Re: [Asrg] Spam Salt, an email sender authentication mechanism

mathew wrote, On 9/29/10 12:04 PM:
> On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 10:16, Seth<sethb(_at_)panix(_dot_)com>  wrote:
>> mathew<meta(_at_)pobox(_dot_)com>  wrote:
[...]
>>> To put it another way: If someone could come up with an anti-spam
>>> system that worked, but only for people who have (say) skills
>>> equivalent to a CS degree, that might not be of any use to 90% of
>>> people, but it'd work just fine for me.
>>
>> And you'd have to code it yourself, because the market is too small.
>
> Did you miss the free software revolution of the last 20 years? There
> are thousands of free software projects that require CS knowledge to
> be useful.

Indeed. There are even some of those that don't demand the ability to debug 
CS101-quality code to successfully build and run as intended, and in some 
cases there are actually competent coders who have done maintenance in this 
century.
Less cynically: I think Seth's point is more quantitative and subtle. A 
mechanism that only provides any benefit at all for the most CS-savvy 10% or 
requires BSCS equivalent skills (which is actually on the other side of 
0.1%) to get full benefit from has a sparse potential audience with such 
diversity in specific needs and skills that no specific implementation can 
satisfy any meaningful subset of them. For example, I recently went looking 
for an audio metadata tool that could manipulate mp3 files whose unusual 
tags demonstrate a fuzzy area of the ID3 specs. The open source, beer-free, 
and demo-able tools can't do the tricks I was looking for, and the open 
source tools seemed to be the products of fledgling coders who outgrew their 
obsession with music files some years ago. I ended up handling my own task 
with some rather clumsy shell work using standard Unix tools. I *could* 
recover all of that from my shell history and pretty it up for a real script 
or even translate it into Perl or C and release it, but I am unlikely ever 
to bother.
In other words: the spam control needs/whims of people who *can* write 
enough code to satisfy them are diverse enough that where they go beyond the 
needs of the general population they don't overlap enough for there to be a 
generalized solution for a significant fraction of the highly-skilled 
minority. See SpamAssassin for a demo of that. Also relevant to this is the 
fact that many of us who have been in the spam war for many years have 
essentially already won it for ourselves with highly individualized 
defenses, so many of the people who could be early adopters and improvers of 
novel approaches lack motivation for those roles.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)irtf(_dot_)org
http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg