In fairness to Bob. There is a big difference between saying
"DNS cannot do that" and "The deployed Microsoft DNS server
does not do that".
There are many cultural tensions at work here. The practices
of systems operation acceptable in the UNIX world are not
acceptable to Windows sysops. Within the UNIX world there is
a vast gulf between the management practices acceptable in
a small operation and the processes used by infrastructure
providers.
It is however somewhat incongruous to hear a network standards
organization that has signally failed to provide security in
email, DNS and the IP protocol go lecturing word processing
vendors for design decisions taken long before the Internet
went mainstream.
-----Original Message-----
From: Gordon Fecyk [mailto:gordonf(_at_)pan-am(_dot_)ca]
Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 11:42 PM
To: ietf-mxcomp(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Subject: [On Rewriting SMTP and DNS] RE: MARID to close -
Comments/Suggestions
3) Optional: Rewrite SMTP 2821
unless the MARID group gets the IETF-SMTP involved, it will be
a tough climb to reach the common goals we are all looking for
success across the board. We need to recognize that the old
design philosophy in SMTP 2821, a "relaxed internet spirit
required for wide deployment with less
emphasis with security" no longer applies today.
I'm a newcomer to the IETF and I've observed this snobbish
attitude right
from the first day I stepped into the the Lotte Hotel in
Seoul[1]. That of
the SMTP working group, I mean, and while Hector didn't
mention them, the DNS
working group too.
"This fundamentaly changes the semantics of X," was a favorite line
throughout this process. There are a few in this group who
represent this
thought who I will refer to as The Old Guard.
Mitch Kapor, of Lotus 1-2-3 fame and co-founder of the
Electronic Frontier
Foundation, made opinions of The Old Guard clear to the
author of The Hacker
Crackdown (1992 Bantam Books) during an interview:
"You go tell a hardware hacker that everyone should have a node on the
Internet, and the first thing they'll tell you is: 'IP
doesn't scale.' The
answer is: Evolve the protocol! Get smart people together
and figure out
what to do. Do we add [identification]? Do we add protocol?
Don't just say
'we can't do it.'"
The Old Guard tells us We Can't Do It and then goes to
extreme lengths to
prove why. I say: B***S***. I'll bet Tim Berners-Lee
thought that, and the
result is the World Wide Web. We have The Old Guard saying
that we can't do
X in DNS, we can't do Y in SMTP.
Even though it was done.
We have Bob Atkinson telling me his company's software can't
do X in DNS even
though folks here proved him wrong. And it didn't even
require rewriting
DNS.
Earlier proposals worked entirely within existing DNS and
SMTP framework,
even if they did change some semantics in SMTP and made some
DNS old farts
turn up their noses. They still worked within the system to
the system's
specifications.
Yet they were rejected based on semantics. Outdated
semantics, I might add,
based on an Internet where it was assumed all communication
was wanted and
requested.
To Mitch Kapor, "...this is the snobbery of the people on the
Mayflower
looking down their noses at the people who came over [to the
New World] on
the _second boat!_"
By what right do you, The Old Guard, have to look down your
noses at folks
like me? Like Meng? Like Hadmut? Like Raymond? Criticism
("Where's the
debugger?") is one thing, but you went beyond mere criticism
to outright
denial.
As for the patent issues, I believe "Chairman Bill" and his pack of
cartooneys can stand a lesson on where they came from. That
goes for you
guys, Harry, Bob, and the others whose names grace certain patent
applications. You all came on The Second Boat looking down
at us coming on
the third, pretending that the Mayflower didn't exist. Or
that the first
boat infringed on your patents. Or something stupid like that.
[1] During the second English keynote speech which I'll call
the "Don't Try
This At Home" speech, the speaker took an unnecessary stab at
Microsoft Word
as being a security risk for allowing active content in a
document. I didn't
hear any chuckles from the audience and I'm not surprised -
not only was the
presentation B-O-R-I-N-G, it was demeaning, disrespectful to
the audience and
disrespectful to "the folks on the second boat" who produced
MS Word they way
they did Because Their Customers Asked For It.[2] I took a
moment to try to
bring this to light to the speaker afterward. I made my
first enemy in the
IETF and it was only my first day on site.
[2] Users keep demanding functionality with little or no
regard to security.
That's not Microsoft's fault.
<http://www.vmyths.com/rant.cfm?id=376&page=4>
--
PGP key (0x0AFA039E):
<http://www.pan-am.ca/consulting(_at_)pan-am(_dot_)ca(_dot_)asc>
Sometimes it's hard to tell where the game ends and where
reality bites,
er, begins. <http://vmyths.com/resource.cfm?id=50&page=1>