[TUHS] Re: OT: LangSec (Re: A fuzzy awk.)

[Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>]

On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 04:02:26PM -0400, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that Ben Kallus <benjamin.p.kallus.gr@dartmouth.edu> said:
> >> It may become hard to reconcile this with the robustness principle
> >> (Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept)
> >> that Jon Postel popularized. Maybe it becomes necessary, though.
> >
> >Yes; the LangSec people essentially reject the robustness principle.
> >
> >See https://langsec.org/papers/postel-patch.pdf
> 
> On the contrary, they actually understand it.
> 
> Postel was widely misunderstood to say that you should try to accept
> arbitrary garbage. People who knew him tell me that he meant to be
> liberal when the spec is ambiguous, not to allow stuff that is just
> wrong. As their quote from RFC 1122 points out, he also said you
> should be prepared for arbitrary garbage so you can reject it.

Yeah, I read the pdf and I took away the same thing as John.
-- 
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat