You may wish to review RFC 5513 which was submitted yesterday. It identifies a serious problem facing the Internet community. (No not the virus thing, far more serious than that.)
This has real security implications for all of us, and we need to do something about it now. Congress should hold hearings.
Furthermore, it should be noted that we are rapidly approaching World Acronym Depletion (WAD). It has been estimated that, at the current rate of TLA allocation, we will run out by the end of September this year. This timescale could be worsened if there is the expected growth in demand for mobile acronyms, IP-TLAs, and TLA-on-demand.
And if that wasn't bad enough this issue may effect those of us in the business of securing systems even worse:
Many security algorithms are identified by TLAs. It is a clear requirement that someone implementing, for example, MD5 should be understood to have encoded the well-known Maybe-Decrypted-Deciphered-Decoded-Disambiguated-and-Degraded algorithm, and not any other security algorithm with the same acronym.
Make sure to write your US Senator or Representative today about this pressing problem. Congress is going to fix everything else, why not this thorny problem?
(Thanks to Susan for pointing this out and Adrian Farrel for writing this much needed RFC)
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