Jargons of Info Tech industry

[Terry Hancock]

On Wednesday 12 October 2005 04:37 pm, Roedy Green wrote:
> It is a bit like termites. If we don't do something drastic to deal
> with spam, the ruddy things will eventually make the entire Internet
> unusable.
> 
> the three keys to me are:
> 
> 1. flipping to a digital id based email system so that the sender of
> any piece of mail can be legally identified and prosecuted.
> If every piece of anonymous email disappeared that would go a long way
> to clearing up spam.  Let those sending ransom notes, death threats
> and  hate mail use snail mail.  As a second best, correspondents are
> identified by permission/identity/encryption keys given to them by
> their recipients.

Well, that certainly won't accomplish much -- not without a world
government, anyway. Much (maybe most) of the spam I receive is
international (from Russia, Japan, Southeast Asia, the Middle East,
Africa, even the Phillipines).  Most of it is also already illegal,
so new legislation will certainly make no difference.

The only thing you buy with an authentication system is that you
can filter out the problems at the ISP or on the uploading side,
thus saving a lot of bandwidth. But it would have to be very widely
accepted to actually reduce spamming.

Now, of course, spammers are also hitting web forms and blogs and
other protocols besides e-mail.

> 2. flipping to a sender pays system so that the Internet does not
> subsidise spam.

Then I won't be posting on the Python list anymore, I can assure you.
This would chill a lot of the purposes for which email is ideal.

> 3. Mail is not transported without prior permission.  The receiver can
> turn that permission on and off any time he chooses.  This is
> basically an automated version of what Zaep does where the sender is
> not consciously aware of the permission-getting step.

Well, this is already happening at the level of my mail client. I
gather you have something more centralized in mind?

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com