[e2e] a means to an end

[David P. Reed]

Just for clarification, Fred, I'm not postulating anything in particular.

At most I'm raising a (possibly irritating) question founded in my 
current interests in making wireless communication a first class citizen 
and wired communication a mere resident alien in the human agora, one 
who bids to supplement the natural capabilities of humans to communicate 
just fine for centuries without "service providers." We already have 
very enticing service providers who offer efficiency/convenience in 
exchange for down payments on their customers' firstborn children, thank 
you very much.

In particular, we might well wonder why all network operators who 
maintain routers should become privileged to know where *all* the people 
on the planet who *might* communicate are currently located in order to 
deliver messages connecting a vanishingly small subset of the N^2 
possible pairings of customers.  Should the routers in Russia know when 
a Georgian raising money for military support travels between NY and 
China?  If that person never needs to talk to a Russian, why distribute 
the tracking data in any form, much less distribute it to places where 
communications will never be sought?

Certainly this "network location tracking" enhances "efficiency" in one 
sense.  And the folks on this list who think that networks ought be at 
the center of all power and control might feel just fine with this.  
After all, they personally have good consciences and nothing but love 
for their fellow humans (other than those whom their governments have 
managed to define as subhuman, evil beings :-) ).

Of course, as mere servants of the market, our personal qualms should 
never be attached to mere technical attempts at efficiency.  We must 
serve only the investors of our employers, never humanity, nor 
professional standards and ethics.

Fred Baker wrote:
> On Nov 7, 2008, at 3:33 PM, Lloyd Wood wrote:
>> On 6 Nov 2008, at 21:18, Fred Baker wrote:
>>> It's kind of hard to get a message to a destination, fixed or 
>>> mobile, without giving the network an idea of where it is to go. 
>>> That's kind of the point of the locator.
>>>
>>> That said, the point of the endpoint ID is to identify the 
>>> application on the system, the transport connection endpoint, 
>>> independent of its location. If the application moves from one 
>>> system to another, the transport connection needs to be able to 
>>> follow it.
>>
>> can anyone explain how that clear explanation of the endpoint ID 
>> matches with the definition of endpoint ID given in RFC5050, section 
>> 4.4?
>
> About the same way the description maps to the endpoint ID found in 
> RFC 5201-5201 and 5338. Like HIP's Endpoint ID, DTN's Bundle ID lacks 
> any way for a system, given knowledge of what instance of an 
> application it wants to talk with or what data object it wants to 
> find, to determine the locator of that object. Given the locator we 
> can establish whether we are talking to the right system, but not the 
> other way around.
>
> David is postulating that the only thing we need is a name for the 
> object we want to look at, and we can determine everything else we 
> need to know. It's wonderful theory, and on an isolated LAN it might 
> even make sense.
>