried everything else and it has only limited success.
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.
Don't we have people working on reputation in separate ASRG group that
released version of draft protocol for it? Seems what you're saying is
that we now need to help them and possibly open a development forum to
work on that protocol so it could be tested. If so just go ahead and
say so and make a call on the list for development work and help. Plus
do something yourself and use your connections to get larger companies
with resources to also get involved.
--
William Leibzon
Elan Networks
william(_at_)elan(_dot_)net
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