[jabwd]

Despite the cool shit the guy has done, keep in mind that "venerate" is not the word to use here. djb is very much not a shorthand used in any positive messaging pretty much ever by any cryptographer. He did it to himself, sadly.

[pas]

Sorry, can you explain what he did to himself?

[bgwalter]

I would like to know as well. All that is public is that a couple of IETF apparatchiks want to ban him for criticizing corporate and NSA influence:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250513185456/https://mailarchi...

The IETF has now accepted the required new moderation guidelines, which will essentially be a CoC troika that can ban selectively:

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/mod-discuss/s4y2j3Dv6D...

It is very sad that all open source and Internet institutions are being subverted by bureaucrats.

[pas]

... if he thinks some WG is making a mistake and he's not welcome there (everyone else seems to be okay with what's happening based on the quoted email on the first link), then - CoC or not - he should then leave, and publicly post distance himself from the outcome.

(Obviously he was never the one to back down from a just fight, but it's important to find the right hill to die on. And allies! And him not following RFC 2026 [from 1996, hardly the peak of Internet bureaucracy] is not a CoC thing anyway.)

[bgwalter]

Why should he leave? The IETF pretends on its sponsor page (https://www.ietf.org/support-us/endowment/):

The IETF is a global standards-setting organization, intentionally created without a membership structure so that anyone with the technical competency can participate in an individual capacity. This lack of membership ensures its position as the primary neutral standards body because participants cannot exert influence as they could in a pay-to-play organization where members, companies, or governments pay fees to set the direction. IETF standards are reached by rough consensus, allowing the ideas with the strongest technical merit to rise to the surface.

Further, these standards that advance technology, increase security, and further connect individuals on a global scale are freely available, ensuring small-to-midsize companies and entrepreneurs anywhere in the world are on equal footing with the large technology companies.

With a community from around the world, and an increased focus on diversity in all its forms, IETF seeks to ensure that the global Internet has input from the global community, and represents the realities of all who use it.

There is only one IETF, and telling dissenters to leave is like telling a dissenting citizen to go to another country. I don't think that people (apart from real spammers) were banned in 1996. The CoC discussion and power grab has reached the IETF around 2020 and it continues.

"Posting too many messages" has been deemed a CoC violation by for example the PSF and its henchmen, and functionally the IETF is using the same selective enforcement no matter what the official rationale is. They won't go after the "director" Wouters, even though his message was threatening and rude.

[pas]

> Why should he leave?

Because the game is rigged apparently?

If not then let the WG work. If no one except djb feels this strongly about hybrid vs. pure post-quantum stuff then it's okay.

(And I haven't read the threads but this is a clear security trade-off. Involving complexity, processing power and bandwidth and RAM and so on, right? And the best and brightest cryptographers checked the PQ algorithms, and the closer we get to them getting anywhere near standardized in a pure form the more scrutiny they'll receive.

And someone being an NSA lackey is not a technical merit argument. Especially if it's true, because in this case the obvious thing is to start coalition building to have some more independent org up and running, because arguing with a bad faith actor is not going to end well.)

[bgwalter]

> If no one except djb feels this strongly about hybrid vs. pure post-quantum stuff then it's okay.

That is one of the contentious issues. See the last paragraphs of:

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html

Starting with "Remember that the actual tallies were 20 supporters, 2 conditional supporters, and 7 opponents".