My first trip to London. And I got stuck in the middle of a bunch of NetBSD people.
The bar at the Hilton Hotel was full of techies. The friendly glare from their laptops provided a familiar environment.
The geek skills of the hotel people were amazing. They even served ice cubes in a glass in the bar, and I got served ahead of the loooong line of thirsty techies. The sight of a plush penguin on their bar desk may be what prompted them into action.
Midcom is about punching holes in firewalls and then closing the pinholes without the bad guys coming in. Session oriented protocols like SIP and HTTP are the main problem (session in HTTP is a pain anyway, but ours not to argue why), and the solution is to violate layering. Authorization and state-keeping are messy parts of the world.
Short summary of the discussion on the mailing list prior to the meeting:
On the bright side, there was facts on protocol comparison. And any ASCII-based encoding will leak to end users, and it will be ugly (extra points to those of us who remember QP and =F8 ).
My person, Ingrid, has been involved in web proxy caching and web replication. Quite entertaining. Resource update protocol is something to ship around iff you live an updated life.
The OPES crowd admitted to having a problem with bad language, they want to be Open Pluggable Endpoint Services, not Edge (Life at the Edge is a bit demanding for non-avians). Authorization required for execution of code. Try to do both trans-coding and call-out. Munch and mangle the web objects before serving to end user.
This Internet thing is really catching on. People used to play Solitaire when they were in boring meetings, but today they read their local newspaper on web.
Security pixie dust was handed out by several persons. It remains to be seen whether or not the Internet feels better.
DNS and how DNS interacts with protocols and services was on the table for discussion. After the discussion, the heads of people were on the table.
"Don't stand on the toes of giants" Jon Crowcroft discussing what is to learn from the hourglass model.