[governance] Re: [discuss] Comcast undertakes 9 year IETF cosponsorship!?

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

That is of course a hangover from an era when the internet was restricted to a very small, and professionally responsible group of users from the academic and defense communities.  It was a time when innovation and openness to drive innovation were prized above all else, so security was an afterthought, and still being bolted in as we speak - because "rip and replace" is just not a viable option on a currently running system.

One thing you learn about actually working on any sort of architecture now, if not a couple of decades before, is to have a clear view of its benefits and potential pitfalls, and how it can be abused versus how it can be used.  And how to mitigate the abuse without destroying the utility of the product for its legitimate users.

More than anything else, it is a choice that the developers of, for example, Tor, have had to make and live with because the very same technology that allows a political dissident anonymity from the regime he opposes also enables child abusers and drug dealers.

--srs (iPad)

> On 24-Mar-2014, at 8:17, Jeremy Malcolm <Jeremy at Malcolm.id.au> wrote:
> 
>> On 24 Mar 2014, at 9:21 am, Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh at hserus.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Because you are good enough to say that I know spam well .. I am sorry, how or why is the true origin of spam or any sort of email complex to identify?   At least from the perspective of a receiving mail system, there is the originating IP address, there are various authentication mechanisms (such as DMARC) which allow receiving systems to identify and flag / reject forged mail etc etc.
> 
> What Jefsey's point may have been (not trying to put words into his mouth, but this is my interpretation) is that one of the characteristic faults of the technical community is that it is prone to uncritically laud the Internet's architecture as being wholly beneficial, neutral in terms of welfare distribution, and fully supportive of democratic ideals (or worse, a substitute for democratic ideals).  In reality the effects of those architectural choices are very much more of a mixed bag, with some gains and some losses, unequally distributed, and with limited accountability to those affected by them.  So the simple example (perhaps) being given is that is that spam is a problem that was enabled by the architectural choices made by the Internet technical community, the very same choices that also provide us with many positive benefits such as resilience against censorship (but also other negatives such as vulnerability to surveillance).
> 
> --
> Jeremy Malcolm PhD LLB (Hons) B Com
> Internet lawyer, ICT policy advocate, geek
> host -t NAPTR 5.9.8.5.2.8.2.2.1.0.6.e164.org|awk -F! '{print $3}'
> 
> WARNING: This email has not been encrypted. You are strongly recommended to enable encryption at your end. For instructions, see http://jere.my/l/pgp.
> 

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