Re: Bruce Schneier's Proposal to dedicate November meeting to saving the Internet from the NSA

[Dave Crocker <[e-mail]>]

On 9/6/2013 11:42 AM, Dean Willis wrote:
> On Sep 6, 2013, at 9:55 AM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> In other words, the IETF needs to assume that we don't know what
>> will work for end users and we need to therefore focus more on
>> processing by end /systems/ rather than end /users/.
>
> But we are also end users.

Mostly we are /not/.

That is... of course we are end-users.  And to the extent that the
target market for something is users similar to "us", then fine.

The problem is when the target market is mass-market end-users.  The 3-4
billion other folk who don't participate in the IETF.  The average IETF
participant is  wildly different from the average mass-market end-user,
in many different ways.  Very many.


> So, we could eat our own dogfood,

Oh we definitely /should/ eat our own dogfood.  If the stuff we produce
is not even usable for us, well then...  And I think we can learn quite
a bit of how to improve things.

But my deeper point is that that is nowhere close to sufficient, for
demonstrating mass-market usability or efficacy.




On 9/6/2013 10:25 AM, Michael Richardson wrote:
> 1) We could be telling the public about the protocols that we
> designed 10, 15, and even 20 years ago. Some of which even have
> rather widespread implementation, but seem to have zero use. (S/MIME
> is in every copy of Outlook and Thunderbird, AFAIK)

To what end?  Their poor uptake clearly demonstrates some basic 
usability deficiencies.  That doesn't get fixed by promotional efforts.


> What would the spam situation be like if 90% of emails were
> regularly signed back in 1999?

You mean the way that postal mail and telephone calls require you to 
authenticate yourself personally before you can use them?

Or the way you have to authenticate yourself before you can buy anything 
in a store?

There are tradeoffs here and they can have very considerable downsides.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net