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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

This is a puzzling submission. On the 1st of June an updated eSNI draft, draft-ietf-tls-esni-07 was published with a new name reflecting the approach of encrypting more of the Client Hello rather than just SNI, but "draft status" isn't a thing, except in the sense that a draft either exists or does not, and this one exists.

This Internet Draft was formally adopted by the TLS working group in 2018.

If you have valuable technical input for this work, or indeed any of TLS, you should subscribe to the TLS working group, familiarise yourself with the culture and pitch in - but there doesn't seem to any particular reason it's more relevant to Hacker News today than last week or next month.

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This makes it sound like following the work of IETF is an idle task, and all required is to subscribe to a mailing list, but neglects to mention this inevitably means following endless overlapping and often redundant discussions on multiple mailing lists, that routinely span bi-annual periods. Nobody has time for that unless their job gives them a direct stake in protocol and architecture work. This describes probably much less than 1% of the people found on HN.

Meanwhile there are few mechanisms to popularize the results of standards groups aside from occasional sexed up vendor blog posts (for example, CloudFlare are great at these). I see no problem with this extra visibility, and find it quite perplexing that someone would have reason to complain about it.

The complaint is more "the title of this link does not reflect anything about how the IETF works or the status of this particular revision of the draft rather".

If you're expecting to get any value from this hacker news story, you need to understand enough of how the IETF works to know what meaning this particular draft has as opposed to any of the previous 6 revisions.

Many thanks for the info and sorry for the confusion.

> the previous 6 revisions

Seven, or, depending on how you squint, eight :D

Draft numbering starts from zero: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-esni-00

And also the number resets if (as happened in this case) a draft is adopted by a Working Group and acquires that "ietf" in place of an author's name, so the predecessor to that zero zero draft was ekr's draft-rescorla-tls-esni-00.

Well.... yeah. If I wanted to be a smartass I would be saying something like "the 00 when it got adopted into the working group is important" though, unlike random changes before wglc.

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