[PLUG] Spam, Etc.

[Paul Heinlein]

On Tue, 15 Jan 1980, Jason Van Cleve wrote:

> My paltry little idea is this:  what if everyone went down to their
> local post office or DMV or something and registered a public
> encryption key, and a database was formed of those keys by which
> non-registered keys could be filtered?  Email clients could then opt
> to receive only emails signed by registered keys, so they couldn't
> be spammed without implicating someone.

It just smells like bureaucracy.

And who's going to pay for it? There's lotsa $$ in that sort of
system: bandwidth, establishing trust, cpu cycles, and (gotta love job
security) admins of all kinds.

And I can't wait 'til the day someone swipes my e-mail cert and I have
to prove (to whom?) that I'm me and the other freak is the imposter.

And who's going to hire/pay/license the person on the phone I'm going
to have to call when I lose my cert, since I certainly won't be able
to send an e-mail to clear things up?

And what happens when someone launches a successful DDOS attack
against the identity servers?

And ...

And ...

Centralizing the Internet just rubs me wrong. Or maybe I'm just grumpy 
today...

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at attbi.com>