The author works for a body which argues strongly in favour of watering down encryption, mandating escrow and state actor insight into encrypted data at rest, and in flight, and for obligated scans of content for CSA material. I suspect that this colours a lot of the engagement. It's very hard to be dispassionate across the cultural divide over primacy of rights. Fundamentally, Child Protection advocacy almost always winds up seeking to water down the primacy of privacy preserving technology. Putting that to one side, I think the author observes some cultural truths about engagement in the IETF ab initio. There is a lot of insider/outsider culture. And, assumptions that to be there, in dialogue implies having done your homework which is unfortunately not canonicalised, or always easy to recover. I was very lucky to begin my engagement in SDO lists in a time where it was normal for people to be in tertiary education, and mostly beardless. The barriers to entry were lower, the tolerance for stupid questions possibly higher both as a function of volume and context: pretty much any wild idea was at least worth discussing. Even Geographic address models! Roll forward. We've rehashed the same arguments for 40+ years, we're tired, and deaf. A lot of the behaviours are grumpy behaviours. -G On Wed, Jul 26, 2023 at 9:31 AM John R Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > >> I was OK with him until he got to the part where he said I wasn't > >> paying attention before so you have to start over. > > > > I also noted that part as dissonant, in an otherwise pretty correct summary of how daunting it can be to join this organization. However, one thing is one new person joining and asking to start everything again, another is something that was discussed ten years ago by a narrower set of participants and that now has come to affect many other groups that didn't even know the IETF existed and hundreds of new people that have joined the IETF in the meantime. There should be a way for the organization to review its output after a while, especially if new viewpoints and needs have arisen, without people being aggressively told to just shut up. > > I think that if you show you are familiar with the previous discussion and > can make a plausible argument about what has changed, it is not all that > hard to get going. That's how we revise our RFCs, after all. > > Regards, > John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxxx, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY > Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly >
