Subject: Protocol Layering

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 23:31:15 GMT

Layering ought not to be religion, but appropriate layering
is a good design philosophy, and strict layering may help stave
off entropy death of the Internet protocols.  Which, judging by
the announcements of new Internet Drafts, may not be far off.

Bob Braden

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From: Jon Crowcroft <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 15:48:49 +0100

>>the announcements of new Internet Drafts, may not be far off.

its an interesting thing is that there is more interesting things
to be gleaned from the viruses and worms propagated partly via
the ietf lists recently than the i-ds....

j.

Protocol Lawyering

We need protocol lawyers to enforce strict contractual
obligations and responsibilities and rights between
communicating parties - as we all know, the 
Open Society Initiative determined that there are exactly 
7 lawyers per communicating party in the internet:

Application Lawyer - handles client, serves a writ, etc
Presentation Lawyer,  deals with non disclosure agreements, etc
Session Lawyer - handles open and closing remarks in court
Transport Lawyer - the end2end arguments - 
	e.g. from habeus corpus to appeals from death row
Network Lawyer - deals with discovery, admissability etc
Link Lawyer - frames plaintiff, or defendent, or both, 
	as necessary
Physical Lawyer - does the work, gets paid the least, still
	costs more than any other non legal party

Some people have proposed putting all the lawyers below the
application in the nick...I tend to agree, although there are
problems with this approach w.r.t execution latency

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From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2001 20:12:54 +0100 (BST)

On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, Jon Crowcroft wrote:

> communicating parties

Since tort, rather than contract, law is the problem as far as society
and protocol misdesign resulting in misuse, rather than individual
instances of agreed deployment under contract, is concerned, this
misses the point. Think vandalism[*] or another wrong against society
rather than breach of contract.

(as an aside, I understand Ostermann has a good overview of problems
with the imminent failure of the 'tort' process.)

L.

[*] I was going to use pollution as an analogy, but thought better
    of it.

<[email-masked]>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>