Ryan Lackey <rdl@mit.edu> writes:
You would be expected to comply with efforts to stamp out illegal activities. Laws may be passed (e.g. CDA) which would require technical measures to prevent illegal activity even if you are a common carrier.
Governments are always trying to coerce people into complying with technical measures designed by the likes of GCHQ, NSA, and various government sell-outs. Spammers have surived so far because spam is so hard to stop; stopping SPAM is an inherently hard problem, mostly because of open access SMTP relays which is basically a historic accident, and also because spammers make use of accounts that it pays them to treat as disposable. (I like to think hashcash, http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/hashcash/ is a viable solution for spam, though it too must be widely deployed before it would be practical). We can perhaps learn something from the services and environments which allow spammers to flourish, we could emulate the lack of authentication, and identification in SMTP protocols and implementations, to design attractive new services which are hard to police by design. This is the advantage of the internet protocol designer. Distributed web services as Ryan is prototyping is one attractive new service. The challenge is deployment. Adam