ietf
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: WG Review: Open Pluggable Edge Services (opes)

2001-06-18 13:50:02

From the publisher/consumer standpoint, OPES is not about encapsulation or routing and very seldom about encoding.

These are the most common potentially damaging uses of ICAP, either currently in use or discussed:

  Insert ads.
  Insert a 'console' to 'brand' the browsing session.
  Rewrite links.
  Translate a document (changing its meaning)
  Redirect to a local copy of the resource (making it impossible to
    access the authoritative resource)

Does Ethernet do these things?

Of course publishers can protect against these things; they can run all of their content over SSL/TLS, watermark everything, etc. What if OPES is sucessful? Is the trust model of the Internet ready for this? The infrastructure (imagine if all HTTP traffic moved to SSL, making caching useless)?

Putting the burden of mitigating the effects of OPES onto content publishers and end users isn't a nice thing to do.



Scott Brim wrote:

Publishers lose control of how a resource is treated but still
(optionally) retain control over the resource itself, e.g. through
watermarks.  I doubt that publishers care if their content is carried
over Ethernet or ATM today.  How much do publishers care how their
content is encapsulated, routed, encoded, etc.?  What do you think OPES
could do that a publisher (1) would be concerned about, and (2) could
not protect against?

...Scott

On 18 Jun 2001 at 12:51 -0700, Mark Nottingham apparently wrote:

As such, the OPES goals break end-to-end transparency at the
application layer. As a result, (using HTTP as an example, because it
seems the first target of OPES), the publisher loses control over a
resource once it leaves their server. It then becomes impossible to
makes statements about that resource (e.g., P3P, Semantic Web, legal
status of a resource, etc.).




--
Mark Nottingham, Research Scientist
Akamai Technologies (San Mateo, CA USA)



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