It's been 20 years today (Oct 16, UTC). Hard to believe.

Florian Weimer fw at deneb.enyo.de
Wed Oct 17 19:43:20 UTC 2018


* Laszlo Hanyecz:

> On 2018-10-17 02:35, Michael Thomas wrote:
>> I believe that the IETF party line these days is that Postel was wrong 
>> on this point. Security is one consideration, but there are others.
>
> Postel's maxim also allowed extensibility.  If our network code rejects 
> (or crashes) on things we don't currently understand and use, it ensures 
> that they can't be used by apps that come along later either.  The 
> attitude of rejecting everything in the name of security is what has 
> forced app developers to tunnel APIs and everything else inside HTTP/DNS.

To be fair, a lot of these components that make extending protocols
hard are both receivers and senders.  If they are asked to forward
garbage, then something has to give.



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