Revising the Internet Email Infrastructure

Lauren Weinstein writes "People For Internet Responsibility (PFIR) today released a white paper aimed at starting discussion and work to fundamentally revamp Internet e-mail systems to control spam, forgeries, and a range of other problems, while empowering e-mail users rather than ISPs." Excellent start.

Comments

Re:PGP

[cperciva]

"Free as in free" isn't necessarily better, especially where security is concerned. A good example of this is qmail -- djb offers a guarantee that it is secure, and he can do that because he wrote qmail entirely himself. If he was accepting code from around the world, it would be much harder for him to provide such a guarantee; and if qmail was changing as rapidly as many open source programs, it would be impossible.

Open source means that lots of people can fix bugs; it also means that lots of people can introduce bugs. For security critical applications, I'd prefer to use code which was written carefully by a single person or small group of people whom I trust, rather than using code contributed by a large number of effectively anonymous people whom I don't know.

Re:The ugly truth about poor similes

[WTFmonkey]

I thought that line was funny as hell. There is *nothing* that a good, well-told joke can't make funny (See George Carlin-- "Rape can be funny. Porky Pig raping Elmer Fudd")

Oh, well, you don't like dead baby jokes, either.