At 5:21 AM 11/20/95, Corey Bridges wrote:
At 05:27 PM 11/19/95 -0800, Greg Broiles wrote:
... If A wants to send messages to B, but B doesn't want to receive them, should A be forced to stop sending?
My rambling $.02:
I haven't thought all this through, but I have an emerging stance. Just this week I've started ploughing through the Cyphernomicon, and was smacked in the face with the eminently pragmatic Mr. May's statement that any law that cannot be enforced should not exist.
Thanks. It's always heartening to see that someone is affected positively by one's arguments.
Up until, say, this week, I'd always been in favor of Caller ID. I'd figured if anyone wants to call me, I have the right to know who it is. By default, I had adopted this position concerning email. Now, one day I will receive an anonymous email. Will I be offended? Maybe. Can I do anything about it? Not likely. Anonymous communication is only going to get easier. Current
Yes, anonymous communication is getting easier, and the costs of trying to stop it are becoming impossibly high. It would essentially require a police state to stop, and even then it probably couldn't be stopped...for example, I could always set up a "Tim's Quoting Service," which passes on anonymous mail to a recipient with the "Hey, someone says this..." Could I be prosecuted? Not even in a police state. Just one of dozens of approaches to skirt such laws. However, anticipating your next point, this does not mean anonymous communication bandwidth will become infinite. Solutions are predictable. See below.
congressional prattling notwithstanding, the onus of responsibility will have to shift to the recipient. For example, I could configure my mail program to automatically throw away any incoming message with "anonymous" in the "From" header. (Or any message from *@pseudo.goldenbear.com, for that matter)
If junk mail continues to bother people, it's only a matter of time until mail programs' filtering capabilities become much more sophisticated. (Of course, for all I know, there already ARE programs that do what I'm about to propose.) People can maintain a "do not accept from" list, containing every anonymous remailer they've ever heard about, or an "accept only from" list,
Many of us do this all the time. The Macintosh (and Windows) mail program I currently use is "Eudora Pro," from Qualcomm. Extensive filtering options. Certainly it is possible to set up filters to put mail from "anonymous" into mailboxes, or the trash. And just as possible, though a bit more involved, to put mail from _desired_ sources into boxes, or have a priority flag raised, etc. What if one is "bombarded" by mail, thousands of messages a day, or many megabytes? There are two main options, besides meaningless clamoring for legislation against "junk mail": 1. Some services, like Prodigy, allow one to discard a message before reading it, with no charge. (Seeing the sender and message name only.) This does not solve the problem completely, but it certainly eliminates cost to the enduser. The service provider still has the mail, but at least his network connections are likely to not be much affected....still possible to bring the service to its knees, which brings up the second approach....: 2. Sender pays the costs of transmission. That is, if someone wishes to send 10 megabytes to a site, at least _he_ (or _she_) pays the freight. This is of course the way things now work with the U.S. postal system, with "Postage Due" no longer common: if the sender doesn't In the real world, nothing is really free, so the whole economics of the Internet has been deceiving for quite some time. The notion that one can "spam" for free, shipping megabytes to thousands of sites, has led to strange notions about the economics of the Net and, as a result, for calls for new laws about "unwanted e-mail," "spamming," etc. Of course, most users on the Net are now paying for connectivity one way or another. Even U.C. Berkeley, one of the pioneers in Unix and campus connections to the Net, has subcontracted out it's Net connections to Netcom, with students and faculty paying around $15 a month. A sign of the times. (There are also reasons why at least so far it has proven viable to _not_ charge for individual transmissions. Various kinds of subsidies.) Filtering is a solution for the reader not to have see stuff he doesn't want to see, but he or his ISP may still receive the stuff, even if it gets discarded, which is why the long term solution is likely to involve paid deliveries. (Needless to say, this is not currently part of the Net, and I'm not suggesting it will happen anytime soon, or because I happen to think it's a solution. Rather, what I'm saying is that it's a _technological_ and _market_ solution to the "problem" of spammage and "unwanted mail filling up our mailboxes." How it happens is unclear. But think of how markets generally evolve to deal with what would naively be seen as unsolvable crises or shortages. Long before we all are getting gigabytes of unwanted stuff every day, alternatives will develop. I am confident that paid delivery is one of the keys.)
And to take a stab at another pair of Greg's questions, if A is sending messages from his account on X's system to B, and B doesn't want to receive them, should B have the right to make X stop A? No. (Not that I think the law is going to realize that any time soon.) Should X have the right to stop A? Hell yes--it's his system. Let A find a more open-minded ISP if he doesn't like it.
Amen. Exactly.
Corey Bridges Security Scribe Netscape Communications Corporation ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Interesting. And now I'm even happier to have partly made a convert. --Tim May Views here are not the views of my Internet Service Provider or Government. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."