On Friday, November 8, 2013, SM wrote:
>From the Economist [1]:
"On November 6th a meeting in Vancouver of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (IETF), an organisation which brings together the
scientists, technicians and programmers who built the internet in
the first place and whose behind-the-scenes efforts keep it running,
debated what to do about all this. A strong streak of West Coast
libertarianism still runs through the IETF, and the tone was mostly
hostile to the idea of omnipresent surveillance. Some of its members
were involved in creating the parts of the internet that spooks are
now exploiting. "I think we should treat this as an attack," said
Stephen Farrell, a computer scientist from Trinity College, Dublin,
in his presentation to the delegates.
It is an attack, and we should notice/identify the attackers and their methods. An attacker may try to enter IETF discussions, discourage, or not acknowledge efforts, or slow some process, or fast some process, or make community ignore some inputs, etc.
Discussion then moved on to
what should be done to thwart it.
As a sort of council of elders for the internet, the IETF has plenty
of soft power. But it has no formal authority. Because its standards
must be acceptable to users and engineers all over the world
So we should work for securing Internet-users, and prevent attackers even if they were service providers. I think most of our standards are accepted mostly by elder businesses.
, it works
through a slow process of consensus-building. New standards, guidelines
and advice take months or years to produce."
I don't think it is only slow but also not managed we'll, because IETF still not using time for quality, it is just being slow to wait if some one volunteers an effort, or to make some new people bored. Usually new participant have more fast (never slow) than elder.
There is a sort of council of elders of the internet around here. :-)
That is strange which is not in our procedure. I thought IETF has only participants equal, but I felt (the journalist noticed) that there is hidden groups, teams, bodies, etc, which do work quickly faster than our slow participation. If this elder council body/group exists, then it is another attack that may not be seen by users.
AB