[Battlemesh] glad to be here

[Benjamin Henrion]

On Mon, Jul 8, 2019 at 12:35 PM Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear All:
>
> I just wanted to say how happy I am to be surrounded by like minded
> folk here at battlemesh. I am still recovering from an epic battle
> the bufferbloat.net folk had with the US cable industry at the march
> ietf meeting over the proper use of the "last bit of the internet":
> The cable
> industry wanted to use up the ect1 bit in the IP header for a specialized
> service the basically imposes "fast and slow" lanes on the internet. This
> proposal had meandered through the ietf for years, seemingly going nowhere,
> when in december I got word (through an ECO) that they were actually going
> to go ahead with it, and expected the IETF to bless it, lacking a
> counterproposal and an organized group opposing it.
>
> Their "L4S" specification is wrapped up in a pretty little bow, chock
> full of mis-reprensentations and outright lies about how good it will
> be for the internet, with the actual details buried in appendixes to
> the relevant standards drafts.
>
> Thankfully my group had an alternate proposal nearly ready to go,
> called "SCE" or "some congestion experienced", which was network
> neutral and integrates great with the existing fq_codel deployment. So
> we burned the midnight oil and 2 months preparing that proposal and
> code, and I melted my credit cards flying everyone relevant in, we did
> a great preso at the ietf tsvwg wg meeting, and basically did a DDOS
> at every other working group, asking difficult questions of the
> opposition that reduced them to babeling incoherently at several
> (joyful) points. So we stopped a 40b/yr industry, in it's tracks, from
> screwing up the internet, at least temporarily.
>
> But it was still essentially a guerilla action against an army.
>
> The major stage of that struggle within the IETF got written up in
> lwn, here: https://lwn.net/Articles/783673/

"It looks like a fairly typical battle between a protocol pushed by
the largest Internet service providers, and one with a rather more
grass-roots origin. There is, however, another important thing to know
about L4S: Alcatel-Lucent claims a patent on the dual-queue algorithm.
The company has generously offered to make that patent available under
"fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms; such terms are, of
course, highly discriminatory against free software implementations.
They make it impossible to merge the affected code into a GPL-licensed
kernel."

On the software patent issue, expect senators Tills and Coons to
publish a US law proposal those days to destroy the Alice SCOTUS
jurisprudence and restore software patents in the US.

Trump and Iancu also restored software patents at the USPTO level by
rewriting the examination rules so that the PTAB (the "cheap" way to
invalidate software patents) is not possible anymore.

Otherwise, the LWN article does not mention net neutrality :-(

Best,

PS: what is the best day to come to Batllemesh? I might take a day or
two off this week...

--
Benjamin Henrion (zoobab)
Email: zoobab at gmail.com
Mobile: +32-484-566109
Web: http://www.zoobab.com
FFII.org Brussels
"In July 2005, after several failed attempts to legalise software
patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed its strategy.
Instead of explicitly seeking to sanction the patentability of
software, they are now seeking to create a central European patent
court, which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their
favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or
democratically elected legislators."