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[bryant]

Dave Winer warns that syndication feed arguments may have the same result as cell phone content format arguments. Namely, a fractured market in which it isn’t worth anyone’s time to support multiple formats. That’s definitely one possibility. The other comparison I’d make is email protocols, though. SMTP is deeply insecure, and as a result spam now represents a sizable percentage of the world’s email. We’d have been much better off if we’d switched away from SMTP before it was too late.

Of course, both cautionary tales might be true. Or neither.

Comments

An obligatory chain is yanked, re spam

[cks.livejournal.com]

Spam doesn't happen because SMTP is insecure, and making SMTP 'secure' (whatever that means) would do little to stop spam. Fundamentally, spam happens because one allows strangers to get in contact with one. Knowing a stranger's (nominal) identity doesn't help with knowing the nature of their message. This is the same fundamental issue that Bruce Schneider recently raised over the issue of national ID cards and terrorism: a person's identity is a crappy proxy for their intentions (and really only gets the amateurs).

The usually raised counterargument is that with strong identification, spammers will be outed as such and then blocked. But this relies on a spammer not being able to obtain a string of new online identities through any number of methods. The situation is worse if one allows corporations to have identities. (And in general it assumes that the spammers are not just going to make use of other people's online identities, the way they currently make use of open proxies and open SMTP relays.)

Issuing identities to ISPs merely pushes the problem up one level, plus creates others since an ISP's interests are more aligned with its customers than with the people being spammed by them. (Sure, one could block the ISP. Provided one is not chucking an unacceptable number of babies out with the bathwater.)