Re: Draft finding - "Transitioning the Web to HTTPS"

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 2:06 AM, Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@w3.org> wrote:
> On 2015-01 -26, at 22:15, Eric J. Bowman <eric@bisonsystems.net> wrote:
>> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>>
>>> But where, in the mailing list discussions, are the people who do live
>>> in a place that's remote such that the bottleneck is between the ISP
>>> and the backbone? If there's a link to the backbone at all, email
>>> works, so the circumstances don't technically rule out participation
>>> in discussions like this one.
>>>
>
> Wow. They are users,  They do not spend their time on this list for many reasons.
> They have other things to do with their time.  If they were serious geeks they would have moved but in fact they just want to run their hotel, cafe, business, .   If you look at this list you won't find a representative sample of all the users.

In the email you quote, I said also:
> (Surely someone has to be running the ISPs and one would think whoever
> is running the ISPs would want to make their needs known.)

That is, I wasn't suggesting that we should expect end users to come
and talk on mailing lists where the caching architecture is discussed.
I was suggesting that if forward proxies are essential to the a large
numbers of edge networks to work properly, we should expect someone
who runs those networks once in a while to show up and explain how
important exactly the forward proxies are.

> You will find, I expect, mainly white

Seems odd to bring up skin color in the mailing list context.

> english-speaking male technology experts.

When I was drafting the email you quote, I wrote a pre-emptive rant
about how trite an explanation "English" is for the lack of first-hand
testimony. But then I deleted that mini-rant, because I didn't want to
pre-emptively rant against points that hadn't been raised. Sadly, I
was good at guessing. In this case, the notion that the requirement to
use English just happens to filter out all the testimony that would
support the forward proxy architecture doesn't work.

If the use case is postulated to exist in "Africa", it's not really
the case that no one knows English in "Africa", so you'd need a magic
correlation of the parts of Africa postulated to depend on proxies and
the parts of Africa where English skills aren't as readily available.
If the use case is postulated to exist on "remote islands", there
exist remote islands where English is spoken:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_Islands

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@hsivonen.fi
https://hsivonen.fi/

Received on Saturday, 14 February 2015 10:17:17 UTC