[ih] End-to-end - Was: Re: Found the bug - a word to avoid....

[Karl Auerbach]

My imaginary hat is being tipped in very real thanks and cheers to all 
the effort that went into figuring where a couple of my postings went.

If we step back we might see this event as a kind of failure of the 
end-to-end principle - something in the middle decided to muck with the 
data moving between the endpoints (in this case the end-points being the 
members of this mailing list.)

The notion of end-to-end clarity and transparency - the notion that data 
should flow, unvexed, unchanged - is valuable.

I have considerable concern that the generation of people who see 
end-to-end as a valuable principal is aging away and being replaced by a 
new generation who perceive the Internet as a bag of their favorite 
applications.  Their concern is that those applications work; there is 
not a lot of honor or credit given to elegant underlying end-to-end 
plumbing.  That, in turn, opens the door to application layer proxies 
and gateways that generally appear transparent but that every now and 
then clamp down on some traffic or some users.

A few years back I wrote a rather pessimistic piece, almost Blade Runner 
dark, about a view of the net of the future being shaped into a world of 
island networks connected by highly guarded bridges.  It's a future that 
I don't want, but I have yet to be convinced that that future is not 
possible or not likely.

https://www.cavebear.com/cavebear-blog/internet_quo_vadis/

(It's not a short piece - it runs to a bit over 7200 words.)

         --karl--