On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 1:56 PM Timothy Mcsweeney <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think I like where you're going with this transparency Rich! To highlight, here are a couple zingers I found in your answers to the questionnaire:
"Sadly, right now the IETF often looks more like a colonial empire than something like the UN."
"Akamai gets indirect value were I to become the Chair."
"I am not a professional standards person, I am an implementor who needs standards to succeed."
"I bring an understanding of what it means to be a respectful and inclusive person, knowing that I am a privileged member of society."
This last one is not a zinger but I wanted to include it because of its irony to me personally: “We need to make sure that anyone with an interesting idea for an Internet protocol will feel welcome to bring it forward, and continue to feel welcome even if their idea has already been considered and dropped.”
I think the last point is worth emphasizing because there are pressures in Academia and commerce to chase the latest bright shiny object and that is not necessarily the solution to the problems we are facing today.
The biggest security problem we face today is breach of data at rest, a confidentiality problem. But 90% of the efforts of the academy and 99% of those of commerce are focused on the Blockchain, an integrity technology. Meanwhile it has taken me most of the last five years working in various forums to persuade people to look at threshold decryption, a technology developed in the 1990s that is actually a confidentiality control capable of securing data at rest.
It is only sometimes the case that a problem and a solution arrive at the same time. While it seems that the solution always trails the problem, the reverse is just as likely. And often a solution does not come at a time it can be applied. If someone tried to make use of the systems I am using in the Mesh on a 1990s era $80,000 engineering workstation they would be an unhappy camper. If they tried it on a PC they would be even more unhappy. These days you can run the same level of crypto on a Raspberry Pi.
The only caveat I would add is that when someone proposes addressing an issue someone else has been campaigning on for five or ten years and told that it isn't interesting, they should get a share in the credit when it is recognized that the time is right.
