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Re: Re: [Asrg] 0. General - Define Spam

2004-01-05 09:48:14
Jon,


 The reformulation of the problem as one of consent helped clarify 
 views on this "social" (rather than "political" ?) ill.

Indeed.  Notice how productive things have been, spending lots of time 
debating definitions (repeatedly), lots of time making ad hominem 
attacks, and no success at getting supportive technical work done.

 This might seem like a "good thing" - but of course this means that 
there
 is no way of comparing proposals meaningfully. e.g. Scheme (a) will
 probably be (very close to) 100% effective at stopping the set of 
email

Careful use of the evaluation points suggested in the Technical 
Considerations draft will show such things as adoption difficulties and 
ease with which spammers can 'route around' the proposed mechanism.  
This does not require a comparison with other proposal; it requires 
conceptual and specification quality that can be evaluated on its own.

Development of strong community support obviates the need for doing 
comparisons and artificially declaring choices among them.


 the consensus seems to be 

1. This list has yet to show anything that satisfies the historical use 
of the term "rough consensus".

2. This list has primarily succeeded at convincing active anti-spam 
workers to spend their time elsewhere; as such a consensus in the 
current group is what statisticians politely call "not representative of 
the larger population".


 *You* have rechartered the group to work on the poorly defined "spam"
 problem.

They have rechartered the group to work on technical specifications, 
rather than endless debate about definitions.


 Research Groups are usually
 focussed and long term, 

1. "research" is a term used with variable meaning, in terms of 
practicality and timeframe.

2.  "long term" is a term used with variable meaning.

2. There is a difference between "long term" and "forever".  The rate of 
progress in this group encourages the latter.  


 I suspect that this rechartering is a "political" issue, perhaps 
there's
 pressure to produce "appropriate" results in a predetermined 
timescale.

Absolutely correct.

We need effective mechanisms, defined, deployed and used, before spam 
destroys email.  We are already under crisis pressure.

d/

--
Dave Crocker <dcrocker-at-brandenburg-dot-com>
Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://brandenburg.com>






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