🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <32337@news.Think.COM> barmar@Think.COM writes:
>And what happens when a machine using two-party authentication tries to
>talk to one that requires a third party?

Communication fails.  What's wrong with that?  If you follow your
logic you reach an absurd situation: Until things are perfect, nothing
ought to be done, and perfection will take an infinite amount of time to
reach, so let's not do anything.

All I am trying to poing out in this whole sequence of messages is
that there is merit in trying so reach a solution a step at a time
rather than trying to do it in one giant leap forward.  (And in the
area of security, I do not believe everyone wants to land in the same
spot.)  The blind rejection of Kerberos by some members of this list
is a frightful thing.

Yes, we "ultimately" want universal inter-pluggability and
inter-workability.  But we simply are not smart enough yet to do it,
OSI notwhithstanding.

If some folk do not agree with my opinion in the previous paragraph
they ought to demonstrate, repeat *demonstrate* me wrong.  I'd be
happy to see a working, repeat *working* demonstration that I am
wrong.

But I would request that those people do their work quietly, in the
background, without trying to force their experiments (even paper
experiments) on me, my company, or my government by calling their
experiment an "International Standard."

>Rather than having multiple standards, there should be one standard with
>several modes.  A good example is TELNET, which is a single standard but
>has option negotiation that can vary the protocol.

That's a good example.  Telenet itself just provides a framework to
trigger option negotions.  The options themselves have been proposed
over the years, as someone got a good idea (new options are being
developed even today.)  And many options that the original developers
thought important have been ignorred.

In other words, one of the strengths of Telnet is that the developers
did not undertake to design the perfect, ultimate protocol.  Rather
they built one that could be extended.  So simple basic Telnet now has
options for 3270 emulation, special line-mode processing, normal
full-duplex.  In fact one could even add in-session security
challanges.

Anyway, I think I've made my point, so I'll be a good kid and be quiet
for a while.

Have a good Christmas/New Years everyone!

				--karl--