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more on Stopping spam isn't as easy as you might hope
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 15:30:09 -0400
Date: Sat, 31 May 2003 15:20:54 -0400 From: Bob Frankston <Bob18-2 () bobf frankston com> Since this is a recurring issue I should update http://www.frankston.com/?name=spamfixation. For now I'll simply say that the concept of spam itself is the result of having a word that can be used in lieu of understanding. There are really two issues. One is the concern about the volume of mail and I'm not convinced that it is that bad compared with what the capacity we'll need when video traffic becomes the norm. But it's really a denial of service issue not an email attention issue. The spam problem is really an attention problem (separating out the issue of slow pipes and fraud which is ever present) and is the to-be-expected result of having one well-known magic name that all can use to reach us be it by phone/fax, direct mail, email or other ways. There are also indirect ways such as advertisements (which are invisible only because we've learned to manage our attention). Many approaches to spam seem to assume that there is an omniscient and prescient version of Maxwell's Demon that can make a static distinction between those with good intent and bad intent or which simply knows what we're interested in at the moment. This is also the presumption that makes people ask for firewalls and leads to increasingly complex and problematic solutions when failures make people try harder rather than recognizing the fundamentally flaws in the concept. Aside from being ineffective, the appeal to a central authority is basically antithetical to the underlying end to end concept. Since SMTP is an edge protocol, there isn't a place for the demon to sit in the middle of the network anyway. What we really need are edge tools that help us manage the demands on our attention and capabilities rather than names to manage our personas. Of course these are all going to be imperfect since there cannot be a static metric. As an aside, the payment system ideas are tempting and can be implemented at the edges. While I know reporters who would like to put their fax on a 900 number I don't know of any who have actually taken that step. There actually is a version that is implemented -- advertisers pay third parties to piggy-back on their reputation and reach their viewers or readers. There are even publications that are 100% advertisements that you choose to view. I'm especially concerned with proposals that make the .COM problem far worse by presuming that the DNS is the source of all authority (and wisdom) rather than just a binding mechanism. Just because I have an MX record somewhere should not subject me to commercial conditions of all the zone owners in DNS path. As John Levine pointed out, some proposals are like making it illegal to drop a (paper) letter in a mail slot other than the one near my house. This is the kind of rigid centralism that threatens the Internet. The anger at spam is real but so is the danger of misguided solutions that only create worse problems while only addressing the symptoms.
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