Subject: Re: complex extensions attacking IETF protocols

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Nov 1998 12:01:22 -0700 (MST)

> ...
> Although the surface of the document describes strategies for
> Microsoft to attack Linux, the document spends a lot of time
> discussing ways to interfere with the markets by distorting protocols, 
> including Internet protocols.
>
> People should be taking this VERY seriously.
> ...

Fooey.

The IETF, like any big standards committee, does far more damage to its
own standards than any crassly commercial outfit could hoping to acheive.
The IETF, like any standards committee, is fully stocked with go-ers who
desparately need to prove to themselves and the folks back home that their
Participation in The Standards Process is valuable and positive.  In this
context, "positive" never means "make it simpler" but always means adding
something, since it's hard to show your "positive" value by pointing at
things you kept the working group from doing.  If you look a random RFC
of recent years, you will find more warts "raising the bar" than any
ponderous, desparate, half dead commercial outfit that needs to write down
the obvious could hope to add.  For that matter, if you pick a random RFC,
you're likely to find that it is 100% warts without redeeming value.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be ..."  
Such are the facts of life in any big standards organization.

If you think that any particular current outfit is the first, only, or
most dangerous outfit to play old fashioned standards committee politics,
then you've not been paying attention to the Standards Process.  There
are obvious reasons why certain other commercial outfits could be far more
dangerous to future IETF standards.  Sheesh--have you guys never before
heard the phrase "standards committee politics" or do you think that is
only about the egotistical concerns of individuals?  I've seen standard
standards committee politics played (eg. ANSI BASIC, by coincidence) since
Mr. Gates was still a student at Harvard, and I'm sure it predates my
observations by many decades.  It aint rocket science.

I really hope the suggestion that routers should be filtering packets that
contain bytes that do not match previously known profiles for their UDP
or TCP port numbers was a joke.  How else could you detect re-uses of
numbers assigned to other applications?

As for having the IANA only issue numbers to good designs--double sheesh!
I'd like to think statement was also a joke.  The old IANA gave numbers
to anyone who seemed determined to use them, regardless of how good the
ideas appeared.  Even non-IETF efforts could get numbers if they provided
a short, written description of the protocol.  That is as it must be,
unless you want what would inevitably become yet another committee with
plenty of go-ers to vote on the technical value of ideas from outsiders.

Or maybe that would be a good thing.  Finish turning the IETF into a
subcommittee of the OSI/ITU.  Let it be run by those who prefer to
legislate ideas instead of letting people create them.  If the IETF is
really as dead as some of the comments this week imply, then the sooner
it finishes being ossified, the sooner something else can displace it, as
the IETF displaced the standards organizations that came before.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

---

From: Robert Moskowitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Nov 1998 18:49:30 -0500

>numbers assigned to other applications?

Yes, Vern it was a joke.  Or more exactly it was meant for people to think
as to what we are doing here.

>a short, written description of the protocol.  

More to the point.  Request something, moderately document it and get it.
It might be foolish (DES40 for IPsec), it might be 'proprietary'
(Microsoft's version of Kerberos auth for IKE).  Document it enough so we
know who is using it.

---

From: Robert Moskowitz <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 03 Nov 1998 18:49:30 -0500