On Jul 25, 2010, at 5:36 AM, John Levine wrote:
>>> Some people have argued that it should be possible to participate
>>> in some or all IETF processes while remaining partly or completely
>>> anonymous. Is this a reasonable expectation?
>
>> No. Anonymous or pseudonymous contributions would allow a scumbag
>> patent troll to inject ideas into a standard for which s/he held
>> an undisclosed patent. I don't see how we can draw a line between
>> that and other types of contribution.
>
> To tease this out a little more, the IETF makes no effort to verify
> the identities of people who join or send mail to mailing lists,
Permit me to nitpick... :-)
We don't require that they provide a name for a mailing list, or that it be a "right" name. But we do in effect verify the email address they use, and we do force them to post from that email address. Someone could come up with an email address per working group ("donald.duck+dispatch@xxxxxxxxx") for the price of a little typing, and some do create "special addresses" for IETF use (example: Ralph Droms is rdroms@xxxxxxxxx or rdroms.ietf@xxxxxxxxx, the latter being for IETF use). In the sense that an email address is in fact used by an identifiable person, it is an identity that is verified in the process of joining a list.
> while
> we expect that people who physically attend IETF meetings register
> under their real names and sign the attendance sheets in sessions. As
> far as I know, no RFC (other than perhaps April 1) has an author using
> a pseudonym, but is that policy, or just the way it happens to have
> worked?
>
> There is certainly some difference here, since the mailing lists and
> RFCs are immediately available to the world, while the attendance info
> is not, but we seem to have different policies in practice.
>
> I am NOT suggesting that a privacy policy should go into this level of
> detail, but it needs to deal with the reality that in some contexts we
> require people to provide PII, while in others it is conventional but
> not required.
>
> R's,
> John
>
>
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