Who's afraid of Mallory Wolf?

bear bear at sonic.net
Tue Mar 25 15:09:24 EST 2003



On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Ian Grigg wrote:

>On Tuesday 25 March 2003 12:07, bear wrote:

>But, luckily, there is a way to turn the above
>subjective morass of harm into an objective
>hard number:  civil suit.  Presumably, (you
>mentioned America, right?) this injured party
>filed a civil suit against the person and sought
>damages.

You honestly haven't heard of Fred Phelps?
He has thirteen children and nine of them are
lawyers.  Estimated costs to sue the guy are in
the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Estimated
costs for him to defend are near zero.  Plus the
instant you file that civil suit you'll have his
zombies loudly picketing your home (that's right,
your private residence) 24/7 until you stop.


>> And we're going
>> to continue to have this problem for as long as we continue to
>> use unencrypted SMTP for mail transport.
>
>I would agree.  Which is why we are having
>this discussion - how can we get this poor
>victim's traffic onto some form of crypto so
>she doesn't get her life ripped apart by some
>dirtbag?

ISP's don't want to support encrypted links
because it raises their CPU costs.  And mail
clients generally aren't intelligently designed
to handle encrypted email which the mail servers
could just "pass through without decrypting and
encrypting".

I think a new protocol is needed.  The fact
that SMTP is unencrypted by default makes it
impossible for an encrypted email form to be
built on top of it.

			Bear



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