Re: [NNagain] Internet Education for Non-technorati?

[rjmcmahon <rjmcmahon@rjmcmahon.com>]

As an open-source maintainer of iperf 2, which is basically a network 
socket & traffic tool, I find this history extremely interesting. 
Releasing a measurement tool free to all, with transparent code, allows 
everyone access to a "shared yardstick." While maybe not enough, 
hopefully, it helps a little bit to those 40+ years of not much.

Bob
> Good point -- "How would I know if an installation was meeting the
> specs?"
> 
> It *has* been done before.  From a historical perspective...
> 
> When TCPV4 was being defined and documented in RFCs (e.g., RFC 793),
> circa 1981, other activities were happening in the administrative
> bureaucracy of the US government, outside the realm of the "research
> community".
> 
> The US Department of Defense, which purchases huge quantities of
> electronic equipment, declared TCP to be a "DoD Standard" in the early
> 1980s.  Further, they changed their purchasing rules so that all
> equipment purchased, which might need to communicate to other
> equipment, had to implement TCP.  If you wanted to sell your networked
> products to the government, they had to implement TCP.   This caused
> industry to suddenly pay attention to what us crazy researchers had
> done in creating this TCP thing.
> 
> A separate piece of government, the US National Bureau of Standards
> (now called NIST), defined a testing procedure for verifying that a
> particular TCP implementation actually conformed to the documented DoD
> Standard.   Further, they also created a program which would certify
> third-party labs as qualified to perform those tests and issue
> conformance certificates.   Such conformance proof could be submitted
> by companies as part of their sales process to supply equipment for
> DoD contracts.
> 
> I remember this pretty well, since I set up one such TCP Conformance
> Lab, got it certified, and we performed a lot of testing and
> consulting to help traditional government contractors figure out what
> TCP was all about and get their products certified for DoD
> procurement.  I've never learned who was orchestrating those
> bureaucratic initiatives, but it seemed like a good idea.  There may
> have been other similar efforts in other countries over the decades
> since 1981 that I don't know anything about.
> 
> In the last 40+ years, AFAIK little else has happened for testing,
> certification, or regulation of Internet technology.   Hundreds,
> perhaps thousands, of "standards" have been created by IETF and
> others, defining new protocols, algorithms, and mechanisms for use in
> the Internet.  I'm not aware of any testing or certification for any
> Internet technology today, or any way to tell is f any product or
> service I might buy actually has implemented, correctly, any
> particular "Internet Standard".
> 
> Governments can create such mechanisms around important
> infrastructures, and have done so for transportation and many others.
> IMHO they could do the same for Internet, and seem to be trying to do
> so.
> 
> But to be effective the administrators, politicians, and regulators
> need to know more about how the Internet works.   They could create
> "Conformance Labs".   They could involve organizations such as the
> Underwriters Lab in the US, CSA in Canada, CE (European Conformity) et
> al.
> 
> If they knew they could and decided they should .... Education...
> 
> Jack Haverty
> 
> On 10/12/23 12:52, Hal Murray via Nnagain wrote:
> 
>> Jack Haverty said:
>> 
>>> A few days ago I made some comments about the idea of "educating"
>>> the
>>> lawyers, politicians, and other smart, but not necessarily
>>> technically
>>> adept, decision makers.
>> 
>> That process might work.
>> 
>> Stanford has run programs on cyber security for congressional
>> staffers.
>> 
>> From 2015:
>> Congressional Staffers Headed to Stanford for Cybersecurity Training
>> 
> https://cisac.fsi.stanford.edu/news/congressional-staffers-headed-stanford-cybe
>> rsecurity-training
>> 
>>> Today I saw a news story about a recent FCC action, to mandate
>>> "nutrition
>>> labels" on Internet services offered by ISPs:
>> 
>> Is there a chicken-egg problem in this area?
>> 
>> Suppose I had a nutrition-label sort of spec for a retail ISP
>> offering.  How
>> would I know if an installation was meeting the specs?  That seems
>> to need a
>> way to collect data -- either stand alone programs or patches to
>> existing
>> programs like web browsers.
>> 
>> Would it make sense to work on those programs now?  How much could
>> we learn if
>> volunteers ran those programs and contributed data to a public data
>> base?  How
>> many volunteers would we need to get off the ground?
>> 
>> Could servers collect useful data?  Consider Zoom, YouTube, gmail,
>> downloads
>> for software updates...
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