Hallam-Baker is active in anti-spam issues. More inline. On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: > > I am sure the majority of the people in this forum would prefer to > > look at ways of securing the Internet to protect against the real > > internet criminals stealing pensioners' life savings > > ??? > > How can you secure a communication channel against crime in general? They can't. Information Theory (covert channels et al) shows its impossible. This fact does not deter anti-spammers in anyway from saying they can and will "if only they'd get cooperation". They've known about the theoretical impossibility since 2003 from me, at least, not counting the actual experience of failure of every scheme conceived over a ten+ year period. Anti-spam is a whackamole game, and information theory shows it will always be a whackamole game. Hallam-Baker responded to this question and offered "proof" the internet can be so secured: >Accountability. > >They did it for the telephone system in the 1920s.... > >We can do it for the Intetnet. Another innaccuracy. We still have telephone fraud today. Catching telephone fraud is also still (similarly) a "whackamole" game. They only thing they did was start looking for fraud and trying to catch and prosecute it. That process still continues. Telephone fraud is not __prevented__. It is merely detered by penalties, like most crimes against civil society. Indeed, the telephone system is mostly "open relay", with relatively little user pre-authentication (calling cards). Fraud is detected post-use, from call detail records (ie logs), just like open relay and other kinds of abuse. [And I think you can read "telephone fraud" in my statements here as meaning either "unauthorized calls", or as "scams conducted over the telephone", or just about anything else that would qualify as a crime the telephone system is somehow supposedly secure against.] > If you expect the IETF to stop pensioner savings stealing, you're > setting yourself up for a big disappointment. Right. Exactly. Yet we still have IETF people promisng they are going to stop spam through expensive, patented email authentication systems. That's just complete nonsense. If only it were a simple mistake on their part, but it isn't simply a mistake. A great deal of money is involved. And lies, defamation, and intimidation against anyone who speaks against it. However, there is certainly intimidation by the IETF. I've experienced it from former IESG members Dave Crocker and Noel Chiappa just recently. And public hostility from Harald Alvestrand (former IETF chair). I've experienced retribution in the form that IETF leaders who refuse to chastise plainly ad hominem attacks on people with unpopular views. I've experienced undeclared conflicts of interest by working group chairs. I've even experienced the Sergeant of Arms using his official role to argue merits of an Internet Draft [message: don't disagree on the draft or else] in front of the current chair, who did nothing, even after I commented on the irrelevance of the I-D argument made by the Sergeant at Arms Ted T'so. Carpenter (IETF Chair) told Nick Staff his views were a waste of time. There are many people on several sides of the spam argument: Those who agree with me (no technical solution), and those who agree with Hallam-Baker (technical solutions) (not that either of us are speakers for the respective sides), and the pro-spam viewpoint is entirely unrepresented. But I haven't seen any intimidation of Hallam-Baker's side at the IETF. If it is there on working groups, it hasn't been specifically brought to the attention of the ietf list. Hallam-Baker's posts on the current thread seems more to do with facts of disagreement rather than evidence of misbehavior in communicating those facts. If there is intimidation of Hallam-Baker, I'm against the intimidation. His side has a right to make their case. My side has a right to show why its wrong. But there is some evidence of misbehavior against myself and my views, and others who share those views, as I outlined above. It is most interesting that Crocker and Alvestrand want to have a new AUP. They are among the intimidators. The leaderhip can't fairly enforce the current rules without bias against unpopular viewpoints or "irritating" people. An additional AUP is just more for them to abuse. --Dean [it is an interesting asside that "irritating" is often used agains those who are correct, but their information is unwanted. For example, a crowd catches a known criminal, and wants to lynch the criminal, but one person stands up and says he should be tried in court. That person is "irritating". But engineering isn't a popularity contest. "Irritating" is a fact one may have to simply accept.] -- Av8 Internet Prepared to pay a premium for better service? www.av8.net faster, more reliable, better service 617 344 9000 _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf