NSA and IETF, part 3: Dodging the issues at hand
6 points by indolering
6 points by indolering
These rants are bordering on unhinged. They're also clearly made in bad faith.
He consistently refers to his target as an "area director" (with quotes in the original). No, the title is Area Director. No quotes needed. I'm sure Dan would be upset if anyone referred to him as a DJB, an alleged "cryptographer".
Many other comments are him getting enormously upset whether "consensus" is 23 or 22 people.
And then there's this, which is either disingenuous, or outright dishonest:
I would expect a purchasing manager to have instructions along the lines of "Buy only products complying with the standards", and to never see IETF's confusing jumble of further designations.
Standards bodies have reasons for using different labels and processes. What he's really saying here is that for things he cares about (e,g. cryptography), labels and designations matter. For things he doesn't care about (standards body work), labels are stupid and shouldn't be used.
He's also posted messages to the IETF lists alleging that his opponents are being paid off. This is classic crank behavior.
To explain what's happening here with a similar story:
...
Bob is a retired aerospace engineer. He has 30 years of experience in esoteric technology, and is widely considered to be the industry leader. After retirement, he buys a property in the country, and decides to build a custom house. During the build process, he shows up every day, nit-picking every little detail. After all, he's an expert. The people building the house don't share his expertise.
After 3 months of this, the builder tells Bob to get bent, and walks away from the project. Bob spends the next 2 years writing blog articles about how terrible the builder is, and filing one unhinged lawsuit after another. His friends and neighbours tell him to let it go, but he can't. The builders are wrong. And maybe even paid off by his enemies.
...
See "Pearson v. Chung" for a real-world tale of a judge suing a dry cleaners for $54M over a pair of dress pants.
Here, DJBs colleagues are pretty much in agreement that due to his behavior, they're either ignoring him, or outright blocking his messages. They've made public statements saying so.
If DJBs comments were limited to crypto, people would still be taking him seriously. Instead, we get hundreds of pages of essentially crank content. His reputation is nearly ruined as a result of this. He needs to stop before people start calling in wellness checks, out of concern for his mental health.
He consistently refers to his target as an "area director" (with quotes in the original). No, the title is Area Director. No quotes needed. I'm sure Dan would be upset if anyone referred to him as a DJB, an alleged "cryptographer".
The difference being that… "area director" is an internal title made up by the IETF?
After 3 months of this, the builder tells Bob to get bent, and walks away from the project. Bob spends the next 2 years writing blog articles about how terrible the builder is, and filing one unhinged lawsuit after another. His friends and neighbours tell him to let it go, but he can't. The builders are wrong. And maybe even paid off by his enemies.
I don't think this analogy is applicable here, because the agreement between a home owner and a contractor is a human-scale relationship rooted in consent (well, to the degree that consent is possible at all under capitalism…). Both parties came together to agree on the work to be done, and either party can walk away whenever and be more or less done with it.
Standards orgs like the IETF fundamentally aren't like that, because their whole purpose is to centralize decisionmaking. Like it or not, in practice we're all stuck with whatever the IETF decides. So it makes an awful lot more sense to get invested in what decisions they make.
Out of respect for djb’s accomplishments I actually attempted to understand his argument, but I lost the plot at this point in his application of antitrust law to standards comment processes;
[A proposal with] 22 positive votes and 7 negative votes, does not qualify as general agreement. "General" means "shared by or affecting most people, or most of the people in a group"; "most" means "nearly all of the people or things in a group, or nearly all of something"; the phrase "general agreement" means that nearly everyone agrees. Merely having three quarters agree is not good enough.
Except that’s not what “most” means in normal usage; even the dictionary he linked to only has that meaning as one out of several “majority” definitions, and you have to scroll down pretty far to find it.
In my experience reading online rants since Usenet days I’ve found that linking to dictionaries is a red flag in itself, but linking to definitions that don’t even support your argument is a really bad sign.