On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 11:29:34PM +0100, Jeroen Massar wrote: > Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 12:50:44AM +0000, > > Paul Vixie <paul@xxxxxxx> wrote > > a message of 32 lines which said: > > > >> in the IETF, the naysayers pretty much kick the consenting adults' > >> asses every day and twice on sunday. and that's the real problem > >> here, i finally think. > > > > Time to have a formal representation of end-users at the IETF? > > What is defined as an 'end-user'? > > You, me, the rest of the people, are all end-users IMHO. > > That we might have quite a bit more knowledge on how things work and > that we might have some connections to people so that we can arrange > things, is nothing of an advantage over people who are not technically > inclined (or how do you put that nicely ;) > > The point is that those people don't know better and as such they also > don't know what is possible and what they are missing. Arguably, anyone can join the IETF, and represent themself. However, there is a steep learning curve, especially for those people who don't have much if any technical background, in order to participate meaningfully. For example, I know of people who would like IP addresses to encode physical locations such as the country and city, so they can use this information to decide which ads to serve (or to block), or to enforce DRM. But if they come to the IETF lists and ask for this capability (or why it can't be provided), at best, they'll be told that's not the way things are done. Instead, they go to companies that are willing to sell them databases that presumably map IP addresses geographically to a high degree of accuracy, at least to the country level. > Eg, if you tell somebody "oh but I have a /27 IPv4 and a /48 IPv6 at > home and I can access all my computers from the Internet wherever I am", > they will be going "and? why would I need that". The typical lay-man > end-user really couldn't care less, as long as their stuff works. > > The only people really noticing problems with this are hobbyists and > most likely the gaming crowd trying to setup their own gameserver and > finding out that they are stuck behind this thing called "NAT". > > P2P people, thus quite a large group of people using the Internet today, > have their tools to nice NAT tricks, thus these won't notice it. > > And for the rest of the population the Internet consists of http:// and > https:// if they even recognize those two things, thus most likely only > "www" and "email", the latter likely only over a webinterface... Actually, one could argue that this suggests that NAT is an engineering success, even if it is architecturally flawed, because it serves the needs of a majority of users, causes problems in only a few cases, and isn't mandatory. Users can get non-NAT access, depending upon how much money and/or effort they're willing to expend. (Granted, this doesn't take into account the arguments about how future applications may be inhibited by NAT, or how certain security measures are more difficult to enforce.) > Which group do you want to 'involve' in the IETF and more-over, why? > Last time I checked the IETF was doing protocols and not user interfaces. I'd like to see the general level of user understanding of the capabilities of Internet protocols raised. However, I don't know how this can be accomplished without a lot of effort on the users' parts to come up to speed. --gregbo _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf