[Ietf-not43] Re: Data mining v. poorly-framed queries [was Re:[Ietf-not43]

[Leslie Daigle]

I'd prefer this -- I always like deterministic behaviour :-) 
But I think I agree with Andy in that it's not what will get 
implemented, irrespective of what our requirements state.

So, two possibilities:

	. as proposed below:  will servers in fact implement
	  sufficiently random deletions from the result set,
	  or will miners simply try to chain, anyway.

	. as currently written in the requirements doc:  the service 
	  MUST fail silently when it has a query that generates too 
	  many hits.  Both legitimate clients and miners will have
	  to retry queries to confirm they got everything they
	  wanted...

At this point, it seems like we're trying to do behaviour modification
on end-users via requirements for a service that will be implemented
in some as-yet-to-be-decided protocol... that seems like too many
layers of indirection for sanity.

Leslie.

Ted Hardie wrote:
> 
> Andy writes:
> > I think the right thing to do would be to stipulate that the protocols
> > have such a feature to notify the user of the truncation condition.  The
> > use of these notifications are, and in reality will be, site specific.
> >
> 
> This gets to be hard to debug; if I might or might not get a specific
> error based on which service provider I'm talking to, we can end up
> back in the soup pretty quickly.  I'd rather see the requirement say
> something like:
> 
> "The service MUST indicate if a response has been truncated using
> a standard error mechanism, but MAY omit details from that response
> in order to hinder the 'chaining' of requests by data miners".
> 
> This does err on the side of supporting standard errors over
> avoiding data mining, but I'd really, really hate for us to be
> back in the situation where diagnostics have to be cased for individual
> services.
>                         regards,
>                                 Ted Hardie

-- 

-------------------------------------------------------------------
"An essential element of a successful journey
    is recognizing when you have arrived."
       -- ThinkingCat

Leslie Daigle
leslie@thinkingcat.com
-------------------------------------------------------------------