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

[Steve Witham]

>From: David Wagner <daw at cs.berkeley.edu>
>Some of my favorite papers I've ever
>read have been "principles" papers.  For instance, the paper introducing
>and arguing for the end-to-end principle is a classic systems paper that
>has had significant influence, and certainly impressed me when I first
>read it.  If I remember my anecdotes correctly, that paper was rejected
>twice before being eventually accepted, and was controversial at the time.

"Gotos considered harmful."  But a Gotos only comes around once in a
great while.  You would have to be already well-respected & write a
good screed.  Btw, Google only returns one hit for "ACLs considered
harmful" http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~410/lectures/L32_Protection.pdf
and it's a page (about EROS) that's been taken down (but in Google's
cache at the moment).

>Tyler Close  wrote:
>>  If it is true that it is hard to publish a paper that only evaluates
>>  existing mechanisms, rather than proposing new mechanisms, that would
>>  go a long way towards explaining why poor mechanisms survive and
>>  thrive for so long in this field once they take hold.

David:

>They wanted to know what to do: who could they tell to
>make sure the record gets corrected?  The answer is, often, nothing.
>They didn't like that answer much, and I don't blame them, but that's
>how it works.

"It" being peer review for conferences and journals.  A mechanism that's
meant to deal with the situation where
     it's already hard to get something published (or onto a stage)
     it's hard to attach a criticism to something already published
so
     it's easier to pre-filter than post-filter

What you're saying is that the system itself discourages trying to
use it for post-filtering.

Tyler, you might write a survey of ACL-based errors in
papers in that conference's recent proceedings.  Nyuk nyuk.
Maybe find a paper that criticizes ACLs and plot error frequency for
some number of years before and after that paper.

  --Steve