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Re: [Asrg] attention bonds, was Email Postage

2008-11-27 12:20:21

On November 26, 2008 at 01:12 johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com (John Levine) wrote:
If you have a working implementation, who cares about consensus?

Only people who want to interoperate.

What I sincerely do not understand is why it is so important for some
people to not just fast forward through the messages which they
personally believe will not be fruitful but instead to stop and try
their level best to discourage the conversation entirely.

All that does is act as a multiplier, a lot of the volume in the past
few days on "email postage" has been nothing but meta-discussion on
whether or not to discuss email postage (including, unfortunately,
this message.)

As each point of view wanders from the technical merits it of course
gets more heated because we have exited "research discussion" and
entered a realm of trying to control each other's behavior.

Maybe it's the influence of television, we shout at the TV, change the
channel, get annoyed at the lousy programming which isn't holding our
attention, etc.

But this isn't television, this isn't entertainment, the merit or
value of a technical discussion isn't how well it holds your attention
personally.

That said, since we've now gone over a decade with little effective
progress with spam, and it is still very destructive, perhaps phrases
like "interoperate" need to be examined.

I sense once again a nostalgia for a small-town culture where everyone
behaved (or was run out of town) is competing with a realization that
things have changed.

I don't see the spam problem as purely in the realm of
interoperability if by interoperability one means a certain symmetry
among all players, servers and clients et al.

Some asymmetry may be necessary to get this problem under
control. With luck it will be a reasonably voluntary asymmetry,
reasonable, not perfect, just reasonable.

But please, since you've evidently figured out how to solve all the
problems that we morons think are insoluble, build a working
implementation and prove us all wrong.  Until then, you're just
blowing smoke.

You see, this is just unnecessary. This is a research group, not a
"show us your working implementation group and we'll try to set down
how many bits in a flag field" group.

This spam problem remains incredibly intransigent and shooting down
ideas with hair-trigger impatience because you personally don't see
your way clearly through to the end is not productive.

I've been involved in research, off and on, for over 30 years.

Research is not a simple linear process. Sometimes one re-opens old
ideas when nothing else is working to see if something has been
missed.

The simple assertion:

  If spammers had to pay fairly for the resources they use then there
  would be no spam problem as we know it today.

is prima facie true and obvious, or should be. It is a given that
crime is a spammer's stock in trade, their business model does not
allow for fair payment for resources.

That, in a sentence or two, is the essence of email postage or similar
ideas: How can we make spammers pay fairly for the resources they use?

It's different than:

  Spammers will slam me with thousands of messages a day, how can I
  not see them or at least not "believe" them?

Which sums up about 99% of the rest of the discussion.

To some extent it has a fallacy inherent because it overwhelmingly
characterizes the "spam problem" as a problem only for the end-user
who is interrupted or distracted by spam.

But as I've tried to present here that is only the tip of the iceberg,
albeit the tip which is out of the water and the one most people sit
on so understandably find attractive. Unfortunately for me I live in
the cold, dark, murky depths of the rest of the 'berg, as do most
ISPs.

There is also all the bandwidth and computrons which must be devoted
to this filtering and blacklisting. Someone pays for all that and the
cost just rises and rises. All that keeps it from driving the business
models over the edge is that the computrons keep getting cheaper and
cheaper. But there's still the software technology, etc.

The main place these two views meet is at the "starve a fever, feed a
cold" point which is the theory that maybe if we could effectively
filter out all (or almost all) of this spam through blacklists and
DKIM-like schemes and spamassassin schemes etc. that PERHAPS the
spammers would give up since they're not getting through. That is, it
would choke off their livelihood.

There is no hard evidence that this starvation theory is true, it is
perhaps a compelling theory, but yet to be proved.

It is not even clear we can filter down the spam influx sufficiently
to make life pleasant except perhaps when individuals agree to live
within virtual gated communities.

Consequently, the two approaches:

    1. Stop the end-user from seeing the spam.

    2. Make the spammer pay for what s/he uses.

seem to me equally valid topics of discussion, each with various
sub-topics (1b. help the end-user realize a message is not from a
trustworthy source, 2b email postage: threat or menace?)

But the meta-discussion isn't productive.

Personally, I can skim through it quickly enough, but clearly some
fool themselves into thinking that the meta-discussion is urgent and
important when, in my opinion, it is anything but, it's just sniping,
all heat, no light.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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