Re: IETF Chair

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

On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 1:56 PM Timothy Mcsweeney <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> I think I like where you're going with this transparency Rich!  To
> highlight, here are a couple zingers I found in your answers to the
> questionnaire:
>
> "Sadly, right now the IETF often looks more like a colonial empire than
> something like the UN."
>
> "Akamai gets indirect value were I to become the Chair."
>
> "I am not a professional standards person, I am an implementor who needs
> standards to succeed."
>
> "I bring an understanding of what it means to be a respectful and
> inclusive person, knowing that I am a privileged member of society."
>
> This last one is not a zinger but I wanted to include it because of its
> irony to me personally:  “We need to make sure that anyone with an
> interesting idea for an Internet protocol will feel welcome to bring it
> forward, and continue to feel welcome even if their idea has already been
> considered and dropped.”
>

I think the last point is worth emphasizing because there are pressures in
Academia and commerce to chase the latest bright shiny object and that is
not necessarily the solution to the problems we are facing today.

The biggest security problem we face today is breach of data at rest, a
confidentiality problem. But 90% of the efforts of the academy and 99% of
those of commerce are focused on the Blockchain, an integrity technology.
Meanwhile it has taken me most of the last five years working in various
forums to persuade people to look at threshold decryption, a technology
developed in the 1990s that is actually a confidentiality control capable
of securing data at rest.

It is only sometimes the case that a problem and a solution arrive at the
same time. While it seems that the solution always trails the problem, the
reverse is just as likely. And often a solution does not come at a time it
can be applied. If someone tried to make use of the systems I am using in
the Mesh on a 1990s era $80,000 engineering workstation they would be an
unhappy camper. If they tried it on a PC they would be even more unhappy.
These days you can run the same level of crypto on a Raspberry Pi.

The only caveat I would add is that when someone proposes addressing an
issue someone else has been campaigning on for five or ten years and told
that it isn't interesting, they should get a share in the credit when it is
recognized that the time is right.