Re: draft-bradner-rfc-extracts-00 and the risk of "false RFCs"

[Please refrain from Cc:'ing me. I'm subscribed.]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2005, Bill Sommerfeld wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-02-18 at 21:11, Don Armstrong wrote:
> > > the people most likely to be harmed by an unofficial RFC would
> > > be the ones who would not know how to check the signature.
> > 
> > Are such people even capable of writing software that actually
> > conforms to an RFC?
> 
> you have an unrealistically narrow view of the target audience of
> IETF documents.

Perhaps I do have unrealistic assumptions about the average
intelligence of the target audience of IETF documents,[1] but assuming
the target audience of IETF documents is capable of the following:

  1) reading and understanding them
  2) following simple directions to verify the authenticity of the
  document

then I really don't see the difficulty. It really is quite trivial to
verify a PGP signature, as I demonstrated previously. Surely anyone
for whom the accuracy of an RFC was important would be capable of
undertaking such a simple task.

This also has the added advantage of taking care of malicious RFC-look
alikes that aren't derivative works of an actual RFC and thus aren't
covered by the license at all.

Don Armstrong

1: It wouldn't be the first time that I've been surprised by assuming
an audience was capable of rather rudementary tasks...
-- 
DIE!
 -- Maritza Campos http://www.crfh.net/d/20020601.html

http://www.donarmstrong.com              http://rzlab.ucr.edu

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