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02 MAR 2004 By Gordon Fecyk, Pan-Am Internet Services
Portions paraphrased from Seo Hyun-Jin's 01 MAR 2004 article from The Korea Herald
| Likely Highlights of MXCOMP statement: |
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SEOUL - CRUCIAL TALKS here this week on Meng Weng Wong's SPF ambitions made modest progress but failed to bridge the divide on major issues concerning the 11-month tension.
Wrapping up their two hour negotiations Thursday, Wong, Danisch, Fecyk, Brand, Hardie and Fältström adopted a chairman's statement in which they agreed to set up a working group for detailed discussions and hold the next talks in August, at San Diego...
Seriously, read Hyun-Jin's article and then compare the real-world events to the archives of the ASRG SMTP-Verify mailing list. You'd almost believe we're playing with nuclear weapons here.
I COULD COMPARE EVERY PARAGRAPH of Hyun-Jin's report with the activity on SMTP-Verify, play a Mad-Libs game with key names and places, and come up with an article that would have CNN's reporters drooling. And they'd eat up every word, too. Junk e-mail is supposedly such a huge problem that the IETF actually set up an emergency meeting just to deal with this problem.
The fact is, the IETF holds these meetings twice to three times a year. They do this to refocus their working groups, discuss creating new working groups (like the one I'm here for), discuss IETF business itself, and (as RFC 3160 says) hold a week-long dweebfest including PGP key-signing parties, a social event at the World Cup Stadium, and so on to break the tension and put their work back into perspective again. The work is always going on through the IETF-sponsored mailing lists, and even these meetings don't mean progress without consensus on the mailing lists.
The last thing the six of us need now is sensationalist stories. There are far more exciting things to write about here, like IPv6 streaming.
THE SIX OF US NEED REFOCUSING TOO. I tried to explain this back on February 4th. We are not here to save the Internet from junk e-mail, and the Internet is not going to die on Friday if we don't start a working group on Thursday. We're here to discuss proposals to combat a very specific problem that happens to be part of the spam problem.
By comparison, if the six factions over at Beijing don't agree, the Internet could very well die. Along with the rest of the world. Or at least the corner of it I'm standing on this moment.
Patrik Fältström asked me two days ago to step back and take a long look at what we're doing. I think I can do that now. It's actually easier to do that from here, with some real-world problems in view to put it into perspective.
Right now, I'd be happy to get out of Seoul alive, never mind with some kind of progress at the Seoul IETF. But progress here would be nice, too.
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