[cap-talk] "ACLs don't" paper rejected from Oakland 09

[Tyler Close]

Hi David,

Thanks for your reply. Your perspective on this is especially valuable to me.

I have a lot of questions about this result, but I'll start with just one...

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 12:04 AM, David Wagner <daw at cs.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Your paper seems to me like the kind of paper that academic conferences
> are likely to be reluctant to publish, or that it will be difficult for
> them to publish.  Review #31D explains why nicely.  Yours is a paper on
> broad principles, with arguments from first premises.

I thought I had written an evaluation of the ACL model, and its
derivatives; studying whether it actually provides the functionality
that is commonly claimed. Saying the paper is on broad principles
seems to imply a paper that declares certain properties are "good" and
provides scant justification for it. That's not the paper I thought I
wrote. The studied features are ones the ACL model has declared to be
good, not me. I then use concrete examples to study whether or not the
claimed features are actually implemented. In many cases, I succeed in
showing that not only are the features not implemented, but they
cannot be implemented given the input data the ACL reference monitor
has. In the second part of the paper, I go on to show that these
failings aren't theoretical curiosities, but severe problems in the
dominant computing platform in the world.

I was especially demoralized by reviewer #31D's claim: "The paper is
rhetoric, ..., and there is no evaluation."

I tried to be very careful not to make any statements in the paper
that weren't fully supported by the provided evidence. I thought the
paper was free of rhetoric. I also thought the paper was nothing but
evaluation. There seems to be something fundamental about the terms
"rhetoric" and "evaluation" that I don't understand. What is it?

--Tyler