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 espaethDigital PlumberPremium,MVM
join:2001-04-21
Minneapolis, MN
kudos:2
 ·Clear Wireless
| reply to funchords
Re: MORE! MORE! MORE! said by funchords:That's true of all of the RFCs. Enforcement is essentially the missing part. Actually, for the worthwhile RFCs the enforcement is quite effective. "Do it this way or your shit won't work"
said by funchords:I love to quote the RFCs (those that are the authoritative "Internet Standards") because that's the instruction manual for developers and implementors. There are actually a couple Internet standards bodies: the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF, who picks and chooses certain RFCs to become standards) and the IEEE being the two largest orgs. The difference between RFCs and IEEE standards is like the difference between books and scientific journals. To publish in a scientific journal you need a certain level of detail, research, and peer review whereas any jackass of the street can write a book.
I'm not knocking RFCs, there's a lot of brilliant ideas published in RFC form, but you have to take them for what they are. Many of the proposals are purposefully left open-ended for interpretation; that's why SHOULD vs MUST becomes a huge point of distinction in many RFCs.
said by funchords:And Comcast didn't know how all P2P apps would respond -- all P2P apps haven't been written yet. If the app doesn't exist, how would Sandvine profile it to be able to take action on it? | |
 funchordsHelloPremium,MVM
join:2001-03-11
Yarmouth Port, MA
kudos:5 | Any jackass can write an RFC, but it won't make "Internet Standard" level until its been fully vetted.
If the app doesn't exist, how would Sandvine profile it to be able to take action on it? Sandvine attacked the application protocol, so it recognized all BitTorrent applications. However, how one BitTorrent app responds to RST's resulting Winsock error code might be completely different than how another responds. Some apps might try and reestablish contact right away, others might mark the peer as "bad" and blacklist it.
Sandvine's method doesn't (and probably cannot) recognize which app is actually being used to generate the protocol it is attacking, so therefore it cannot predict what the app will do in response to the RST unless that behavior is also described in the protocol. And for BitTorrent, Gnutella, or ED2K, it is not. (I don't know about the others.)
--
Robb Topolski -= funchords.com =- Hillsboro, Oregon
FCC Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet - Thursday, April 17th - Stanford Univ., Calif. | |
 RARPSL
join:1999-12-08
Suffern, NY | reply to espaeth
said by espaeth:I'm not knocking RFCs, there's a lot of brilliant ideas published in RFC form, but you have to take them for what they are. And then there are the RFCs that are issued dated April 1 such as 1149 (A Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on avian carriers) issued in 1990. This one was actually implemented experimentally a few years ago and even had an enhancement RFC issued a few years ago where the datagrams were tunneled via commercial air planes to speed the transmission time. | |
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