[e2e] Fwd: Camel's nose in the tent

[Vernon Schryver]

> From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed at reed.com>

> ...
> As a matter of law, it is not their option to block mail based on arbitrary 
> criteria.  In particular, the First Amendment does apply here, as do a 
> variety of telecommunications laws.

Telecommunications law perhaps, but certainly not the 1st Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution.  If anything, it preserves the right of
ISP's to do whatever nonsense they want with their printing presses,
because it restricts the laws that Congress may pass and so what
government can do, not what people can running SMTP relays can do.
Consider that one of the standard challenges to must-carry provisions
of cable TV systems is an appeal to the First Amendement.

> As a matter of contract, ISPs claim to offer "Internet service" not 
> "whatever I feel like". ...
> about fraud ...

I agree about the fraud in such as AOL's interception proxies and UUNet's
port 25 filtering, but given the millions who buy software that purports
to be reasonably safe and secure from Microsoft, that seems moot.  (I'm
seeing 1 CodeRed hit/minute/host and I'm confident that will continue
indefinitely, as new versions without cutoffs are distributed.)

But that is all off-topic.


I think the following isn't:

> As a matter of engineering practice, you are wrong.  SMTP provides an 
> end-to-end guarantee that the contents will be preserved intact (modulo 
> adding Received: lines at the front).
> ...

The last time this topic came up, I though the arbiters of the definition
of the end-to-end principle had more or less agreed that it is about
the connection from one IP host to the next, and that application
gatewaying, translating, and so forth including SMTP relaying is outside
the stratosphere of the end-to-end principle.

If I'm wrong about that, then what are the ends?  Is the reflector
for this mailing list part of the end-to-end (ends?) path for this
message?  If it passes through a gateway to an X.400 system, is the
entire path from either calcite.rhyolite.com or boreas.isi.edu to the
X.400 MTA includig the SMTP-X.400 gateway subject to the end-to-end
principle?  Are the MUA's part of the path covered by the end-to-end
principle?  Given the necessary crazinesses in MUA's and things like
SMTP-X.400 gateways, I hope not.

Besides, the practices if not theories of such as automatic quoted-
printable conversions make talk of SMTP guaranting intact contents
a little strange.


Vernon Schryver    vjs at rhyolite.com