Re: Request to Move RFC 954 to Historic Status

["Derek J. Balling" <dredd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday, April 23, 2003, at 04:03 PM, Bill Weinman wrote:

> At 01:04 PM 4/23/2003, Derek J. Balling wrote:
> > Without attempting to drag out this discussion *too* long, I would 
> > say that it's entirely possible for jurisdictions to legislate 
> > various stupid things, and it isn't necessarily the role of the net 
> > "at large" to be accepting of silly policies just because some 
> > countries have them as legislated mandates.
>
> Typical flame-bait -- "don't want to drag out the discussion" ... and 
> ... "your policies are stupid and silly".
>
> With dialog like that, no wonder there's no workable policy.

Sorry, that was not my intention. My "stupid things" statement was a 
segue into my hyperbolic example later in the post (which, it should be 
noted, really did describe a legally-mandated stupid policy), and was 
not intended to imply "privacy is stupid".

My point was simply to indicate that "local legal policies" which seem 
perfectly reasonable to a local municipality, country or region of the 
world, may not necessarily be in line with "best practices" from a pure 
standpoint of "keeping a network up 24x7x365", and it's important that 
- for any RFC - the standards not be watered down in terms of their 
effectiveness to satisfy non-technical concerns.

That Chileans (in the real-world example given) cannot include certain 
information on the WHOIS record does *not* mean by default that 
including it in WHOIS is "bad", and when writing a new policy document, 
that document should not consider it bad just because XX% of the 
countries have laws forbidding it.

Does that wording make more sense?

> There are some very compelling arguments on both sides of this issue. 
> If you want a rational debate, start by acknowledging opposing points 
> of view. If you want a flamewar, please take it somewhere else.

I will certainly agree that there are good arguments for privacy. I 
know that I personally fall on the side of those who say "you're using 
part of a shared IP/name-space, and the rest of the net needs to be 
able to reach you if your portion is 
(screwed,acting-up,down,abusive,whatever)", but I was not meaning to 
imply that the other side of that many-sided coin's arguments were 
"dumb".

Sorry for any misconceptions there.

D