Subject: RE: delegating (portions of) ietf list disciplinary process

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 07:53:57 -0700

> Behalf Of Dave Crocker

> For another, individual pique is best pursued either by 
> private exchange or 
> through formal complaint.  Neither requires burdening the 
> full IETF list.

I disagree, hard cases make bad law, good cases make bad procedure. It
is easy to see why process is unnecessary in good cases. It's the bad
ones where there is a problem.

Recently an IRTF WG chair decided to effectively turn the group into a
publicity engine for his own company and banned anyone who objected to
this or disagreed with him, at one point he had banned about a third of
the active members. He is no longer the chair and the normal process
took its course but what would have happened if there had been no open
process?

The point is that we cannot assume that WG chairs always operate in good
faith and that any objections that appear on the lists are from cranks
despite the simplicity that model provides. 

WG chairs are not elected, the ADs are not elected. The accountability
processes of the IETF are not designed for the type of action suggested.
If the consensus processes are blocked then complaints are more likely
to end up being littigated rather than thrashed out in public.

My objection to this thread is that people appear to have rushed to
judgement that this is a disciplinary issue before considering the
substance of the point raised. People seem to be saying that there is no
time to read the message because they are too busy shooting the
messenger.

I do not understand the objection that Dean is raising, I certainly do
not see that a defect in DNSSEC should constrain DNS operations. However
I will point out that four years ago we had a similar argument about a
defect in DNSSEC that I predicted would prevent deployment in the major
TLDs for at least five years. The procedural abuses that took place in
that instance have resulted in the current situation where phishing is a
real problem and there is justified concern that DNS based attacks -
pharming will become a threat.

There is a simple way to settle this issue, state that it is a
requirement for DNSSEC to work with anycast. This is not impossible to
achieve, an RSA signature is only 256 bytes, a DNS response can be 500
bytes without difficulty and in practice can be up to the ethernet MTA
of 1400 bytes without significant operational issues. A response from a
TLD is small. I don't see why packet fragmentation would be a problem
for the anycast TLDs.

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---

From: "Gray, Eric" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 18:40:00 -0300

Ted,

	One way to deal with the fact that having a fair
and impartial selection process might occasionally get
you a bad egg is to have an equally fair mechanism for
"impeaching" a member of the selected group.  If I am
recalling things correctly, isn't that how the same
issue is dealt with in the NomCom process?

--
Eric

--> -----Original Message-----
--> From: [email-masked] 
--> [mailto:[email-masked]]On Behalf Of
--> Theodore Ts'o
--> Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 4:00 PM
--> To: Nick Staff
--> Cc: [email-masked]
--> Subject: Re: delegating (portions of) ietf list disciplinary process
--> 
--> 
--> On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 06:00:18PM -0700, Nick Staff wrote:
--> > > 2) Unless discussion of the decisions of the netiquette 
--> > > committee, during the committee is considering a request, and 
--> > > after the committee has rendered a decision, is ruled out of 
--> > > scope, it's not going to help the very long discussions such 
--> > > as this one which plague the IETF list.
--> > > In the worst case, we can assume that the mailing list abuser 
--> > > will immediately appeal any decision of the netiquette 
--> > > committee, which means that after inventing this entire 
--> > > mechanism, it may not have any effect other than 
--> prolonging the agony.
--> > 
--> > I know personally, if I feel a process is fair, then even 
--> if I hate the
--> > decision I can accept it and move on.  That's another 
--> reason why I think it
--> > should be an unmanipulated membership.
--> 
--> That may be true for you, OK.  But that's irrelevant.  What about
--> someone who is mentally disturbed, or someone who is determined to
--> make a nuisance of himself?  How long could someone who is genuinely
--> determined to carry out a DOS attack on the IETF should be 
--> allowed to
--> do so?
--> 
--> I am not necessarily making any claims about anybody in 
--> parparticular,
--> although I do have some private opinions on this matter.  
--> The question
--> is should we design a process which is open to abuse in this manner?
--> It seems like designing a protocol with a known security hole and
--> assuming that all of the participants won't violate 
--> societal norms an
--> exploit said security hole.  If this is considered 
--> irresponsible when
--> designing a protocol, should it be considered irresponsible when
--> designing organizational policies?
--> 
--> 						- Ted
--> 
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