[ih] IETF relevance (was Memories of Flag Day?)

[Michael Thomas]

On 8/30/23 2:36 PM, Steffen Nurpmeso via Internet-history wrote:
> So whereas here everything is tried to give people a hand, the
> IETF has protocols which leave you standing in the rain without
> any tools at hand you can use to get out of the situation.  Take
> DKIM and mailing-lists.

That's what happens when you have to graft security onto something that 
already exists and whose operational models makes it impossible. It's 
like all of the operational issues in SIP land of dealing with legacy 
PSTN signaling gateways. You are bound to have holes that are impossible 
to fill. But with DKIM vs mailing lists, that can be dealt with 
operationally if the goal is to have restrictive signing policy (ie, 
p=reject). Like make them use gmail for list traffic, or make them use a 
mailing list friendly subdomain or things like that. Or just don't use 
mailing lists at all and use something more modern like forum software.

That's why ARC was bound to fail too. Speaking of history... clearly 
nobody paid attention to it.

Mike