on 8/15/2002 4:34 PM Fred Baker wrote:
the root problem is indeed social, but I don't think we need laws on
the books to provide technical work-arounds. If we want to, for
example, have white-list people (people who are subscribers to the
mailing list, or people who work for our company, or people to whom we
have sent the appropriate goober in the past so they can now present
it) present a credential and in our own instance of a mailer process
treat peers that don't present the credential differently (such as
r-e-a-l s-l-o-w-l-y), that doesn't require a law, it merely requires
the appropriate technical specification and implementation.
We certainly don't need laws to do any of that. The laws are needed for
when all of that fails to work, for the ten years between now and whenever
critical mass is achieved, and for the simpler technologies which replace
SMTP in the mainstream that start to have their own spam problems.
ICQ has been whitelist-centric for years, and there is spam there too.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/