--On Wednesday, 22 August, 2007 21:39 +0200 Iljitsch van Beijnum
<iljitsch(_at_)muada(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
Unfortunately, the most innovative people around these days
are the spammers and fishers, so these days, when we come up
with new protocols, we need to specifically allow everything
that's good so implementations/users can reject everything
else. I.e., a new mail protocol will have to address things
like forwarding and mailinglists explicitly.
I trust you understand that "anything not explicitly permitted
is prohibited" is equivalent to "there will be no innovation
from this point forward except by breaking the rules".
Not a network environment I want to live in. YMMD.
Marginal and criminal elements are _always_ the most innovative
people around if there is profit in stretching the boundaries of
the rules. In normal environments, the consequences of those
innovations are limited by effective legislation that
criminalizes sufficiently bad behavior and by enforcement and
punishment structures that create significant negative
incentives for that behavior.
Consider what would happen if there were no societal consensus
that breaking into houses and stealing things was a bad thing
and if the only laws permitted a given burglar to break into any
given house once, requiring only that he leave a note with an
address for notifications that he wasn't permitted to do it a
second time. Such a system would encourage house occupants to
make significant investments in repelling initial break-ins and
in an arms race between them and the burglar population about
break-in technologies. Every time the home occupant built the
fence a half-meter higher and that appeared to have an effect,
the burglars would obtain ladders a meter longer. If the
occupant decided to electrify the fences, the burglars would
obtain insulators and mechanisms to short the fences out. It
would also encourage any burglar who wanted to expand her
business to create ways of hiding or changing identities so that
the prohibition on second and subsequent break-ins after
notification would not apply or be unenforceable.
Bingo!
From that perspective, the real question here is how bad things
have to get before society decides to effectively criminalize
the behavior. Technical measures that temporarily make things a
little less bad for some populations are the equivalent of the
half-meter increase in fence height and mostly serve to make the
bad guys more sophisticated, to reduce general quality of life,
and to give legislators and regulators excuses to continue to
delay action.
john
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