On Thu, Aug 24, 2023 at 11:23 AM Murray S. Kucherawy <superuser@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 10:54 AM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:On 8/22/23 11:51, John R Levine wrote:
> It's amazing how many people here appear to believe that mail was
> perfect in the 1990s and nothing has changed.
I certainly don't make that claim, and I haven't seen anyone do so.
What I will claim is that email worked better in the 1990s than it does now.
(that's not entirely IETF's fault, but IETF has arguably failed to keep
email updated to deal with the changes in the 'net since then.)What aspects of email needed standardization and interoperability that didn't get it?Given the grassroots nature of how the IETF generally does work, it seems like an interesting idea that we should be asserting ourselves over an area (and finding people willing to volunteer to do so). If the community didn't spontaneously demonstrate that momentum, I wonder what you think should've been done differently.-MSK
I think the community already is. That is why proprietary walled gardens like Signal are replacing email.
I like a lot of things about Signal. But they refuse to make it an open infrastructure, it is a walled garden that insists on a single set of security concerns.
Signal is trying to be two things: a communications service and a privacy foundation. Those need to be split because they are in conflict. Just like ISOC really needs to sell .ORG because running a DNS domain is a conflict of interest with being the parent of the Internet standards org. Oh if only EFF hadn't used it as an opportunity for fund raising.
I get that people don't like my schemes but I can see an opportunity for a clear win-win-win here. The nub of the matter being Keith's point that email addresses aren't portable. I will raise that and state that the problem is that alice@xxxxxxxxxxx is being used for voice and video and chat as well but these additional affordances cannot be implemented well without participation of the service provider for alice@xxxxxxxxxxx.
My proposal is to overcome all of these issues with a new registry that is designed for personal use, not announcing Internet services. I have a proof of concept specification and code. I almost have a client.
The basic idea being anyone can register a callsign which under normal circumstances is theirs for life (yes, I understand the trademarks issue, I was PS of VRSN) at a really low cost (I have done the math and can do the registry part at $0.10/name).
So if you register @Murray_Kucherawy, @Murray_K_Kucherawy and @DefinitelyNotMurray for a total of $0.30, those are yours for life and you can put them on a business card and people can then use that to acquire and verify a contact assertion which contains the communication addresses you wish to share with them. You can then change your email service provider and all of your mail from people using callsign aware clients will go to the new address automatically, even if your old mail service provider has shut down.
The win for users is that every messaging address that can be represented as a URI (i.e. all of those not deliberately closed) can be used from a callsign aware contacts book. Contacts are for life. Even if you sell a callsign, the contracts connected with it are bound to the underlying public key.
The win for Signal is the privacy foundation they claim is the heart and soul of the organization can sell off the communications provider and focus on the job of making tools to protect personal privacy. That should net them an endowment of at least a billion dollars.
The callsign registry proposal is that there be a registry run by a non profit, control over which is distributed across a suitably wide number of parties that can serve as proxies for the real stakeholders, the users. In addition to charging $0.10 for names of 9 characters or more, I propose exponentially increasing charges for shorter names with single character names in the Latin character set beint $10 million.
The win for IETF, W3C, various open source efforts, particularly those developing privacy software would be the surplus from the registry would go to fund them.
The win for Microsoft, Google, etc. and for the EU, US and other countries is that this technology might be the vehicle that would allow a second burst of Internet related innovation after the Web revolution.
