[thelist] Serious antispam measures

[Kasimir K]

Good morning,

> the online identity needs to be tied to a physical or legal entity
...
> an invasion of privacy/destruction of the anonymity of the 'net.

I'm all for privacy and all. But I too think that this tying would be a 
good thing. Often people crying for privacy on the net think of the net 
as something that is not part of the rest of our world, when it really 
is just another forum or medium, just a bit more effective and far 
reaching...

In the 'old forums' we don't like to see people anonymously shouting or 
doing things that affect others, why should this 'new forum' be 
different? The same people who wouldn't even dream of stealing a cd from 
a record store are happily stealing online - so it seems that we have a 
lot of attitudes to adjust.

I would love to see internet, where doing some things (including 
emailing) would require an identity to a physical or legal entity, while 
some others wouldn't - posting to a message board aimed at victims of 
pedophilia should always remain anonymous.

> You start making it economically unfeasible to send commercial spam

One approach to achieve this would be to require the sending system to 
perform a complex calculation - to send mail one by one this does not 
cause a noticeable delay, but to send 10000s of emails at once would 
require too much hardware to be cost effective. (http://www.hashcash.org)

But this too is band aid, and if this becomes common, we'll soon see 
worm based distributed computing calculating hashcashes...

> (obviously, this won't stop those people who like to send out unsolicited
> junk mail where they don't care about the commercial implications). Again

Indeed, political, religious etc. propaganda is not commercial, but 
nevertheless unwanted. I liked Paul Graham's proposal to define spam as 
"unsolicited automated email".

I fully agree with Ken that we need fundamental reforms - in my ideal 
world they would first be in peoples' attitudes (by education), then in 
jurisdiction, and finally in the messaging infrastructures.

Meanwhile, bayesian filters and white lists are our friends.

.k