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FTC Wants Comments on Email Authentication
An anonymous reader writes "Groklaw has the scoop. The Federal Trade Commission and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will co-host a two-day 'summit' November 9-10 to explore the development and deployment of technology that could reduce spam. The E-mail Authentication Summit will focus on challenges in the development, testing, evaluation, and deployment of domain-level authentication systems. The FTC will be accepting public comments until Sept. 30, 2004 via snail-mail or email (authenticationsummit at ftc.gov). The FTC has a list of 30 questions they would like answers/comments to. The list available in this PDF of the Federal Register Notice." In a related subject, reader Fortunato_NC submits this writeup of the sequence of events that led to Sender-ID's abandonment.
There are two ways to get rid of spam. Stopping spammers and stopping people from buying via spam. The former never works because spammers will always find ways around it. The latter could work, here's how:
First, equate spam with child pornography and terrorist activity. Get Congress to make it illegal to buy products via spam. Start arresting and imprisoning those who do buy via spam. After a couple years, spam will stop.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Why not check this out? I think this seems like a good solution, myself. Sure, people will say:
1) It will (for all practical purposes) eliminate the possibility of geeks who want to run their own mail servers on a DSL line. So what? There's no good reason for them to be doing that, except for fun or for malicious purposes.
2) It will be a blow to anonymity. So what? There has GOT to be a line drawn between anonymity and the need to hold people accountable for abuse of mail servers. Period.
Until people start to understand that there are tradeoffs in these things, things will be going nowhere.