[12233] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: "Arizona Lawyers Form Company..."
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arthur Richard Brodsky)
Tue May 10 20:57:34 1994
Date: Tue, 10 May 1994 09:57:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Arthur Richard Brodsky <arb@well.sf.ca.us>
To: Roger Bohn <Rbohn@ucsd.edu>
Cc: "Glenn S. Tenney" <tenney@netcom.com>, com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: <199405100514.WAA26737@ucsd.edu>
Just a little legislative history here. Remember the hue and cry over
telemarketers, and over junk faxes? Congress put some restrictions on the
former and outlawed the latter.
On Mon, 9 May 1994, Roger Bohn wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
