Re: <nettime> Direction of Travel - social / technical

[Rich Kulawiec via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org>]

On Wed, Jun 21, 2023 at 05:33:15PM +0200, Allan Siegel via Nettime-tmp wrote:
> I think this could be very helpful as some way of making a comparison
> between the different options as I get a bit confused by the technical
> descriptions and determining what options are best and what are the basic
> necessities in terms of serviceability and reliability.

I'll try to explain this briefly (and thus incompletely) below.

> One criteria that seems to stick out is finding a location that is
> compatible with and sympathetic to what NETTIME is about.

I don't think that's necessary at all.  It would be nice, sure; and it
would be greatly preferable to locating someplace hostile, sure; but as
long as the host is competent, that should suffice.


Now let me go back to your first paragraph.  One of the unfortunate realities
of the contemporary Internet environment is that there are a lot of very bad
operations.  By "bad" I mean "chronic, systemic sources of abuse and attacks",
not "sporadic, isolated sources of abuse and attacks" -- because the latter
describes almost everyone.  These bad operations *are* bad for a variety
of reasons: incompetence, laziness, cheapness, ignorance, greed, etc.
And sometimes they're bad because they've been designed and built for the
express purpose of being so.

A lot has been written about this situation, its causes, its effects, etc.
but I'm not going to recapitulate all of it here.  Instead I'll just talk
about what it means for nettime.

And that's pretty simple: nettime should want nothing to do with any
of these.  Homing nettime on any of them is a recipe for failure.  Why?
Because the rest of the Internet is growing increasingly unwilling
to accept network traffic (including email) from these operations.
This refusal is not only a sensible response, it's a best practice: when
someone has stacked evidence on the table that they're hostile, it's a
bad idea to do nothing while they keep stacking it.  Or as Paul Vixie --
whose name should you know -- put it so eloquently some years back:

	If you give people the means to hurt you, and they do it, and
	you take no action except to continue giving them the means to
	hurt you, and they take no action except to keep hurting you,
	then one of the ways you can describe the situation is "it isn't
	scaling well".

It's not difficult -- in most cases -- to discern which operations are
which.  A modicum of due diligence usually suffices.  I happen to have
a catalog of many of them in my head as a byproduct of decades of working
in this area, so while my knowledge certainly isn't exhaustive there are
some operations that I recognize immediately as non-starters.

It's worth performing this due diligence.  And it's worth paying a bit
more for quality in order to (a) avoid supporting bad operations and
(b) avoid creating a problem set that then has to be solved.

---rsk
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