RE: Status of MARID WG?

On Tue, 23 Nov 2004, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
> > There is a fundamental concept of democracy and consensus to 
> > the IETF. Its just insufficient and flawed.  Most standards 
> > organizations have a membership concept, and /all/ members 
> > get to vote on certain things.
> 
> If someone wants to trump my opinion in my field of expertise on an issue I
> believe is critical to the security of the Internet on the basis of an
> unelected appointment through the old boy club then they are going to have a
> big fight on their hands.
>
> I find it utterly ludicrous that we are on the brink of taking a spec to an
> alternative working group due to a technical dispute where the pragmatic
> approach is so clear.
>
> If people don't want a fight then the answer is clear, give me an
> alternative way to deploy MASS that does not create a dependency on the
> deployment of new DNS infrastructure. The dependency is real and it is
> neither necessary nor even advantageous.

"If someone wants to trump [your] opinion ..."? 
"If people don't want a fight, [...] give me ..."? 

These are another set of dictatorial statements.  It is odd that you talk
about democratic process and make threats about trumping your opinion at
the same time.  It seems you like the democratic process until it doesn't
go your way. Then its threats.

Well, I think it is ludicrous that we (that is, the ietf) are still
talking about a non-working, demonstrably harmful specification such as
SPF and Sender-ID in /any/ working group.  But I guess that is part and
parcel of a democratic process:  The spam-profiteers and others will
continue to promote it, in any way they can. The rest of us have to
continue exposing the problems.  So far, 2 working groups have rejected
SPF/Sender-ID. Why not a third try?  It couldn't be that the IETF has
better things to do.

> > Right. "Combining relative weights" sounds very much like Bayes rule.
> 
> But Bayesian inference makes some assumptions that are not valid for a real
> corpus, the probabilities are not disjoint and Bayes developed his theory of
> probability for that area. 

First, Bayes rule makes no ssumptions that aren't valid for a real corpus.
That assertion seems to be nonsense.  Second, there is a partition of
events on the spam sample space. Indeed, there are many, as in any
probability application.  And like any probability application or textbook
problem, choosing the partition is the hard part. Then integrating that
into a working mail system in ways that are easy for users is even harder.  
But, by comparison, when Radio was first invented, you basically had to be
able to build your own radio receiver to listen--that was pretty hard.  
Now you just go to Circuit City and buy one.


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