[HN Gopher] Remembering Jon Postel and the day he hijacked the i...
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       Remembering Jon Postel and the day he hijacked the internet (2012)
        
       Author : nadermx
       Score  : 25 points
       Date   : 2023-12-09 20:12 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
        
       | ljlolel wrote:
       | Postel's Law:
       | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle
        
         | wyldfire wrote:
         | From what I gather, Postel's Law has fallen a bit from favor --
         | according to some folks anyway.
         | 
         | > From 2015 to 2018, in a series of Internet Drafts, Martin
         | Thomson argues that Postel's robustness principle actually
         | leads to a lack of robustness, including security:[1]
         | 
         | [1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9413
        
           | kstrauser wrote:
           | Darned if I'm going to say Postel's wrong, but it feels like
           | long-term pain to me. If you accept invalid input and process
           | it, then you're saying that it's de-facto good input. Other
           | systems come to depend on those undocumented extensions, and
           | now you're stuck supporting it forever. I can imagine a
           | million ways that could lead to security problems. Even if
           | that weren't an issue, it's definitely a maintenance problem.
           | 
           | For example, suppose you specify that a web service accepts
           | JSON. It also accepts things like `{foo:"bar"}` as identical
           | to `{"foo":"bar"}`, because hey, it's clear what the client
           | meant. Guess what: now you can never switch to using an off-
           | the-shelf JSON parser. You were trying to be nice to the
           | client, but screwed yourself up in the process. Don't do
           | that.
        
       | sparky_z wrote:
       | As someone not too familiar with the underlying nuts and bolts of
       | the internet, I wish the article had been a little more detailed
       | about the direct aftermath of the "takeover". It wasn't clear to
       | me if it was a permanent change that continued to this day or if
       | it was just a temporary "demonstration". From wikipedia, it was
       | apparently the latter, and was hastily reversed under heavy
       | pressure from the US Government.
        
       | alalbertson wrote:
       | If anyone is interested, Walter Isaacson has a great book called
       | "Innovators: that touches on this and many relayed and
       | interesting stories.
        
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       (page generated 2023-12-09 23:01 UTC)