Bill Stewart writes:
Anybody for an Internet Driver's License?
At this point, I would love the ability to filter news and mail according to some criteria related to the sender's probable reputation. Back in the early days of C&S, spam was an intellectual issue. Now it is a good chunk of the entire bandwidth of major components of the Net. I am now getting more junk email than email from people I care to correspond with. It seems one can't even read the scholarly newsgroups anymore without "Come Watch Us Lick Ourselves on the Web" messages popping up regularly. It's really getting to the point where the time-honored suggestion of "just hit your delete key" cannot deal with the obverwhelming amount of Drek posted, much of it with subject lines deliberately designed to blend in with the newsgroup topic. Just being able to filter out posts from Net addresses that don't correspond to real identifiable humans posting under their legal names would be a good first step. Purely voluntary, of course, since any filtering would be done at the reading end, and people could still post anything they liked. -- Mike Duvos $ PGP 2.6 Public Key available $ mpd@netcom.com $ via Finger. $