Re: Ancient history [Re: ipv4 and ipv6 Coexistence.]

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, Feb 27, 2020 at 8:44 AM Joel M. Halpern <[e-mail]> wrote:

> While technically commercial use of the Internet for non-governmental
> purposes was not supported in the 1980s, in practice it occurred.  From
> the mid-80s, I worked for a company that got Internet access through
> MRNet, used that for commercial interaction with the government, and
> also used it for other commercial and non-commercial purposes.
>
> I think for the purposes of Stewart's original comment, the difference
> someone drew between soft and hard control is important.  The
> government9s) clearly had soft control over the Internet for much of
> that time.  (It would be pretty foolish for me to argue with Mike over
> that.)  At the same time, the ISO OSI example was a case where the
> government (and then other groups) tried to exercise harder control. And
> it failed.  Which aligns well with how hard it has been to get folks to
> adopt IPv6, and yet we are making progress.
>
> Yours,
> Joel
>

If you work on communications technologies, you are going to receive the
attention of people who make it their business to observe communications.
That is simply a fact of life.

But what folk don't seem to appreciate is that it is people rather than
institutions that do things. Institutions don't have agendas, the people
working for them do. And so it is usually a mistake to attribute intent to
the alphabet soup of three letter agencies. One hand rarely knows what the
other is doing.

Times change and so do agendas. The concerns of the cold war are not the
concerns of today. Sometimes parts of the TLA agenda coincides with our
agenda and sometimes parts are opposed and most often both are the case at
the same time.

I have been pushing the use of Threshold cryptography for several years
now. Some parts of the federal govt. oppose it because the last thing they
want is better end-to-end crypto and some parts are pushing for adoption
because it is the tool we need to address insider threat.