On 5/19/02 11:16 PM, "kim brooks wei" <kimi@kimbwei.com> wrote:
>> As an extreme example -- if a person wants a "proof of license" to send
>> child pornography, it's going to be rejected by any authority. But on a
>> fundamental basis, if you want to avoid censorship or bureaucratic biases of
>> any sort, if the recipient of that e-mail WANTS the kiddie porn
>
> Well, at least in the US, it's illegal to handle kid p at all.
> Sometimes it's great to be an American.
That's exactly why I used it to prove this point. Because the decision to
grant a "license to send" is cloistered from its content. Or it has to be,
or it simply becomes a bureaucratically driven censorship bureau, not a
spam-protection bureau.
The point is, if user "A" has something, and user "B" wants it, permission
has to be granted for A to send it to be. Whether it's legal to do so is
irrelevant to the mechanics of this "proof of license" thing. The nanosecond
you allow this system to make decisions based on content that are not in
sync with the receiver's preferences, it's a censorship system and it will
fail. And the temptation to DO this will, frankly, likely be too great to
resist if anyone ever tries it.
> In any event, kid p is also an issue best handled by the police. Your
> example, Chuq, also speaks to mail that is solicited.
Exactly. So it should go through, as reprehensible as we might think it is.
Because otherwise, you're also allowing others to decide what is acceptable
to send to you, and they might decide to disallow transfers of MP3s or
criticisms of dick cheney. Once you step on the slippery slope, it's pretty
damn impossible to stop the slide.
> What is an issue we can better address, is how to protect our inboxes
> from a growing amount of UNSOLICITED garbage mail, which isn't a
> problem only for the recipients, but for the information flow around
> the world and is a BIG HEADACHE for ISP and webhosting managers.
Hundreds of really intelligent, motivated people have been trying to find
the answer to that for years. As Nick noted, there are places where you can
get into that discussion and maybe help move it along. I don't think,
however, it serves a useful purpose for that discusion to start from scratch
again...
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui@plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/
He doesn't have ulcers, but he's a carrier.
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