North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Horrible Service Agreements

  • From: Vadim Antonov
  • Date: Mon Dec 01 17:04:15 1997 
Dean Anderson wrote:
 
> I suspect that much spam can't be stopped, without a constitutional
> amendment.

Wow!  What a heavy-handed way to fix a problem which has
a purely technological solution.

Cryptography can be used to produce non-transferrable keys
allowing some party to send message to a particular recipient.
Messages can include "right to respond" keys.

The problem with authenticated messaging is how to send a message
to a person who was not in any kind of contact with you before.
Fortunately, this is not much of a problem, with adequate
key distribution scheme, because there's always some kind of
community both parties belong to before they exchange messages
(obviously, since the sending party got to obtain address from
somewhere).  Such community message board can provide its members
with keys allowing them to communicate to each other directly.

Now, communities will have to perform some kind of authentication
of its members to exclude abuse.  Which means that USENET cannot
be covered by this scheme; but isn't it already nearly dead?

I was always saying that Internet is quite a step forward in
promoting a right to speak.  Unfortunately as-is it is very bad
at promoting the right not to listen.

--vadim