Re: SPF (was: Re: PERSONAL xxxx - KTA)

At 11:45 AM 7/3/2007 +1000, Craig Sanders wrote:
>> Well they did force us to get new TV sets. :D And France has managed to ram
>> the metric system down the whole world's throats. :(
>ps: metric makes sense, anyway, and isn't too difficult for anywhere
>except the US. a moderately reasonable education and a grasp of basic
>maths (and the ability to count to 10 - fingers can be useful for that,
>and by an amazing co-incidence, most of us have 10 of them) is all that
>was needed.

I get that SPF is for "authenticating a sender" so to speak. And interestingly my analogy of large entities forcing new things down people's throats highlights both sides of the new mail system debate. Somehow I knew u would respond to the metric thing but that too illuminates the issue.

The examples I gave are examples of things that sound good but are in fact not all they're cracked up to be. Just like SPF. Promoters of all three tout how their new fangled things will cure all ur ills. Theoretically HDTV is better than normal TV. However it could have been made much better with a little more work. So in the end we trade one meh system for another meh system. The metric system was invented as a form of propaganda after the French Revolution. It's claim of being "naturally based" and not arbitrary and being easy to do certain math problems with was it's selling point. However it's just as arbitrary as every other measurement system ever invented. It's claim of math friendliness sounds attractive but who really benefits from this feature? It turns out only scientistish people benefit. There is no benefit in being able to convert cm into km. Who cares? That's not how people's minds work. The human mind naturally works on visual groups of 2 and 3 (and their reciprocals). BOT SPF as well makes nice claims about letting u know if some mail is a forgery. But so what? Unless everybody agrees on what a forgery is and agrees on what to do in such case, the system is worthless.

Now the punchline. All three of these examples represent the caveats of creating a new mail system. It has to be truly all it's cracked up to be. It can't be self serving, or ego stroking to an elite few. It has to serve *the masses*. It has to be universal. And finally (and where my original analogy comes in) it has to be endorsed and propagated by sufficiently large entities that it will take hold quickly and completely. As someone mentioned it can be bolted onto existing SMTP systems. e.g. u create a new protocol level, EHLO2 or something, and then after a year or so u disable HELO and EHLO. Think of it as combining OSPF and SMTP. SMTP knows nothing about anything except whoever tries to talk to it and who it tries to talk to. OSPF "knows" about the entire network. That kind of network awareness is what we need to create a spam free mail system. If anyone does spam on that kind of a system blow darts can be sent right back through the chain to punish whoever did it.

--
REMEMBER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER         ---=< WTC 911 >=--
"...ne cede malis"

00000100


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-isp-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org