[tor-dev] Next ten Tor Tech Reports

[Paul Syverson]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2012 at 08:29:25AM +0200, Karsten Loesing wrote:
> Hi Mike,
> 
> On 8/8/12 8:13 PM, Mike Perry wrote:
> > 
> > Since HotPETS doesn't count as "publishing" perhaps this should be
> > listed as a tech report:
> > http://fscked.org/talks/TorFlow-HotPETS-final.pdf
> 
> I agree.  If it counted as "publishing", we'd put it on anonbib.  But
> since that's not the case, let's put it on our tech reports list, or
> nobody will find it.

Wait. What!? Since when did anonbib get restricted to what is
"published"?  Paul Karger's MITRE tech report is there. I mean Wei
Dai's pipenet mailinglist post is there! There are probabily others. I
just mentioned two I knew off the top of my head. I assume that papers
are on anonbib because they've appeared somewhere that one can point
at consistently and they're relatively important, not because they are
"published". "Published" is a useful fiction I'll come back to, but
I don't see why anonbib has to be hamstrung by it.

> 
> The only thing I'm worried about is that we shouldn't add reports
> published by other organizations (here: HotPETs) to the Tor Tech Reports
> list.  I'd rather want us to turn your HotPETs report into a Tor Tech
> Report with identical content and put that on the list.


HotPETs being labeled "not published" is just one of the many never
actually solid but increasingly shaky distinctions trying to cope with
the overloaded semantics and quickly evolving meaning of 'published',
wherein 'published', 'refereed', 'archived', 'produced by a recognized
publisher/organization', 'made available for purchase', etc. were all
taken as synonymous (except when they weren't). Most academic research
venues in computer security don't accept things that are already
published or under consideration to be published. (For convenience I
will completely pretend journals don't exist in this, which for most
of science is like saying you'll pretend published research does not
exist.)  But presenting the work at a workshop wouldn't be
publication, even if presented works were printed out and made
available to attendees. Putting out a tech report wasn't generally
viewed as published (except for patent purposes (which was one of the
motivations for places to have tech reports) but then so did
presentation at a public meeting---now define 'public', how many
epicycles are we up to?).  Now jump forward a few decades or so and
all of these are on the web. How can you tell if some web page talking
about a meeting and providing links to pdfs of what was presented
there (possibly produced before or afterwards or both) counts as
published?  HotPETs wants to get half-baked innovative stuff, not just
the work after all the proofs have been done, full implementation and
simulations run, whatever. (It also _will_ take stuff that has been
"published" elsewhere.) But if it counted as published, authors
couldn't submit it to a venue that does count once the details were a
bit more worked out (and counts in the eyes of tenure committees,
funding agencies, etc. in a way HotPETs does not). So, HotPETs labels
its works as not published because you need to tell people which side
of this nonexistent line the work is on, so they know what to do next.

> 
> How about we put the LaTeX sources in tech-reports.git, change them to
> use the new tech report template, assign a report number, and add a
> footnote saying "This report was presented at 2nd Hot Topics in Privacy
> Enhancing Technologies (HotPETs 2009), Seattle, WA, USA, August 2009."?
>  Then people can decide if they rather want to cite our tech report or
> the HotPETs one.

This is pretty standard for tech reports at many universities,
organizations, etc. Also I think, stuff on arxiv.

aloha,
Paul