Re: [sasl] MOGGIES Proposed Charter

[Arnt Gulbrandsen <[e-mail]>]

On 05/24/2010 05:36 PM, Nicolas Williams wrote:
> On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 08:34:38AM +0200, Arnt Gulbrandsen wrote:
>> On 05/24/2010 06:36 AM, Nicolas Williams wrote:
>>> These wouldn't be constants though -- that's part of the point.
>>
>> Aren't you talking about sendint something like "cipher suite foo is
>> pretty strong"? "Pretty strong" is a magic constant.
>
> No, not on the wire.  We're talking about the API, and the UI.

Same thing. A piece if information is sent from someone's domain to 
someone else's domain. Whether that involves network traffic is not very 
important; the most significant bit is that someone's code provides 
information to someone else's code, and the two "someone"s don't know 
each other.

> Right, and therein lies one problem with strength numbers: we've no clue
> how they'll be used, and quite possibly they'll be used inappropriately.

That applies no matter how you package the piece of information.

I know one instance where they tried to get away from packaging the 
information as a piece: A Windows thing called TWAIN where the two 
pieces of code (which may or may not be linked into the same process) 
cooperate across the API to build a UI. TWAIN does get away from the 
packaging, but the result is not nirvana.

Arnt