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The Time Has Come to Ditch Email?
Krishna Dagli writes to mention an article at The Register claiming that it's time we stop using email to communicate. From the article: "The problem is, email is now integral to the lives of perhaps a billion people, businesses, and critical applications around the world. It's a victim of its own success. It's a giant ship on a dangerous collision course. All sorts of brilliant, talented people today put far more work into fixing SMTP in various ways (with anti-virus, anti-phishing technologies, anti-spam, anti-spoofing cumbersome encryption technologies, and much more) than could have ever been foreseen in 1981. But it's all for naught."
Short version of story:
E-mail shouldn't really go away, we need to recreate it from scratch with builtin security, authentication, encryption, etc, and those mechanisms need to be as transparent as today's e-mail.
EOF
E-mail will probably go that way, but I don't see it being recreated from scratch. Postfix evolved out of perceived difficulties with sendmail (still one of my favorite packages... obtuse, obtuse, obtuse, but lots of fun.) while in-flight.
The fixes for e-mail likely will also occur in-flight... there's too much momentum, and too many transactions dependent on e-mail for it to stop, then go.
The single most important step for me would be transparent authentication, via certs, whatever. As phishing becomes more insidious and the stakes go up, someday someone (or a bunch of someones) will be phished severely, escalating the urgency of authentication. It may start out clunky (ever tried to get friends and family to do PGP handshakes?), but as with other technology I think it can be done with transparency.
E-mail stays... (btw, if you want to send e-mail feedback to the author, this is the link.
It's time to ditch reality. It's fundamentally broken and inherently insecure. We should have predicted that 13 billion years ago.
Sorry, but to be taken seriously, you'd at least have to have a basic framework already thought out. Just claiming that it's broken and maybe one of these TLA's that you've heard of might be used to fix it
Go back, think about it and then write a real article.
I realize basic language skills are a difficult thing for a slashdot editor to grasp, but come on! Rather than taking the title of the Register article and slapping a question mark on it, it makes a whole lot more sense to actually rearrange the words into the form of a question: "Has the Time Come to Ditch Email?" or even "Is it Time to Ditch Email?"
This guy's the limit!
From TFA: "Use existing, proven technologies and a few new and novel ideas - starting with the latest encoding mechanisms, a reliable hashing algorithm, fast compression, strong encryption and signatures. "
So in 25 years time today's technology will stop 90% of communication being spam? Spam exists in the spite of the best efforts to stamp it out. Whatever we do it'll be the same. Writing an article full of buzzwords and hypothesis doesn't really help a lot.
Put another way, if you run your own mailserver and still get spam and viruses, it's because you haven't chosen to address the problem. If you use someone else's mailserver and still get spam and viruses, it's because they haven't chosen to address the problem. Nothing stands between you and a clean inbox but motivation, whether your own or your ISP's.
And no, broken hacks like DJB's "Internet Mail 2000" will never get real-world acceptance as they make it as difficult for legitimate bulk senders to broadcast as for spammers. SMTP is here to stay as the standard method for (somewhat) reliably routing messages between people on unaffiliated networks. Replacing it with a similar system with new pitfalls isn't the answer we're looking for.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
"ever tried to get friends and family to do PGP handshakes?"
Yes, I've tried... and I've been and am quite successfull with it. Using GPG to send/receive encrypted mail and check signatures with a good plugin isn't rocket science.
Agreed, setting up keys and such is hard, but with friends and familiy we geeks can help. We do that with E-Mail, Games, Wordprocessors, why not with PGP?
My experiences with PGP with friends and family: Do You Use PGP? - Encryption is not just for techies any more.
As much as I hate to admit it, copyright treaties have been extremely successful in perpetuating the DMCA.
why not use it for something beneficial for a change, and introduce treaties to the UN for the harsh enforcement of anti-spam measures.
Once the international safe havens are removed or severely curtailed, there will be less of it, and everyone but the ad nazis and the "big data" industry which has arisen to serve them will be better off.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
And of course, the NEW system won't be vulnerable to ANYTHING - right?
No, wait, let's think that through. Let's take video games as the paradigm. Every year companies spend upwards of 20 million per video game. Every year, they come out with the newest, latest, greatest in copy protection. This copy protection is only limited by their imaginations (and the hardware). And yet days after release, and sometimes prior to release, their code is hacked, cracked, and distributed.
This author somehow thinks that going back and redoing everything will fix it. The author is naive.
Call my analogy a bad one if you will, but the SECOND you put ANY type of system into the hands of the criminals / spammers, they will find ways to exploit it. This is proven time and again.
How exactly does this new email system stop phishing? Oh, right, it can't. Have a link, go to a malicious website, etc. How exactly does this new email system stop users from clicking executables thinking that they are going to see nudie pictures of Katie Holmes? They don't. How does this new email stop virii? It won't.
Encrypt your email if you want security. Password protect your account. Use filtering to dump spam before you read it.
OH, and I forgot to mention - I'll be sending you a snail mail letter that looks completely official. It's about a man I met in Nigeria, who has some money he'd like to give you.
Agreed, setting up keys and such is hard, but with friends and familiy we geeks can help. We do that with E-Mail, Games, Wordprocessors, why not with PGP?
Because we're looking for a long term, widespread, permanent solution. There aren't enough of us geeks to hold the hand of every user in the world.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
If I'm to apply the same logic to regular mail, well, regular mail is doomed too; it's full of phishing, spam, and spoofing. I guess I'm not sending anything by mail from now on!! Duh!
If you get a letter from a car dealer stating that you won $3000 in credit if you buy one of his cars, do you automatically go and buy one? NO. Same thing goes for email, you don't open all emails and follow all links blindly.
The problem is with educating people how to use email and the Internet as a whole. When enough people stop being click-happy... spamers will lose interest as no one will be paying for such a service, and phishers/spoofers won't find enough people to fall for their tricks.
Simply, educate people about this powerful tool before you through them in! this is not only for email, it goes for anything to do with the internet and any form of communication as a whole.
Just my $0.02.
I find that the people who gripe loudest about the problems with e-mail are the ones who have poor or no spam filtering.
I guess I'm lucky that I have an ISP who takes spam blocking seriously, using a combination of Brightmail and a user configuarable Spam-Assassin install that seems to block 98% of spam and which has virtually no false positives. On the weeks when I monitor it, they may mis-label one in several tens of thousands of messages, usually from mailing list or other source that just barely triggers the filter.
Most people assume that the lousy, error prone spam blocking offered by many ISPs is the best than can be acomplished. That's simply not true.
Unlike the article author, I still find e-mail a reliable and essential tool, and can't see a need to make significant changes at this time.
Three Squirrels
A peak of ~75 messages a minute?
Me thinks you need several zeros on the end of that to get to a medium to large installation....
What somebody needs to do is curb the fucking spammers!
And I don't mean "curb" as in curtail their activity, I mean "curb" as in stick their fucking heads on a curb and stomp on them!
You're using her as bait, Master!
As a systems administrator working on a few large scale mail servers the 'investment' required to cut spam and virus emails is very low if the system has been designed properly. I use open source tools on a system with in excess of 150,000 active users and it costs nothing in licenses and its on four servers and a central NetAPP filer for the mailstore. Realistically if we distribute the total cost over the user count and support issues are very low. its simple design the system. Our email service uses the following
-Qmail, vpopmail, simscan, spamassassin and clamav. On a userbase with the amount of users we have its very easy to distribute, its easy to scale and the performance is great.
Each of the items I listed are too large and complex, and are beyond repair, but in the same respect could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable time frame.
Two questions:
1) By suggesting email "could NEVER be recreated in a reasonable timeframe" you are inferring that a reinvented email system must be complex. Why would that be? We don't have to re-invent security, authentication, encryption from scratch for use especially for email--we already have the technology and use it extensively (HTTP(S), LDAP, Kerberos, SSH, etc). What is missing in email is an elegant integration of these technologies.
2) Even if architecting a next-generation email system would take a long time, why would that be a problem? What would be a "reasonable" timeframe? Personally I don't think that a W3C-like standards body would take more than 5 years to craft a usable standard, and by the time it hit 1.0 there would already be a lot of early implementations. Sure it would take a long time to adopt, but there could be email gateways like there was between the internet and old-school nets like Fidonet, and those gateways can handle the spam and other crap before they hit any "new and improved" email servers.
When something gets as broken as email people are more motivated to fix it. There are already some interesting ideas out there that could catch on...
Your company advocates a
(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(X) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid company for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
grossout factor, for example, say you have an individual who needs some help setting up their next gen email, and this geek runs up to help, his mouth still dripping blood from the chickenhead he just bit off, the poor email using individual is going to just freak out and run away.
What makes Spam and Malware unmanagable is the sheer number of vulnerable and hacked systems.
When vulnerable boxes disappear, the bad guys would have little ammunition. My guess is that over
time, as computing matures and our OSes stabilize, security holes will be plugged faster than they
are created. When that happens, vulnerable boxen will become rare, and the bad guys will find it
harder and harder to send Spam and Malware with impunity.
And then the rainbows will soar and unicorns will return.
Dude, your web page is so bad, I uninstalled my browser.
[To moderators: before modding me down, please visit it first]