Re: Internet standardisation remains unilateral

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

On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 12:32 PM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On 10/21/2013 9:30 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 09:08:43AM -0400,
>>   Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> wrote
>>   a message of 27 lines which said:
>>
>>  He invented the datagram...
>>>
>>
>> Some people say it is Leonard Kleinrock. I welcome any precise
>>
>
> With a very strong interest in /not/ getting into the history debates,
> I'll point out that datagram is a term of art this is different from packet
> switching.  Besides the Wikipedia entry on Louis, I'll note that I've
> regularly hear him credited for influencing the work on IP.
>

Giving credit for particular inventions is always problematic. I had
occasion to review the history of the invention of email. There are many
people who made important contributions and not always the ones that they
got credit for.

And sometime the contribution is not coming up with an idea but to perform
triage.


Take the Web, every part of the Web had been proposed before by Ted Nelson.
The only difference between Tim's idea and Ted's was that Tim's could be
implemented. Ted had 110% of a solution Tim stripped that down to 90% that
could be deployed and even though the Web does not have referential
transparency or universal indexicality etc., it was good enough to allow
Google etc. to add those in afterward.

That is a pattern that I see repeated again and again in Internet
development. A lot of the early pioneers were crazy guys whose ideas were
too extreme to be fully realized and had to be interpreted by someone else.

The point here is that when we are looking at security solutions to defeat
PRISM, what may be the most important choice is not which problems are
solved but which are left out. I think that what we have today in email
security is a Ted Nelson scheme that tries to do be too much and ends up
failing to be anything.

-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/