[12221] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: "Arizona Lawyers Form Company..."
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roger Bohn)
Tue May 10 03:23:33 1994
Date: Mon, 9 May 1994 22:14:48 -0700
To: tenney@netcom.com (Glenn S. Tenney), com-priv@psi.com
From: Rbohn@ucsd.edu (Roger Bohn)
At 3:51 PM 5/9/94 -0800, Glenn S. Tenney wrote:
>At 2:36 AM 5/9/94 -0400, Russell Nelson wrote:
>>...It's a matter of moments to set up a mail alias that cancels articles
>>by message-id. That... will keep your users from any grief. ...
>
>However there are two gotcha's to this. (1) Although it will take moments
>to set up such a filter, it will take hours to percolate around the net --
>yet the perpetrator can change their identifying marks much faster; and (2)
>more and more nodes on the net do not have the ability to do such things
>(ie. not all PC or Mac programs support that).
The inability to implement mass automated countermeasures is very
troublesome. Looking into my crystal ball, the problem of unsolicited mass
postings looks like a signal-to-noise ratio problem. Any one mass poster
can be dealt with _relatively_ easily. However as the percentage of
unsolicited junk mail increases, the effort needed to filter it, or
read/delete it, goes up too, and the S/N falls since no filtering system
can be 100% accurate. As the S/N in a particular Netnews group declines,
the value of reading that group declines, and readership falls. Similarly
for mail received from lists. Even personal mail would suffer, if we start
getting individually addressed junk.
I don't know which of the solutions discussed here is best. But I do know
that to be useful in the long run, it better scale well as the number of
perpetrators rises above 1E3.
Roger Bohn
