Interesting People mailing list archives
E-mail is broken
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sun, 05 Oct 2003 17:49:51 -0400
E-mail is broken Four Internet pioneers discuss the sorry state of online communication today. The consensus: It's a real mess. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Katharine Mieszkowski Oct. 2, 2003 | Somewhere between that spam promoting spyware disguised as a chipper e-greeting and the latest e-mail-borne virus masquerading as an urgent software upgrade, something got lost. Not just a single overlooked urgent message from your boss, lodged in a sea of ghastly teenage bestiality spam, but something more fundamental, something more essential. It's impossible to say exactly when the ritual of opening the e-mail in box went from being the lure that brought you online in the first place to a slough of deleting drudgery, full not only of irritating commercial messages that you never signed up to receive, but also of potential threats that could bring down your computer. But there's no use being nostalgic for that earlier, simpler time, whenever you got online, whether that was in 1984 or 1998. You can't go home again, or at least, you can't go back to a home without spam. The questions now are: Can e-mail be saved? How bad is the problem, really ? And what can be done to fix it? Salon interviewed four Internet pioneers, computer scientists who have been online longer than most of the rest of world and who, in some cases, helped set up the systems we use today. Dave Farber, who sometimes calls himself "the grandfather of the Internet" because many of his students went on to be its fathers, is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's school of computer science. He first went online in 1962 and started on the Internet in the late '60s "near the day it was born," when his student Dave Crocker, now a principal in Brandenburg Consulting but then part of the original Arpanet research community, "got the damn thing working." Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, first used e-mail in 1976 and started the first ".com" company, in 1989. And Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert and principal of Nielsen Norman group, started using e-mail in 1981 and the Internet back in 1985, when he worked at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center: "Every single time I sent e-mail to a non-IBM address, a screen came up to warn me that we were sending information outside the company and asked the user to confirm that no confidential information was included." .... http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/02/e_mail/ ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- E-mail is broken Dave Farber (Oct 05)