[ih] A paper

[John Levine]

Do you think I should send this to the list?

This paper is embarassingly bad, but we've already seen that.

R's,
John

From: John Levine <johnl at iecc.com>
To: internet-history at elists.isoc.org
Subject: Re: [ih] A paper
In-Reply-To: <CAN1qJvDVuyH3+y8gySA9aLeL8dzgSwM4Q9RA3qW2g55yTe+pjg at mail.gmail.com>
Organization: Taughannock Networks
Cc: farzaneh.badii at gmail.com

It appears that farzaneh badii via Internet-history <farzaneh.badii at gmail.com> said:
>Hi everyone,
>
>Filder and I have published a paper recently about Internet protocols and
>human rights but had a historical look at WHOIS, BGP/EGP and DNS. We
>greatly enjoyed the informative conversation about BGP and EGP on this list
>and helped us a lot with providing a more complete background.

I unfortunately also found the paper turgid to the point of unreadability.

It missed how little the HRPC research group had to do with the actual
activity of the IETF. The authors of RFC 8280 were both using the IETF
as a topic for their PhD theses, in ten Oever's case putting himself
into the IETF's processes and using the IETF as unwilling human
research subjects in ways I found quite unethical. The HRPC RG had and
still has a painfully cramped idea of "human rights" limited to issues
of expression and anonymity. I stood up in a couple of their meetings,
pointed out that they were paying attention to only two of the 28
articles of the UDHR, so how about the other 26? What about attacks on
honor and reputation (Art 12), or being arbitrarily deprived of their
property (Art 17), both of which are big problems on the Internet? Oh,
they're important too, said the chair, but nothing changed. 

Some of the HRPC members attempted to do "human rights considerations"
reviews of proposed standards, which mostly revealed that they had no
idea what they were reading. A spec about a technique to transmit
credentials, e.g., for a chartered bank to register for a banking service,
was misinterpreted as a mandatory way for oppressive governments to
track their citizens. It was not a positive experience for anyone.

I also can't help but note that the article gets the title of Tom
Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" wrong in different
ways in two different places which makes it appear that this piece has
not been proofread or otherwise had meaningful review.

R's,
John