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Email could have been X.400 times better

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Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#141

Post by Spooky23 »

packetlost wrote: post #96
rayiner wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a deterministic network of pipes I love this. Ethernet is such shit. What do you mean the only way to handle a high speed to lower speed link transition is to just drop a bunch of packets? Or sending PAUSE frames which works so poorly everyone disables flow control.

Wait, are you serious? This is how it works?

I experienced this with a VDI project when we mistakenly got 25Gb links delivered to the hosts.

We were expecting to get some sort of unbelievably fast internet experience, but it was awful as the internet gateway was 1 Gb or something similar.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#142

Post by zzo38computer »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #67
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

Doh! Of course it was easier to implement. IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising. Have you ever tried to implement an ITU standard from just reading the specs? It's hard. Firstly you have to spend a lot of money just to buy the specs. Then you find the spec is written by somebody who has a proprietary product, and is tiptoeing along a line that reveals enough information to keep the sta…

I have been told that ITU specifications are deliberately confusing so that they can sell consulting services.

However, I think DER is good (and is better than BER, PER, etc in my opinion). (I did make up a variant with a few additional types, though.)

OID is also a good idea, although I had thought they should add another arc for being based on various kind of other identifiers (telephone numbers, domain names, etc) together with a date for which that identifier is valid (to avoid issues with reassigned identifiers) as well as possibility of automatic delegation for some types (so that e.g. if you register an account on another system then you can get a free OID from it too; there is a bit of difficulty in some cases but it might be possible). (I have written a file about how to do this, although I did not publish it yet.)

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#143

Post by matheusmoreira »

chuckadams wrote: post #75
jcranmer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer? Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way net…

There's an entire book devoted to ripping up the OSI model: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iL0fYmMmariFoSvLd9U5nPVH...

What an interesting read. Thank you for posting it.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#144

Post by pimlottc »

MisterTea wrote: post #24
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a…

My college went all-in on ATM-over-fiber and wired all the dorm rooms with it. It was a PITA. Of course no computers came with ATM support and the cards cost $400+ each so the school had hundreds of cards that they would “lease” them out to students each year. There would be a huge “install depot” at the start of the year where students brought in their (desktop) computers and volunteers would open them up, install the cards, install drivers and configure them for our network.

For Linux heads, it was doubly annoying, as ATM was not directly supported in the kernel. You had to download a separate patch to compile the necessary modules, then install and run three separate system daemons, all with the correct arguments for our network, just to get a working network device. And of course you had to download all the necessary packages with another computer, since you couldn’t get online yet. This was the early 2000s, so WiFi was not really common yet.

Even once you got online, one of the admins would randomly crash every so often and you’d have to restart to get back online. It was such a pain.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#145

Post by deepsun »

ogurechny wrote: post #69
rstuart4133 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doh! Of course it was easier to implement. IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising. Have you ever tried to implement an ITU standard from just reading the specs? It's hard. Firstly you have to spend a lot of money just to buy the specs. Then you find the spec is written by somebody who has a proprietary product, and is tiptoeing along a line that reveals enough information to keep the sta…

Given that general public uses social network services for electronic messaging today, and those don't even pretend they want to be interoperable, we've got parasites of a totally different class on top of the Internet infrastructure.

Remember jabber/xmpp? At least they tried to interoperate. Google Talk at the beginning had interoperability as its main feature, but Google quickly scrapped that.

UPDATE: some say that's because XMPP was too encompassing of a standard (if a format allows to do too much it loses usefulness, like saying that binary files format can store anything). IMO that's not the reason, they could just support they own subset. They scrapped interoperability for competition only IMO.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#146

Post by somat »

nofriend wrote: post #136
MisterTea wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a…

Was it actually superior though? The usual treatment is that packet switching works better at the scale of the internet. With voice, hogging a whole line works, but for the internet it makes more sense to slow everybody down when congestion occurs rather than preventing some people from connecting at all. I get why the telecoms would have you waste your bandwidth reserving a connection you don't need, and I get why t…

One reason I heard the internet works as well as it does is that it inverts the bell system. Where the bell system is a smart network with dumb edge devices. The internet is a dumb network with smart edge devices. The reason this is supposed to be better is that it is much much easier to upgrade the network.

And this sort of checks out, most of the complaints about the internet architecture is when someone starts putting put smart middle boxes in a load bearing capacity and now it becomes hard to deploy new edge devices.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#147

Post by tosti »

jcranmer wrote: post #55
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer? Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way net…

If you mean the presentation layer, hard disagree. Not thinking about presentation creates problems. For example, Go treating ASCII headers as UTF-8 caused trouble. Only slightly not worrying about an HTTP/2 vs HTTP/1.1 mismatch caused trouble for reverse proxies.

Now I'm young enough not to have seen teletypes in an actual production use setting, but I've never heard anyone suggesting the presentation layer was for teletypes. That's just Google-level FUD.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#148

Post by jcranmer »

tosti wrote: post #147
jcranmer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer? Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way net…

If you mean the presentation layer, hard disagree. Not thinking about presentation creates problems. For example, Go treating ASCII headers as UTF-8 caused trouble. Only slightly not worrying about an HTTP/2 vs HTTP/1.1 mismatch caused trouble for reverse proxies. Now I'm young enough not to have seen teletypes in an actual production use setting, but I've never heard anyone suggesting the presentation layer was for…

No, it was the session layer.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#149

Post by lukeh »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #134
jcranmer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer? Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way net…

X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP No, LDAP was a student project from UMich that somehow gained mindshare because (a) it wasn't ISO, and (b) it cleverly had an 'L' in front of it. It's now more complex and heavyweight than the original DAP, but people think it isn't because of that original clever bit of marketing.

Well, it started off simpler, but, yes.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#150

Post by unscaled »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

LDAP might have won over DAP, but it's still heavily based on the X.500-family of standards. Unlike SMTP (which is a completely different standard), LDAP is strongly based on DAP and other X.500 family standards.

Besides LDAP and X.509, you've got old standards that were very successful for a while. I'm perhaps a little bit too young for this, but I vaguely remember X.25 practically dominated large-scale networking, and for a while inter-network TCP/IP was often run over X.25. X.25 eventually disappeared because it was replaced by newer technology, but it didn't lose to any contemporary standard.

And if you're looking for new technology, CTAP (X.1278) is a part of the WebAuthn standard, which does seem to be winning.

I'm pretty sure there are other X-standards common in the telco industry, but even if we just look at the software industry, some ITU-T standards won out. This is not to say they weren't complex or that we didn't have simpler alternatives, but sometimes the complex standards does win out. The "worse is better" story is not always true.

The OP article is definitely wrong about this:

> “Of all the things OSI has produced, one could point to X.400 as being the most successful,

There are many OSI standards that are more successful than X.400, by the seer virtue of X.400 being an objective failure. But even putting that aside, there are X-family standards that are truly successful and ubiquitous.X.500 and X.509 are strong contenders, but the real winner is ASN.1 (the X.680/690 family, originally X.208/X.209).

ASN.1 is everywhere: It's obviously present in other ITU-T based standards like LDAP, X.509, CTAP and X.400, but it's been widely adopted outside of ITU-T in the cryptography world. PKCS standards (used for RSA, DSA, ECDSA, DH and ECDH key storage and signatures), Kerberos, S/MIME, TLS. It's also common in some common non-cryptographic protocols like SNMP and EMV (chip and pin and contactless payment for credit cards). Even if your using JOSE or COSE or SSH (which are not based on ASN.1), ASN.1-based PKCS standards are often still used for storing the keys. And this is completely ignoring all the telco standards. ASN.1 is everywhere.

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