On Sun, Jan 1, 2023 at 4:03 PM John R Levine <johnl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The notion that anyone who knows my phone number is authorized to call me
> any time of the day or night is stupid on a stick. So is the notion anyone
> who feels like it can clutter up my inbox.
I couldn't disagree more. The reason e-mail survives and none of the
things that are supposed to be better and replace it have done so is
exactly because anyone can send e-mail to anyone else.
That doesn't mean anyone should be able to send me any sort of message of any length without permission, unsolicited and impersonate someone else as they do.
And being able to cause a bell to ring in my home because some telemarketing scum wants to sell something to me - No, just no.
If you want a walled garden, there's no shortage of them but I have two
observations.
If you read to the end you will see that I am absolutely opposed to walled gardens.
Universal service does not mean having to forego access control.
> The notion that anyone with scant technical knowledge can impersonate
> anyone else via telephone or email is more stupid on a bigger stick.
It's *always* been possible to lie about who you are when making a phone
call, but for the first century or so nobody cared. Whhat changed?
The cost of calling people dropped, robo-calling, in particular the cost of international calling dropped enabling off shore boiler rooms filled with criminals calling up to do scam after scam.
The trick is to add enough friction to messaging to make it unattractive
to spam but not cripple it as a service. I can currently think of
somewhat effective voice message friction ("press N to complete your
call") but we've completely failed to come up with effective email
friction, and e-postage ain't it.
I started writing video games. A video game is a user experience so good people keep paying to use it again. Adding unnecessary friction is not acceptable.
The exception to that in my current code is that there is one message, a contact request message that is authorized by default. So, if I have your contact address (john@xxxxxxxxxxx, @john_levine, whatever) and I don't already have you in my contacts, the first message I send, is a contact exchange request saying 'Hi I am PHB, can I send you messages'.
If you respond yes, I can send you additional messages, if you let me, I can call you by voice or video etc. Otherwise, my messages are refused. Same on my end.
Given our relationship, I am not going to be giving you 'call me in the middle of the night' authorization. But I will probably allow your requests into the 'auto-scheduler' so my bot and your bot can arrange a mutually acceptable time for the call.
The key point here is that unlike a phone number or email, my contact address is not a bearer token giving anyone authorization to send me messages. So Madonna can be @madonna and Lewis Hamilton can be @lewis_hamilton and neither need worry about printing their contact address on their business card for fear of being slammed by fans. Now granted, they are probably not going to be processing their own contact requests but they have peeps for that.
Once we are in each other's contact catalogs, nobody else can impersonate you to me. I might not have been contacted by the real John Levine in the first place but that is another issue.
For interpersonal contact exchanges, trusted third parties aren't really very useful. But if we are communicating in the context of some corporation, it is important that I know both the person and the organization. So at least an organization level LRA is needed.
