4 ms·

>> 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

• SV_BubbleTime 6mo ago
  As x509 goes. I doubt many could explain it off hand with BER, DER and others being subset to ASN.1 and other obscura. I’ve never been a fan
• ghaff 6mo ago
  And you could add any number of the big standards group-based standards that a great deal of blood, sweat, and tears were poured into. Not universally the case, but more true than false.
• MisterTea 6mo ago
  > 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 deterministic network of pipes. You called a computer as if it were a telephone (or maybe that was Datakit?) and ATM handed the user a byte stream like TCP. Imagine never needing an IP stack or setting traffic priority because the network already handles the QoS. Was it simple to deploy? No. Was it cheap? Nooohooohooohooo. Was Ethernet any of those? YES AND YES. ATM was superior but lost to the simpler and cheaper Ethernet which was pretty crappy in its early days (thinnet, thicknet, terminators, vampire taps, AUI, etc.) but good enough. The funny part is this has the unintended consequences of needing to reinvent the wheel once you get to the point where you need telecom sized/like infrastructure. Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs so various hacks and standards have been developed to paper over these deficiencies which is what TSN is - reinventing ATM's determinism. In addition we also now have OTN, yet another protocol to further paper over the various other protocols to mux everything down a big fat pipe to the other end which allows Ethernet (and IP/ATM/etc) to ride deterministically between data-centers.
  • pjc50 6mo ago
    > Ethernet had to adapt to deterministic real-time needs Without being able to get too into the telco detail, I think the lesson was that hard realtime is both much harder to achieve and not actually needed. People will happily chat over nondeterministic Zoom and Discord. It's both psychological and slightly paradoxical. Once you let go of saying "the system MUST GUARANTEE this property", you get a much cheaper, better, more versatile and higher bandwidth system that ends up meeting the property anyway.
    • burnished 6mo ago
      Yeah, big differences between an absolute guarantee and "we'll take as much as we can get"
    • wat10000 6mo ago
      I saw a story once, which may well be completely made up, about why AT&T got out of the cell phone business. They had a research project, but reliability was an issue. They couldn't see a way to do better than 1 dropped call in 10,000. Their standard for POTS at the time was 1 in 2 billion. Seeing that the tech would never be good enough, they sold off the whole thing for cheap. Years later, they bought it back for way, way more money because they desperately needed to get into the cell phone business that was clearly headed to the moon. I totally understand the pride they had in the reliability of their system, but it turns out that dropped calls just aren't that big of a deal when you can quickly redial and reconnect.
      • projektfu 6mo ago
        Seems a little sus. AT&T basically created the cellular mobile phone, and built up an analog, then digital system (D-AMPS/TDMA). AT&T sort of sold out the mobile business in 2004 to Cingular (BellSouth) because TDMA was a dead end. They then bought BellSouth back in 2006 and carried on with CDMA. Those old phones had a long range. It was hard to make small ones because the old AT&T towers were much farther apart, up to 40km. Meanwhile, their competitors focused on smaller coverage areas (e.g. 2km or less for PCS) and better tech (CDMA), and it seemed to pay off.
• pabs3 6mo ago
  The critical part of that quote "Like a car with no brakes or seatbelts."
  • bragr 6mo ago
    That's a partisan framing. Another framing could be that SMTP is the golf cart SMBs were asking for, not the car they were being sold.
  • pjc50 6mo ago
    It doesn't seem to have worked out like that? You might as well say "like a car without a man walking in front of it with a red flag" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws
• p_l 6mo ago
  A lot of the IETF standards winning was vendors avoiding work even when paid for. Another was NIH in considerable important places. Yet another was that ITU standards promoted use of compilers generating serialization code from schema, and that required having that compiler. One common issue I found out from trying to rescue some old Unix OSI code was that the most popular option in use at many universities was apparently total crap. In comparison, you could plop a grad student with telnet to experiment with SMTP. Nobody cared that it was shitty, because it was not supposed to be used long. And then nobody wanted to invest in better.
• agwa 6mo ago
  I'll note that while X.509 certificates are deployed widely on the Internet, they are not deployed in the manner the ITU intended. There is no global X.500 directory and Distinguished Names are just opaque identifiers that are used to help find issuers during chain building. That hardly counts as a win for the ITU in my book.
  • justsomehnguy 6mo ago
    And in some usages CN is just doesn't even looked up upon.
    • cylemons 6mo ago
      Apperantly the AKID and SKID extensions are used instead these days
• jcranmer 6mo ago
  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 networking stacks are described in educational materials, despite the fact that it bears no relation to how any of the networking stack was developed or is used. If you really dig into how the OSI model is supposed to work, one of the layers described only matters for teletypes--which were are a dying, if not dead, technology when the model was developed in the first place.
  • chuckadams 6mo ago
    There's an entire book devoted to ripping up the OSI model: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iL0fYmMmariFoSvLd9U5nPVH1uFKC7bvVasUcYq78So/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iL0fYmMmariFoSvLd9U5nPVH...
    • MrDrMcCoy 6mo ago
      Everyone who knows what the OSI model is should read at least some of this book.
    • matheusmoreira 6mo ago
      What an interesting read. Thank you for posting it.
    • bombcar 6mo ago
      The OSI model and its consequences have been a disaster for the networking race.
  • pseudohadamard 6mo ago
    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.
• msla 6mo ago
  Yes, the TCP/IP protocol stack beat the OSI protocol stack comprehensively, even down to four layers beating out seven unless you're so wedded to the Magic Number of Seven that you see Session as distinct from Application in the modern world, like how Newton was so wedded to seeing Seven Shades of Light in a spectrum he was sure to note indigo as distinct from violet in the rainbow. (Presentation and Session are currently taught in terms of CSS and cookies in HTML and HTTP, respectively. When the web stack became Officially Part of the Officiously Official Network Stack is quite beyond me, and rather implies that you must confound the Web and the Internet in order to get the Correct Layering.) https://computer.rip/2021-03-27-the-actual-osi-model.html https://computer.rip/2021-03-27-the-actual-osi-model.html - The Actual OSI Model > I have said before that I believe that teaching modern students the OSI model as an approach to networking is a fundamental mistake that makes the concepts less clear rather than more. The major reason for this is simple: the OSI model was prescriptive of a specific network stack designed alongside it, and that network stack is not the one we use today. In fact, the TCP/IP stack we use today was intentionally designed differently from the OSI model for practical reasons. > The OSI model is not some "ideal" model of networking, it is not a "gold standard" or even a "useful reference." It's the architecture of a specific network stack that failed to gain significant real-world adoption.
• rstuart4133 6mo ago
  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 standards body happy (ie, has enough info to make it worthwhile to purchase the specification), and not revealing the secret sauce in their implementation. I've done it, and it's an absolute nightmare. The IETF RFCs are a breath of fresh air in comparison. Not only can you read the source, there are example implementations! And if you think that didn't lead to a better outcome, you're kidding yourself. The ITU process naturally leads to a small number of large engineering orgs publishing just enough information so they can interoperate, while keeping enough hidden so the investment discourages the rise of smaller competitors. The result is, even now I can (and do) run my own email server. If the overly complicated bureaucratic ITU standards had won the day, I'm sure email would have been run by a small number of CompuServe like rent seeking parasites for decades.
  • ogurechny 6mo ago
    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.
    • deepsun 6mo ago
      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.
  • jech 6mo ago
    > IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising. I don't think that's IETF policy. Individual IETF working groups decide whether to request publication of an RFC, and the availability of open source implementations is a strong argument in favour of publication, but not a hard requirement. If the IETF standards are sometimes useful, it's more a matter of culture than of policy.
• pseudohadamard 6mo ago
  It's not so much that SMTP won, it's that X.400 lost because it suuuuucked. Anyone who's ever had to work with that piece of s*t, as opposed to rhapsodising over what it could theoretically do, can tell you stories about this. It made Microsoft Mail and Lotus Notes look good in comparison. Notes actually did X.400, so imagine Notes but even suckier.
• rayiner 6mo ago
  Worse is Better: https://web.archive.org/web/20040619155500/http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040619155500/http://www.jwz.or...
  • teddyh 6mo ago
    Better link, by the author: <https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html>
• bigfatkitten 6mo ago
  > In the end, internet swallowed telephones and everything is now VOIP. Using ITU voice codecs!
  • buttocks 6mo ago
    And still, ITU modem standards and T.30 … yes, fax still lives!
• lukeasch21 6mo ago
  X.25 and other ITU specs won out massively in aviation, and they are just recently starting to go through the slow painful process of moving to IP. We'll probably see it hanging around for at least another 15 years in that sector.
• userbinator 6mo ago
  H.261-264 video codecs, depending on your definition of "win".
• AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
  At the time, when there were so many different platforms still in existence, "easier to implement" was in fact a major component of "better".
• unscaled 6mo ago
  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.
• ajb 6mo ago
  The rivalry continues in the fibre era, with ITU's GPON and successors competing with IEEE EPON etc. ITU does seem to have lost out comprehensively at layer 3. They do some stuff like OAM which is only interesting at Telco scale, although in the mobile era bodies like ETSI are more relevant. The other difference from that era, and even the early internet era, is how much is no longer standardised at all, but decided by global monopolies. Back then it was a given that Everything would at least need to interoperate at the national level. But we may be returning to that .
  • mixdup 6mo ago
    In the US at least the fiber standards are shaking out to telco vs. cable. Fiber providers who used to be telephone companies (AT&T, Verizon, and the smaller former Bells) are hitching to ITU standards in products developed and sold by vendors who have always sold to the Bells (Nokia via Alcatel via Lucent). Many of the startup fiber providers fall into this category, too (Google Fiber, Sonic, etc--oftentimes because they started as DSL companies riding on physical last mile networks of the telephone companies) ISPs and providers (fiber or not) that started out as cable companies (Comcast, Charter) are hitching to SCTE/CableLabs standards and equipment from their traditional vendors (Commscope, wherever Cisco's Scientific Atlanta business lines ended up) In the US there is little need for interoperability since networks don't have to be unbundled or support any kind of competition, outside of cable networks have to allow a customer to bring their own CPE (and only for copper networks, when they move to fiber all bets are off) The only benefit interoperability brings is pricing--if a vendor can sell their platform to many ISPs, they get an economy of scale. This doesn't mean standards win, even in the cable world in DOCSIS 4.0 there are two flavors, with Comcast being just about the only company that has picked one flavor, with the rest of the industry picking the other
• bostik 6mo ago
  > Did any of the ITU standards win? Maybe X.500 - also known as LDAP, and widely deployed across enterprises in the form of Active Directory.
  • mixdup 6mo ago
    Kind of the exception that proves the point. Yeah LDAP is open, and there's a dull roar of an underbelly of stuff glued together, or glued to AD via LDAP, but AD is proprietary and if it had been completely proprietary instead of built on LDAP it probably would've been just as successful. Just kind of an accident that it "won" as an ITU standard, it could've been a Bill Gates fever dream instead and still made it
• gzread 6mo ago
  Everyone likes Wireguard over OpenVPN for many reasons, and one of those reasons is that OpenVPN requires a certificate pair while Wireguard uses a 40-character private and public key you can generate by running "wg genkey" with no parameters and copy/pasting.
• sheepscreek 6mo ago
  Especially in that age when compute was precious, and scaling horizontally looked nothing like how it does today. This is a time before the Intel 386 which ran at either 16Mhz or 33Mhz :) So it must have been preferable to reduce the workload per email for the server and client.