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6. Proposals - C/R and CRI (was: Re: [Asrg] 6. General - IPR - Patents on C/R)

2003-12-16 18:21:45
[changed subject to reflect where this is going]

Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
[snip history]

The application to spam is obvious and utterly anti-social. Best thing that
can happen here is for the patent to kill this obnoxious and clueless
mechanism.

The problem with general C/R is that it's trying to achieve two separate
purposes. It's doing return-path verification, and it's doing sentient-sender verification. Return-path verification is not inherently anti-social, so long as it doesn't necessarily bother the original sender (pick your own definition of 'bother'). Sentient-sender verification is quite reasonably considered inherently anti-social by some.

Return-path verification definitely has some value, but we need to work out a standardized way of doing it. We would never accept that a TCP connection is valid after receiving only the SYN packet, so why should we accept it for email? Proposals like CRI could be used to provide end-to-end return-path verification by automatically ACKing the challenge, assuming that it only asks 'did you send something?', not 'did you, as a sentient being, send something?'.

I'm not going to comment on the technical merits of sentient-sender verification because it is inherently a social problem that we're not tasked to deal with.

Philip Miller


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