Re: bozoproofing the net, was The Value of Reputation

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I hope the message here is not that we should restrict ourselves to
developing technology that is idiot-proof, since a sufficiently
determined idiot, of which there are many, will do idiotic things with
any technology that we never in a million years would have
anticipated.

However, ...

>The difficulty is that establishment of such a mechanism makes
>it very easy for, e.g., an ISP that wants to "protect its
>customers from spam" and reduce spam traffic on its backbone to
>say "aha, any message that isn't validated/authorized by someone
>whom we recognize is obviously hostile and should be silently
>dropped".  And the only sources they are likely to recognize are
>members of their own messaging cabal. ...

People have been building e-mail walled gardens as long as there has
been e-mail.  Fifteen years ago there were lots of disjoint mail
systems, none of which remain except perhaps as gateways to the world
of SMTP mail.

One favor that the SPF crowd did for us was to give the aforementioned
idiots a chance to find out what a bad idea it is to reject mail
arbitrarily from people who don't jump through their hoops, so nobody
rejects for SPF failure any more.  People who use C/R against people
not on their whitelists have found the same thing -- they all check
the folder of unconfirmed mail because they know there's lots of real
mail from people who won't hoop jump.

If the idiots were to latch on to DKIM and start rejecting valid mail,
like they have to the past umpteen magic bullets, why do you expect
the results to be any different?

R's,
John

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