Re: Brian Kantor

[Stan Barber <[e-mail]>]

Like Eliot, I also got to know Brian via Netnews and his important efforts
in codifying the what people were actually doing in RFC 977. He was the key
motivator in the approach I did on codifying the many and varied extensions
that people implemented in NNTP(RFC 2980). I will miss him.

On Mon, Feb 3, 2020 at 2:30 PM Eliot Lear <[e-mail]> wrote:

> It seems we can’t go long without another one of these unfortunate notes.
>
> I imagine a great many at the IETF will not have heard of Brian Kantor, as
> he only briefly participated in standards meetings and mailing lists; but
> he was the co-creator of the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP), RFC
> 977, and a regular for many years at USENIX. Before there was Facebook and
> Twitter and MySpace and AOL, there was NetNews, and it was Brian and Phil
> Lapsley, along with Rich Salz later, who designed how we would get our
> daily fix over the Internet of everything from soc.religion.{pick your
> favorite) to alt.sex. That same mechanism was used by molecular biologists
> to distribute updates to the GenBank database, precursor to the Human
> Genome Project, and was how we informed one another at SGI of disposition
> of bugs before there were such tools as Bugzilla or Service Now.
>
> Brian had a definite preference for how RFCs should be developed. He
> believed that they service the community best when they document existing
> practice, rather than specifying wishful thinking as to how things might
> work. He was also an avid amateur radio practitioner (a ham – WB6CYT), and
> deeply involved in the packet radio community alongside Phil Karn. He was
> also involved in researching security of the Internet of Things, and
> together with Stefan Savage produced seminal work on automobile
> vulnerabilities.
> Brian was a mentor to generations of both professionals and amateurs
> alike, and he will be dearly missed.
>
> 73s, Brian.
>
> Eliot
>