RE: Status of MARID WG?

> > All you need is two interoperable implementations and a userbase 
> > noticable to the IETF. The fact that 98% of the users of 
> the internet 
> > will never use it directly or indirectly does not matter.
> 
> The "userbase noticable" isn't requirement of the RFC 
> process. The IETF 
> doesn't standardize based on popularity, but on consensus.

Consensus amongst a community that is 100% atypical of the Internet users.

Each time I vist the IETF the proportion of members who are unashamed
technologist supremacists rises. There is no embarassment about developing
systems that ordinary users cannot make use of.



> > Nobody in the IETF is elected, nobody is accountable. The 
> inevitable 
> > consequence of that situation is that nothing that the IETF 
> does can 
> > ever rise above the level of a personal opinion.
> 
> This is also not true.  It may appear this way from time to 
> time, but it isn't literally true.

It is literaly true that nobody is elected. All appointments are through a
selection committee that is explicitly non-representative and
non-accountable.


> Indeed, the Microsoft presentation given at the Anti-spam 
> conference at MIT demonstrated that.  The MSN people noted 
> that their biggest complaints came from other divisions of 
> Microsoft whose spam they blocked (and that was unblocked). 
> And while they weren't sharing their techniques (better to 
> exploit them that way), what little they did reveal made me 
> think they were using bayesian technique, though I think they 
> specifically denied using spam-bayes. I thought it odd for 
> them to come to a technical conference, give a presentation, 
> and not actually share any technical information.

The best presentation at the MIT conference was by the MIT undergrad who was
the only person there who gave a rundown of the comparative effectiveness of
bayesian inference vs other techniques and found the other techniques worked
better.

I would be surprised if Microsoft did use Bayesian inference, they are not
the best tool for their corpus by a very long way. In the presentation I
heard the presenter said that they used a huge number of rules and
constantly re-evaluated both the ones that were most effective and the ways
in which relative weights were combined.


> These same people saying spam-bayes is pure evil (eg 
> Vixie) have made statements to the effect that anything that 
> helps reduce spam is good.  Except spam-bayes. They say 
> that's bad. Not just a little bad. But terribly, horribly, 
> drastically bad.

Oh I can think of ways in which Spam-bayes might be bad for Paul Vixie...


> I've done some work applying information theory to spam, and 
> have discovered that there is no ultimate solution to spam. 

Now there is an interesting statement. Whayt if the solution does not exist
in information theory?

> But 
> there is a nomination process for the IETF chairman, and 
> members of the IAB.  The IETF is also an activity of ICANN, 

No it isn't.

And no, a nomination process does not an accountability mechanism make.