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

[John Day]

At 4:16 PM -0600 8/10/01, Vernon Schryver wrote:
>  > 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.

Ahh, yes and there is the rub!

>
>  > 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.

Actually, my understanding of SMTP is that it is intended to be as 
much an application relay as X.400?  No.  I would agree.  The ends 
were the ends of a transport layer connection, i.e. TCP.

Take care,
John