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Re: accusations of cluelessness

2003-10-10 21:28:05


--On Friday, 10 October, 2003 21:51 -0400 Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> wrote:

In other words, what happened to the old IETF that would have
said "Site local addresses are utterly stupid and wrong; how
large a block did you say you wanted?"

It went away with the old Internet that was mostly an
experiment and research tool used by a relatively small, elite
group with largely common interests, and a fairly high overall
clue level (as compared to today), to support a  relatively
small set of apps.

Keith, I don't understand what you are saying here. As I read his note, Vernon isn't saying "make all the applications recognize a particular address range and do something special". He is saying "ok, we don't think this is useful, but, if it would help you to have an address range to do your own thing in your own way, addresses are just not that scarce".

I'd love to stamp out all of the wrong-headedness and stupidity in the world, but I would not expect to succeed and have largely given up trying except for isolated local cases. Efforts through the centuries to make and enforce laws against stupidity and stupid behavior have not been very successful. I'm not as convinced as you are that, to use Vernon's description, "Site local addresses are utterly stupid and wrong", but, even if I were, I'd be having some trouble convincing myself that taking the relevant address range out of the allocation pool and leaving it out would be seriously harmful to the network and to interoperability.

    john