Re: the introduction problem, was Email and reputation (was Re: Service outages planned for April 25)

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

> Il 29/04/2022 00:13 John Levine <[e-mail]> ha scritto:
>  
> According to Vittorio Bertola  <[e-mail]>:
> >I see this as one of the many manifestations of possibly the biggest shortcoming in the original design of the Internet's architecture, i.e. not having an
> >"identity layer" taking care of user authentication and information sharing in a uniform way below all application protocols
> 
> While that might be useful for other reasons, it wouldn't solve the
> spam problem. It just replaces the spam problem with the introduction
> problem, with a side helping of the identity theft problem. There is
> no reason to believe those are easier than the spam problem.

You could still accept email from strangers, if you wanted, and it would be no worse than today. What a standard identification system would do is that it would allow you to attribute and share reputation correctly, so it would be much easier to avoid false positives (because you can be sure that email that claims to come from your friend actually comes from your friend) and it would be easier to prevent your spam filters from attributing bad reputation to the wrong entities, making them more reliable.

Then, of course, the problem becomes whether and how it is possible to actually have a secure and global identification system.

> PS: Please don't say e-postage.

I don't think I ever said so :)

-- 
Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
[e-mail] 
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy