QUIC as a solution to protocol ossification

Just to be clear:

1. I don't sell and I haven't ever sold not ever benefited from any middlebox sell, directly or indirectly

2. I *have* tried to work with anti-middleware persons to get them fix their implementation of some standards. Their bugs were causing pain to tends of thousands of people that had no beef in the middleware vs non middleware dispute and probably though IT people were collectively dangerous imbeciles. Only to meet obfuscation and evasion, and finally understand the breakage was 100% intentional and they were crippling some use cases and wasting their user's (and sometimes customers') time and energy to push their opinions. Only they would not own up to it and were lying to their users in pretending they had implemented standards when they had sabotaged the parts of them they didn't like, and used it as argument to propose the removal of those parts.

3. In any medium to large organization you will have idiots that will do things just because they can and feel they will get away with it. That's what control systems are about. If you don't believe in control systems, share a computer with a score of other persons, all running as admin, with no enforcing at all, and see how long you can cope with being charged with making the thing run.

4. If you think software developers are any more responsible just look at the junk that get pushed to app stores and all the nasty permissions those apps ask for just because app stores were designed with a "no middle control" mindset and the few controls that exist were bolted on later and are completely inefficient and lacking. Networks are no magic, they're an IT system like a computer, they have the same control requirements (and will need more as they migrate to SDN. More power means more responsibility, more responsibility means more control requirements).

5. Disabling controls makes things run faster and simpler. Who would have thought of it? (see also: Intel/meltdown)

6. In a "smart object" world where everything from microwaves to lightbulbs runs IP you *will* have to administer a fairly complex network at home. We'll see how much you like it when Google strips you of any control power, and known-dangerous and unpatched gadgets get to talk freely with the exterior. I believe smart camera operators had their first waking call last year.

I'll leave you the 'amusing' insults that have really no place on lwn.

> nim-nim has simply insisted they're wrong, which I guess is brazen enough that it must feel righteous, like insisting "I'm the least racist person you'll ever meet" in the middle of doing something very racist.

To associate a poster on lwn.net with racism because you disagree with him is not the style of discussion that I'm used to, here around. Please refrain from it. This kind of personal attack doesn't help to communicate your arguments, either.

FWIW: I neither follow nim-nim's opinion nor yours, so please don't accuse me of bias.
excors made a good point in a neighbouring post of yours: https://lwn.net/Comments/745923/

Since I wrote the earlier piece, the application I'm responsible for broke again. Senior management were upset and wanted to make sure I knew about it (I work from home, so you can't physically collar me, being aggressively angry doesn't work very well over a video conference either, it just sort of looks comical but you can send loads of email, and they did), they had been told very clearly that the problem was definitely with my application. Users, including our customers and our own in-house agents were unable to use the system, frequently running into an error message, versions of which have now been emailed to me as JPEG screenshots, PDF documents, and other formats over the last several days. The error message isn't mentioned in any official documentation, and the strings from it aren't in any of our source or libraries. But there are mentions in forums found with Google. All of them end up, often after a considerable wild goose chase, pointing at a particular middle box vendor.

So I explained, calmly, that this is undoubtedly caused by a middle box, I specified the exact brand of middle box they'd most likely bought which causes this error, and that I had previously _emphatically_ warned those implementing the latest middle box that it would likely cause serious problems unless its rules had been appropriately hand-crafted to let our actual traffic through, at which point it would simply be dead weight. I think I even forwarded the emails where those responsible had promised to co-operate with me during installation, and then gone silent.

I was assured that even if we had coincidentally just bought a middle box from the exact manufacturer I specified, the network engineering team responsible were 100% certain that it wasn't their box at fault. The problem must be in my application and I needed to pull my finger out and fix whatever it was. I reiterated that it's the middle box, and suggested means by which they could verify that for themselves, and then I just let it all slide by, because it's futile to engage with such nonsense.

This morning my Product Owner, who for his sins does have to actually sit there in person and listen to this every day, managed to persuade someone to do him a favour and try a simple A/B test. He would fail to get into the application, they would switch off the middle box, then he'd try again. To their astonishment it suddenly worked. Then they switched it back on, his application session failed almost immediately and he wasn't able to get back in. How about that?

Now, nim-nim has explained elsewhere that despite symptoms like these in their opinion it's wrong to blame the middle box. Blame client software, or policy decisions, or Google. Here's the problem even if you want to sympathise with that point of view: Nobody cares. You can fire me and get another team in and re-write the entire application, spending millions of dollars and refunding all the existing customers, and at the end it still doesn't work. Or, you can switch off the middle box and it works immediately. It's a no brainer. It wouldn't even matter if _somehow_ the middle box isn't really the "cause" of your problem: no middle box, no problem.