Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence
2009-06-16 14:55:26
Ian Eiloart wrote, On 6/16/09 10:21 AM:
--On 16 June 2009 08:47:51 -0400 der Mouse
<mouse(_at_)Rodents-Montreal(_dot_)ORG>
wrote:
Not quite. There are walled-garden approaches to email that are
basically spam-free, because they have the accountability the open
Internet lacks.
Agreed. What efforts are being made to introduce that accountability to
email?
I believe that successful (on their own terms) demo projects exist in China,
Iran, Cuba, and North Korea.
More seriously: the trend over the past 20 years has been to *reduce*
structured accountability on the Internet. Anyone who wants to only accept
mail that they can be certain is from identifiable and/or trusted senders
can do so now, using mature open standards that have multiple interoperable
implementations including free software.
AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, The Source, Delphi, MCIMail, and just about every
entity that ever received a classful allocation of address space enforced
accountability on their users. More recently, the PGP user community and PGP
Inc., Netscape, Microsoft, Thawte, and Verisign have all made their own
valiant attempts to spread the use of tools that would support widespread
user-level accountability for email. All major MTA's implement mandatory TLS
encryption for transport and submission, mandatory authentication for
transport and submission, and mandatory strict X.509 certificate
verification, yet most also warn against using any of those except for
encryption and authentication for submission and opportunistic encryption
for transport without demanding cert verification. Most users of classical
(i.e. POP/IMAP/MAPI/SMTP) MUA's use ones that can support message-level
digital signatures and encryption, but the use of those capabilities for
general Internet email is rare.
Figuring out a way to get the tools for online accountability into
essentially universal use without a pre-existing adjunct authoritarian
polity and without creating the tools for rapid creation of a new
authoritarian polity would be a very interesting and challenging research
goal. I think it is outside of IRTF scope.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)irtf(_dot_)org
http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg
<Prev in Thread] |
Current Thread |
[Next in Thread>
|
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, (continued)
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, Dotzero
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, Paul Russell
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, Ian Eiloart
- Re: [Asrg] [OT] Soundness of silence, Mike Schadone
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, Bill Cole
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, der Mouse
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, Alessandro Vesely
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, der Mouse
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, Dotzero
- Re: [Asrg] Soundness of silence, Alessandro Vesely
|
|
|