Hi, I sent an alternative to this in the "whole text" message I just mailed, but I thought it better to follow up to this specifically in this thread. On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 04:05:40PM -0500, Greg Shatan wrote:
- services (i.e., the software processes by which commands received via the Internet are processed and a response is generated and transmitted via the Internet, to be viewed in a web browser, email client, or the like) which use the Internet’s unique identifiers, or
That can't be the definition of services, I think. First, I'm not entirely sure that we want to say "receives commands": DNS, for instance, is a completely bilateral protocol that just sends messages back and forth. The messages are the same format in "command" (query) and response, differeing technically only in the setting of a bit. I _could_ make an argument that these are commands, but I don't think we want anything that tenuous. In general, not all services are client-server. Second, not all responses are to be viewed: some are machine to machine (so nobody views them) and some are non-visual (SIP calls, for instance). Third, not all Internet services are connnection-oriented: UDP datagrams, for instance, are connectionless. Finally, for a given service and a given inbound datagram, response datagrams might or might not be generated depending on various local policies. It's problems like this that make people avoid trying to define too precisely. It does seem that a service on the Internet is something that accepts datagrams, when those datagrams are not necessarily the result of datagrams sent by the same thing. Therefore, I _think_ this will work: services (i.e., any software process that accepts datagrams from the Internet, when those datagrams are not themselves necessarily the consequence of a datagram previously sent by the software process itself) that use the Internet’s unique identifiers I'm not absolutely sure this is right, but I think it might be close enough. The problem with it, of course, is that every single thing connected to the Internet uses at least one of the Internet's unique identifiers (this problem is, remember, part of what alarmed the IAB in the first place). So this basically says, "Any software process that accepts datagrams from the Internet," and that very nearly boils down to, "A program with a socket open to the Internet." If that's ok, I guess I can live with it, though it'd be good to get some more technically-clueful (or even, some would argue, "at least one pair of") eyes on this. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com