[11816] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: NYTimes 'green card' article
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roger Bohn)
Thu Apr 21 03:52:28 1994
Date: Wed, 20 Apr 1994 17:28:06 -0800
To: blarrib@netcom.com (Bob Larribeau), finn@mcs.com (the finn),
com-priv@psi.com
From: Rbohn@ucsd.edu (Roger Bohn)
At 10:08 AM 4/20/94 -0700, Bob Larribeau wrote:
>What does this guy have to be repentant about. He got tremendous exposure,
>including his picture in the New York Times for a minimal investment. He
>probably got a number of querys from people wanting Green Cards. What he
>did was a pain in the neck, but it wasn't illegal.
>
>Now that it has hit the mainstream the Internet is going to be exploited by
>people for their own purposes --- that is the what commercialism is all
>about. Some of these people will be "good citizens", others will not. This
>comes as part of the fruits of our success.
Once again, the underlying problem is that posting usenet or email messages
has a perceived cost of zero to the sender, but a positive cost to the
receivers. (Even if they don't read it, it reduces the S/N ratio, and
takes time to decide whether to read.) Flaming raises the ex post cost to
the sender, but not always enough. Cutting off their account has a much
bigger effect, but requires fast decision making by the service provider.
(Until we can authenticate sender ID, flaming the sender also raises the
possibility of a malicious prank by an imposter. )
I agree that we'd better get used to this. :-(
The people on this list are the right group to think about countermeasures,
because as this becomes widespread, the value of Internet activities to
users goes down, and legitimate messages get lost in the noise.
