On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 06:12:18PM -0500, Meng Weng Wong wrote:
| On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 01:31:34PM -0600, Dustin D. Trammell wrote:
| | has much clout and much funds to put behind SPF. Do they have any
| | technical reasons? The only technical arguments FOR XML that I have
| | seen have come from a few people on the list playing Devil's Advocate,
| | or the few that like XML and want to make sure we are not mis-informed
| | on the pro's and con's, but it seems that even those feel it is probably
| | the wrong technology for the job.
|
| There is no one reason the Mystery Stakeholder is behind XML.
|
| Partly they are promoting their pet technology because they expect to
| see it everywhere five years from now, and why not do it here too?
|
| Partly they are promoting it out of convenience --- maybe they may
| already have an XML parser inside their MUA and a working implementation
| based on XML, so it's less of a hurdle.
Aren't we working on SPF parsers for everything? If the have XML now
surely they aren't worried about bloat.
| Partly they are promoting it because it furthers their business
| interests at the potential expense of their competition, which is
| simply what corporations do. It's a pain in this case because the
That also means they are furthering their business interests at the
(it's not potential, it's real) expense of free implementations, which
also are their competition.
| Mystery Stakeholder has so many business interests their competition is
| pretty much anybody who's not them.
Still sounds like IBM or maybe MSFT.
| I have a new appreciation for professional politicians. Stopping spam
| is something that everybody wants, and we see how hard it is. Imagine
| doing something that lots of people *don't* want.
I also don't want to be forced to have to go to one business to be able
to stop spam. That's just a protection racket. They might not be doing
the spamming today, but once the spammers slow down, and they find that
their revenues drop off, they could try to do things to bring the spam
level back up (that those who quit using their facility face getting).
| Now, what is our goal? If the goal is to stop spam, then we should
| allow the expediency factor into our arguments. The Mystery Stakeholder
| controls the desktop and they are so well integrated that they can roll
| out their antispam technology across their entire product range,
| comprising the MTA, the MUA, the ISP, the webmail portal, etc etc.
| Voila. They could do it, and it would be done, at least as far as their
| market is concerned.
Sounds like MSFT now.
My goal is not to stop spam only to let corporate greed roll over me
instead.
| Except the Mystery Stakeholder will encounter a lot of resistance from
| the people who actually have to implement policies in XML. The admins
| have spoken and they don't like it one bit. They hate spam, but the
| Solution doesn't smell right to them, and they'll hate being forced
| top-down, to implement it.
Admins (at least in the admin role) don't implement; they deploy.
Or are you speaking of someone wearing both a programmer hat and an
admin hat?
| SPF has the advantage of smelling right, and there the admins will be
| the ones pressuring their managers to publish.
It smells right to me as long as the XML stench is left out.
| Maybe our goal is to stop spam in accordance with the cultural norms of
| the Internet community. You ignore culture at your peril. They teach
| that in all the MBA classes on international management. When you don't
| absorb those lessons, you get accussed of imperialism. The Mystery
| Stakeholder is no stranger to those accusations.
And as such, the communications should be two way. But the communications
are meaningless without knowing why the MS (so, does that mean Mystery
Stakeholder or MicroSoft) really wants to have XML in place for SPF but
not for DNS (that may happen 20 years from now but anytime soon).
| But what can we really do against the Mystery Stakeholder? The only
| thing that go up against a gorilla is another gorilla. We need to get a
| big player or players on side. That gets into Big-Company Politics and
| where we are all out of our depth. If the other players support SPF,
| they will do so for reasons of their own. The big-company decision
| makers aren't on this list arguing their case because (1) we're not even
| on their radar, and (2) even if we were, they'd have minders and NDAs
| and so on, and this is too public a forum.
Something else that often wins in business is "first to market". If SPF
version 1 is "done today" and implementations are beta released now and
come out in final versions real soon, it may not matter what the gorilla
does.
| But the avalanche has not started.
|
| There is still time for the pebbles to vote.
|
| The gorillas could still be influenced by the grassroots.
And so we should. But influence them away from XML for THIS is what I
say should be done. I doubt if I will ever use SPF if it requires I
have XML integrated into my SMTPD.
--
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN | http://linuxhomepage.com/ http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/ http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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