Clearly I misinterpreted your comments; sorry for reading other parts of the thread into your intent. The bottom line is the lack of a -scalable- trust infrastructure. You are arguing here that the technically inclined could select from a list of partial trust options and achieve 'close enough'. While that is true, Joe-sixpack wouldn't bother even if he could figure out how. Whatever trust infrastructure that comes into existence for the mass market has to appear to be seamless, even if it is technically constructed from multiple parts. Steve Bellovin suggested earlier that identity based approaches wouldn't work. While I agree having the identity won't solve the problems by itself, it does provide a key that the rest of the legal system can start to work with. False identities are common in the real world, so their existence in the electronic world is not really any different. I guess I am looking at this from the opposite side the two of you appear to be, rather than requiring authorization to send, irrefutable identity should be used to deny receipt after proven abuse. Tony
-----Original Message----- From: Alex Bligh [mailto:alex@alex.org.uk] Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 4:48 PM To: Tony Hain; 'Steven M. Bellovin' Cc: nanog@merit.edu; Alex Bligh Subject: RE: Clueless service restrictions (was RE: Anti-spam System Idea)
--On 17 February 2004 16:19 -0800 Tony Hain <alh-ietf@tndh.net> wrote:
Where they specifically form a club and agree to preclude the basement multi-homed site from participating through prefix length filters. This is exactly like the thread comments about preventing consumers from running independent servers by forced filtering and routing through the ISP server. This is not scaled trust; it is a plain and simple power grab. Central censorship is what you are promoting, but you are trying to pass it off as spam control through a provider based transitive trust structure. Either you are clueless about where you are headed, or you think the consumers won't care when you take their rights away. Either way this path is not good news for the future Internet.
Now there was me thinking that I was in general agreeing with you. I am not promoting any sort of censorship, central or otherwise. I believe you have a perfect right to open a port 25 connection to any server, and I have a perfect right to accept or deny it. And of course vice-versa. What I am saying is that I would like, in determining whether to accept or reject your connection, to know who you are and that you act responsibly, or failing that, to know someone who is prepared to vouch for you; failing that, may be I'll accept your email anyway, may be I won't. I do not care what upstream either you or I have. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not talking about forcing people to send mail through their upstreams, or even suggesting that the graph of any web of trust should follow the BGP topology. Indeed the entire point I made about separating the web of trust's topology from IP addresses etc. was rather to enable end users to CHOOSE how they accept/reject mail in a manner that might have nothing to do with network topology. Personally I would be far more happy accepting mail from someone who'd been vouched for by (say) someone on this list I knew, than vouched for by their quite possibly clueless DSL provider. Of course some people will want to use their "ISP", many won't. Just like Joe User can use their upstream's DNS service, but doesn't necessarily need to.
Maybe PGP would have been a better analogy as far as the scale bit goes. I think you are assigning motives to the BGP basement-multihoming problems where in general the main motive is not getting return on cost of hardware; however, I don't think the same scale constraints need apply as it is unnecessary to hold a complete table in-core at once.
Alex