Re: False positives (was Re: [Asrg] Re: RMX Records)

Chris Lewis wrote:
> Who said anything about "you" (the recipient)?
> 
> Let's say that you purchase something on the web, the robot generates
> the invoice, and the robot sees a challenge (or a reject).

first off, the robot would generate a stamp when it sent the invoice.  That 
would prevent it from getting a challenge.

> What would intelligent engineering of a system that deals with money
> suggest?  What would due diligence suggest in the face of the user
> typing their email address wrong? Or the recipient mail server being
> offline for a bit too long?

good question.  I would talk to some of my financial cryptography contacts on 
this topic.  My gut senses that if you are using a stamp that is equivalent to 
cash, the money is lost.  Any future communication would require new stamps. 
This is why I like CPU cycles stamps.

As for the other items, you would not get a postage do or challenge message. 
You would get the classic "mail failed" message.  Now it would be nice if we 
could make these messages more understandable by robots so they can handle 
errors better but that is a whole different conversation.

> 
>  > it's a fundamental axiom of animal training that rewarding good behavior
>  > extremely quickly produces much more rapid change than punishing.  See:
>  > "don't shoot the dog" by Karen Pryor.  If we can give a legitimate
>  > outlet for e-mail advertising, a lot of the incentive to spam will be
>  > reduced.  Those that remain can be punished through negative
>  > reinforcement techniques like connection grabbing and postage stamps.
> 
> This only works when having the dog behave good is the desirable
> outcome. I would suggest that, with Stubberfield [*] for example, the
> only desirable outcome is an "ex-dog" in Monty Python terminology ;-).
> 
> The only way to make Ralsky "behave" is to _promise_ to deliver what he
> sends.  Do we really want that?  I don't think so.

those are wonderful examples.  However, they aren't the people we're trying to 
reach.  They are the people we're trying to stop.  I do get lots of "legitimate 
advertising" that I am interested in sometimes.  I just want to manage it 
better.  Those of the people we want to reach and I believe those of the people 
we can influence.  If we raise the various high enough, a bunch of the spammers 
will go away.  The truly hard-core ones will remain and can be targeted because 
the field will be smaller and less noisy.

It's my opinion, it's worth what you pay for it.  ;-)

---eric

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