Re: Some more background on the RFID experiment in Hiroshima

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On Sep 12, 2009, at 2:31 PM, Doug Ewell wrote:

Ole Jacobsen <ole at cisco dot com> wrote:

I am also not sure what value there is in knowing that 3478273983421 spent 10 minutes in trill and then moved on to behave (pun intended).

To amplify, I'm not sure why the security risks of being tracked while attending these meetings are considered so much greater than the risks of posting messages on mailing lists, signed with one's real name, and having those messages archived for years on publicly accessible Web sites.

Well, I for one don't want people to know that I'm actually showing up for the first ten minutes of each meeting I chair, replacing myself with an inflatable dummy, and then going off to the bar. It would be revealing that I'm too stupid to remove my RFID tag and attach it to the dummy, and that would be a blow to my professional credibility.

Seriously, it does have major implications for intellectual property lawsuits.

Let's say JoeBob attends a meeting of the FRILL working group, then goes home to patent a nifty new innovation in FRILL, which is then bought for $1 by a patent troll when JoeBob's company goes broke because his board of directors blew their investment capital on stocking their break room with headcheese. Said patent troll then sues some defendant, whose legal team later notices that said FRILL- enhancement had been discussed at IETF 211 while JoeBob, the inventor, was in the room, thereby invalidating the patent (and making JoeBob look like a doofus).

Okay, so that's not an example with too many negatives, unless JoeBob decides to sue us for making him look like a doofus.

Now let's presume that some people remember (and that some other people don't remember) JoeBob being in the room during the discussion, but IETF"s RFID tracker log shows that JoeBob was hanging out with me in the bar. Does IETF's failure to maintain the record that invalidates the patent make us liable to the defendant?

Or worse yet, IETF can't produce the RFID logs in response to a court order, because somebody goofed and deleted them. Was this a conspiracy to protect the patent troll? Who got bribed to make it happen? How many hundreds of thousands of euros we would like to spend on the paperwork related to the various discovery motions we might have to endure?

In other words, any retained information increases liability, both for the accuracy of the retained information and for the preservation of the retained information. That's why we must both have a policy about how that information is obtained and preserved, and we must live up to that policy, whatever it says.

Of course, the easiest policy is to retain no information. But even that has its consequences. For example, is deliberate ignorance consistent with industry best-practices? How does this interact with the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements of our sponsors? And why would a startup company stock its break room with headcheese anyhow?


--
Dean


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