Dean Anderson wrote:
I suspect that much spam can't be stopped, without a constitutional amendment.
Wow! What a heavy-handed way to fix a problem which has a purely technological solution. Cryptography can be used to produce non-transferrable keys allowing some party to send message to a particular recipient. Messages can include "right to respond" keys. The problem with authenticated messaging is how to send a message to a person who was not in any kind of contact with you before. Fortunately, this is not much of a problem, with adequate key distribution scheme, because there's always some kind of community both parties belong to before they exchange messages (obviously, since the sending party got to obtain address from somewhere). Such community message board can provide its members with keys allowing them to communicate to each other directly. Now, communities will have to perform some kind of authentication of its members to exclude abuse. Which means that USENET cannot be covered by this scheme; but isn't it already nearly dead? I was always saying that Internet is quite a step forward in promoting a right to speak. Unfortunately as-is it is very bad at promoting the right not to listen. --vadim