An overview of cryptographic protocols to prevent spam

[Amir Herzberg]

John Gilmore wrote:
>>I wrote an overview of Cryptographic Protocols to Prevent Spam, 
> 
> I stopped reading on page V -- it was too painfully obvious that Amir
> has bought into the whole censorship-list based "anti-spam" mentality.
John, I'm disappointed; I expected you to be more tolerant. You got mad 
at me at page V which is still just reviewing the basic e-mail 
architecture related to spam. In this part, I explained what open-relays 
are and why people may try to disconnect from them, and described 
port-25 blocking which is common practice and necessary to protect 
domains from being blacklisted.

I discuss blacklisting techniques and their problems much later, in 
section 5.5 (page XXV). I discuss there, albeit briefly, false 
positives, abuse, and collateral damage. I agree about the importance of 
clarifying these concerns, and will try to improve this.

Frankly, however, I think you were a bit trigger-happy to conclude that 
I `bought-into` the censorship, black list approach. May I recommend 
that you ask first, shoot later? We had some discussions on this and 
while we may have differences, I thought you know I care a lot about 
freedom of speech.

And btw, yes, as users of some (legitimate!) mail services, both me and 
several family memebers (e.g. children) were blocked by domain 
blacklists... When this happened to my 7 year old child, I had to 
forward his answers to a magazine for him. I once almost lost a 
consulting engagement to blocked email. And Ross Anderson once had to 
resort to asking Adi to call me on the phone to deliver a message, since 
a crazy mail filter here (Bar Ilan Univ.) blocked his messages for 
weeks... And more incidents. So believe me I'm well aware of this problem.
-- 
Best regards,

Amir Herzberg

Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Bar Ilan University
http://AmirHerzberg.com
Try TrustBar - improved browser security UI: 
http://AmirHerzberg.com/TrustBar
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