spam control again

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Sun, 13 Jul 2003 01:05:38 -0400 (EDT)
"Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net> wrote:

> Spam needs to made at least as illegal, and as aggressively enforced,
> as small-time drug dealing.
As I was preparing for my talk on Wednesday, I thought a bit about SPAM.
Making something illegal, and enforcing it are two very different
things. 
You brought up some things yesterday. One thought I had was to require
every email message to have a valid digital signature. (Personally I
prefer using OpenPGP, but there are other valid methods). With a digital
signature much of the SPAM could be blocked early in the chain. And,
those legitimate vendors could still send out bulk email. 
The downside of this is that just about every email client would need to
verify and produce a digital signature. We already have the standards
for this in place and most email clients have the capability built in or
available as plugins. 

I think the enforcement of any anti-SPAM measure must be implementable
on the Internet. While this requirement would take some time to
implement it would provide a mechanism that we already posess. 

While I was not able to locate the specific article, I recall the
Microsoft and Yahoo are partnering to find ways to block SPAM. However,
I think that state laws against SPAM are not enough. We need as a
minimum a national law or even an international legal agreement.


-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9
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