Re: Notes from Non-meeting

i am easily confused by this stuff, so bear with me.

> One of the things we also agreed on (almost too readily it seems)
> is that the latter is NOT going to be specified by geopriv.
> We probably will offer guidelines on appropriate choices, but
> because we agreed that transport was not on the table, precise
> crypto is not on the table. I think this is a very helpful thing
> if the entire group agrees.

i suspect that one cares about whether the box is locked or not,
and whether the checks in it are signed, irrespective whether the
box is carried by car or by plane.

> It would facilitate further discussion if participants tried
> to keep these concepts separated. Surely they are inter-related,
> but we can discuss them separately. I'd request that we try hard
> to do that. So, for example, you can talk about needing to know
> whom you are disclosing location information to, but it may or
> may not include cryptographic authentication (and in fact
> in some cases there would NOT be any form of cryptographic
> authentication, for example, with emergency calls).

i thought that the 911 call centers were quite interested in being
able to know the phone number which called the service.

> There was great reluctance to get geopriv into the business of
> devising new ways to express policy and in particular, we did
> not see the WG designing a new policy expression language.
> It was also observed that policy can be expressed by a user
> interface as well as a formal policy language.

i suspect that security folk may be of some help de-confusing
policy mechanisms from policy description from policy decisions.

> It was observed that the output RFC of the work could have
> a 1/2 page statement on policy that would be possible to
> agree on, but it was REALLY hard to figure out how to
> agree on a multipage document in less than infinite time.

"i apologize for writing such a long letter, i did not have time to
write a short one." i.e. a short description may require deeper
understanding and more work on simplification than a long complex
description. so i deeply admire this goal.

> Henning observed that we should use "object oriented" language,
> and thus talk about the person object inheriting location from
> the cell phone object.

from a decade of oo in my dark and dirty past: inheritance is data
*and behavior*.

> The set of objects (cell/pager/PDA) problem was observed to be a
> case of multiple inheritance but unlike in computer science, not
> an inherently hard problem to solve :)

in computer science, multiple inheritance is easy. there are fun
problems in implementation.

randy
Received on Wed Mar 20 08:16:43 2002