more on Why Technologists Should Stay Involved with SPAM Legislation

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 15:00:28 -0800
From: Brad Templeton <btm () templetons com>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Why Technologists Should Stay Involved with SPAM
 Legislation
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>

> seeing them as either/or propositions, as in "my spam solution is better
> than yours" and start trying to implement as many of them as possible, as
> cooperatively as possible.  This applies not only to competing antispam

How could one argue with this seemingly obvious sentiment?

Alas, one can.  Battles among anti-spam options are not simply over
their efficacy.   The real question is what level of collateral
damage they cause, in particular in terms of blocked legitimate mail
(if they are filters) chilled speech and bad precedent (if they are
laws,) blocking of anonymous speech (if they are authentication schemes)
as well as breaking of valued principles (mistaking a feature
of our efficient, open email system as a bug.)

So we can't just "implement as many of them as possible" any more than
we would want to implement as many of the anti-crime or anti-terror
proposals (ubiquitous surveillance cameras, elmination of rules
of justice and civil rights) as we can.

However, I do agree with the main sentiment that there will not be
just one system that solves all problems.  I think the first goal is
to get people to loosen their definition of the problem.  Too many
consider the problem to be annoying mail, or annoying advertising,
but it's a crazy goal to get rid of all annoying mail or all advertising.
What we want is to get rid of the flood, the overloaded mailboxes and
servers.   Once you accept that more modest goal (which still solves 99%
of the problem as far as anybody can see) many more solutions present
themsevles without the collateral damage, and we can follow Nat's course. 

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