Re: Email (was Re: Next steps towards a net zero IETF)

[Hesham ElBakoury <[e-mail]>]

Is using Everything more energy efficient than email systems that are
currently in use?

Hesham

On Sun, Apr 9, 2023, 2:59 PM Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> I agree with the sentiments but not the conclusions here.
>
> Yes, HTML in email is a dog's breakfast. And whose fault is that? Who is
> responsible for email messaging standards? Well SMTP is IETF and HTML is
> W3C and HTML for email was allowed to fall through the cracks.
>
> The structural problem here is that the HTML that is appropriate for email
> is HTML/2.0 which is structured markup. HTML ceased being that when
> HTML/3.0 landed and it lacks the features required for email messaging
> which include the ability to mark sections of text as quoted. The handling
> of fonts etc. is idiosyncratic at best. But whose responsibility is that?
>
> Yes, Github does have some features that can be used to support
> collaboration. But it is a collaboration flow engine wrapped around a
> source code management system and it is really not built for what we need
> for our work. So while it has some advantages, you have to be using Github **in
> a collaborative setting** pretty much every day to remember how it all
> works. The notion of forking a repository so I can submit a pull request in
> order to comment on something is obscurantism at best.
>
> I do use git every hour of every day but only because I wrote some shell
> scripts several years ago and they run via crontabs to make sure my work is
> safe if the house burns down. I could not tell anyone what any of the
> commands are without looking at a manual. There was a day when I could
> write 6502 assembler code from memory in my head, those days are gone and
> so is my memory of git's stupid command structure. Expecting me to be
> familiar with git because I use it is unreasonable.
>
>
> So what do we do instead? Well, there is a reason I have been building a
> security platform for the past five years, the end goal is to support this:
>
> Mathematical Mesh 3.0 Part X: Everything (ietf.org)
> <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-hallambaker-everything-00.html>
>
> Why does an instant message have to have a different format to a post to a
> chat forum or a microblogging site?
>
> Why isn't an email message, a blog post or an article just a superset of
> the paragraph post format?
>
> Why isn't a book or a report just a superset of the message format?
>
> We could bikeshed ETML endlessly but the core concept there is that ETML
> is one markup that only describes document structure which comes in three
> different levels with Level 1 being directed at chat, Level 2 articles,
> Level 3 reports.
>
>
> Everything in my world is end to end encrypted. To start a discussion,
> Alice loads up a document to the server, it is of course encrypted. Then
> Alice decides who she wants on her team. She adds Bob and Carol to the
> review team and they get decryption access through Mesh Threshold secret
> sharing. Since this is a classified project, there is also a global
> encryption key contribution that is shared separately via Kyber.
>
> Bob reads the document, he notices some spelling issues and adds
> annotations on his copy. He also notices some broader issues that affect
> multiple parts of the document. All these annotations are tagged with the
> appropriate lightweight semantic and appends to the DARE sequence
> accompanying the document.
>
> Carol edits the document to correct the spelling errors, Alice opens up a
> separate document to discuss some of the issues, etc. etc. One of the
> issues is legal and so Doug, the external counsel is brought into the loop.
>
>
> OK so why don't we use tools like this? A large part of the reason is the
> lack of the necessary security infrastructure to make it secure. But
> another part is the lack of open interoperable standards. For this sort of
> system to work, Doug has to be able to plug into this conversation and get
> the information he needs using a tool that he already has on his machine,
> it cant be a proprietary thing he has to buy and install just for one
> client.
>
> If someone wants to bend the ears of some VC folk, we could build this for
> real for less than 8 figures. If not, I have other plans which will get
> there eventually.
>
>
> PHB
>
>
>