Re: References Are Needed

Ahh, yes. The old "anything you agree with is relevant, and anything you
disagree with is irrelevant." I've seen that claim before by people
promoting incredible assertions that were subsequently discredited.  
One might even say that raising that argument has a bad reputation. ;-)

Your implicit incredible assertion is that responsible people would (or
should) never judge code based on reputation and quality.  As
justification, you leverage the notion of the fallacy of ad hominem in
regard to science.  Ad hominem means that an argument based on personal,
irrelevant facts is a fallacy.  To be ad hominem, two elements are
required:
  1) It must be personal, 
  2) It must be irrelevant.  
 The fatness of scientist personal and is probably not relevant to the
study of botany. Calling botanist fat is probably an ad hominem.  But of
course, fatness _is_ relevant to the study of obesity in the laboratory,
it _is_ relevant to the medial costs of heart disease for scientists,
etc.  Whether fatness is relevant depends on what is being studied and
decided.  The reputation of a distributor is relevant to the practical
choice of a software distribution.

Mark Johnson is a distributor of DJBDNS-based code, so this discussion
is indeed on-topic to the DJBDNS list.

Code has quality and reputation. Quality and reputation require
references, background and biographical data. I can find none of this on
Mark Johnson; As shown above, it is relevant to the practical choice of
a distribution.  It certainly factors into my decisions about whether to
create a another distribution or trust his because I expect others won't
trust his if there is no quality and reputation behind his code.

While your dog can indeed distribute code, and can even get credit
cards, others may not want to use his code, nor take his credit card.  
The financial transactions made by a dog are fraudulent; no one can
recover money from a dog.  Likewise, no one wants to take code from a
dog (or a sock puppet) because if that code contains security
vulnerabilities added by the dog, the dog (or sock puppet) can't be held
responsible.  That is part of quality and reputation; If the distributor
is anonymous and insubstantial, they have no reputation to put behind
their code.

Anyway, if you don't have any references for Mark Johnson, I'll just
thank you for the opportunity to debunk yet another incredible
assertion.

Thanks,

		--Dean

On Sat, 14 Mar 2009, Laurent Bercot wrote:

> >> Does anyone have any references, resume, background, anything at all on
> >> Mark Johnson?
> > Can we get the same from you?  Specifically, I'd like to know what
> > formal math, computer science, security, and cryptography training you
> > have.
> 
> This is all very irrelevant. Why would anyone judge a poster on where
> he's coming from, instead of on what he says? I like to consider this
> list as a scientific one. Science does not care about who you are. It
> only cares about what you have to contribute.
>  It is a good thing not to be impressed by names or resumes, and focus
> on the content of a message, not on the identity or status of the sender.
> 
> On the Internet, nobody knows I'm a dog, and I would like it to remain
> that way. Please keep the traffic to DNS-related topics.
> 
> 

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