The Great Email "Calculation Debate" : openpolitics.com

The Great Email "Calculation Debate"

Some readers of my proposal for Spam Guarantees believe that my solution is too complex or costly. I concede that simpler approaches, such as authentication will be tried first, and will provide temporary relief, but ultimately a market-based solution will be necessary.

When such a market is created, it will appear gradually, and it will need to use real money, or it will be unable to police fraud.

It will not eliminate all spam, but offer a way for legitimate senders to avoid becoming spam filter false positives.

Friedrich Hayek, Nobel Prize in Economics

Here's an overview of my views on whether market-based solutions should use "Computer-Time" or "Real Money". The issue reminds me of Hayek and the "Calculation Debate".

Anti-Spam Currencies: Computational vs Monetary

Two of the biggest obstacles to implementing a market-based solution to spam are:

Expense: the cost of administering and billing for each email transaction; and
Fraud: the inevitable attempts to capture the newly created currency

Expense

The "computational" school of thought argues that a postage or guarantee system that uses real money will cost too much to administer.

Accounts will need to be created, tracked, and billed. With so many transactions, the overhead will be enormous.

A system that requires computers to solve a math problem will require no accounts, tracking or billing.

Fraud

Both approaches are vulnerable to fraud.

If the system uses real money, hackers will surely attempt to steal a sender's key and use it like a stolen credit card.

If the system treats computer-time as currency, hackers will surreptitiously commandeer computers to poach the postage.

Scope Modesty: Certified Mail for the Web

With my proposal for email guarantees, I don't pretend to the immediately eradicate all spam forever. Imagine instead a system that starts as a premium service, much like current-day certified and registered mail.

People and businesses who really value the email they send will set up accounts to guarantee their mail. This will ensure that their messages make it through the spam filters unscathed.

Not all transactions will need to be tracked for billing purposes, only those messages unwanted by their recipients.

Monetary Incentives

Because senders have to pay for "cashed" email, they will limit the unwanted messages they send, limiting the transaction load that their Credit Company needs to process. The Credit Companies can charge a fee to cover the cost of processing the "cashed" email.

To limit the amount of fraud, Credit Companies will track the amount of guarantees that have been collected. Accounts that reach their limit will be frozen.

Credit Companies may offer to absorb the cost of stolen keys, provided that account holders follow certain security practices. If not, the account holder would be liable, up to the limit of their account.

Computational Incentives

In the computational model, senders and computer owners take no responsibility for securing their systems.

A hacker could install a program on my computer that allows him to offload email computations to my computer.

If my credit card is not being charged for the postage he counterfeits, and the hacker is smart enough not to make my system unusable, I am unlikely to devote the resources necessary to:

avoid getting the program in the first place
removing it, once I have it

Holding someone liable for poor security creates an incentive to limit the exposure of currency and tighten up security.

Some people may decide that their security is so poor that they are unable to offer a guarantee.

Their messages may still make it through the spam filter, but they run a greater risk of being overlooked.

2005/02/19 # Permalink

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Brooks: In the Midst of Budget Decadence, a Leader Will Arise

There's going to be another Ross Perot, and this time he's going to be younger. There's going to be a millionaire rising out of the country somewhere and he (or she) is going to lead a movement of people who are worried about federal deficits, who are offended by the horrendous burden seniors are placing on the young and who are disgusted by a legislative process that sometimes suggests that the government has lost all capacity for self-control.

Over the past decades we have seen a gigantic transfer of wealth from struggling young families and the next generation to members of the AARP. In 1990, 29 percent of federal spending went to seniors; by 2015 roughly half of all government spending will go to those over 65. This prescription drug measure is just part of that great redistribution.

Scoble: No RSS? No downloads? No interaction? Fake content? You're fired!

Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired.

I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed.

Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks.

This site, which probably cost $100,000 (ahh, that's where our towel money went) has great graphic design. Lots of streaming video.

But it's fake. All of it is actors. No real people. No real point.

Aaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh.

Oh, but it gets even worse. "Can I download the videos?"

"No, the whole point of the site is to get people to visit and stick around."

So, let me get this straight. You don't have RSS feeds. That means I won't be able to build a relationship with this site. You have a fake site so even if I tell my readers to visit it they'll get there and feel dirty (and they can't interact or do anything there either). You won't let me download the videos to pass them around virally. Or remix them in fun ways.

Oh, and there's no permalinks so even if I wanted to link you directly to a piece of content there I couldn't.

Harold Bloom: Booknotes Interview

I think that academic tenure is an archaic and malicious institution, and I think it should be abolished everywhere. It was meant to protect freedom of thought and expression from university administrations or outward public and societal or even congressional pressures, but that isn't the way it has worked. It has worked so as to impose a kind of massive conformity in American colleges and universities and, indeed, by now, in secondary schools as well.

But the Internet, which I acknowledge is an economic and commercial necessity--the Internet--and many people disagree with me on this, I know--the Internet, I think, is a terrible danger to the life of the mind. It's a terrible danger to real reading because it's a kind of great, gray ocean in which everything merges with everything else. And extremely difficult--it is extremely difficult for a young person to establish standards of reading or to find again what could be called intellectual and aesthetic standards of judgment in relation to what is available on it. There is no guidance.

There is--if I may use a word now so much despised, there is no intellectual authority involved in it. It's--it doesn't seem, to me, a good mode of teaching, even as an instrument, even as a tool, because something about its very nature defeats, I think, what teaching ought to be.

The New York Times has lost all of its standards, so far as I can see, both intellectual and aesthetic. If I make more enemies among them, that will delight me. They cannot--they cannot be worse than they are already. There are a few people who can still read and think and write who can be found in The Times, but The New York Times Magazine is now indistinguishable from the SoHo News. It's preposterous. Indeed, it is edited by the former editor of the SoHo News, and he's been very successful in getting lots of advertisements, so doubtless he will be there forever.

from 1967 until the present, for one-third of the century, we have had the gradual triumph of the counterculture in the United States, and not just in the United States, in the entire English-speaking world and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in the rest of both the Western and, indeed, by now, the Eastern world. Questions of taste and judgment now seem to rely entirely upon information and not at all upon what I would call learning or wisdom. This can be deplored, but it is not going to change or pass.

I ask them whether they are maintaining themselves as circulation librarians, and they dishearten me by telling me all too often that they're only open three days a week. And all too often they tell me that they now concentrate entirely upon providing computer services. And it breaks what is left of my heart because I would have been nowhere in this life without the various branches of the New York Public Library when I was growing up.

though I hate to use the term because it can so easily be misconstrued in a religion-mad country like the United States, it ultimately has to be a spiritual difference. Either you believe that reading and teaching and thinking about the best that has been thought and written and said matters and does everyone a great deal of good, or you do not.

`Information is readily available to us. Where shall wisdom be found?' And the answer, `It is to be found where it was always to be found, in--in the greatest minds and the greatest writers. And they are usually the same--the same.' You know, it is to be found in Shakespeare and Milton. It is to be found in William Blake. It is to be found in Dante. It is to be found in Cervantes. I wouldn't mind so-called multiculturalism at all, if, say, for Hispanic purposes, they were to replace Shakespeare even by Cervantes. I would say, `Fine. I have no quarrel with this. Cervantes is an almost equal eminence.

Memorizing went out of fashion in American education because it had been brutalized, it had been debased into just reputation by rote. But I think it is not only a legitimate but a crucial mode of teaching and always has been in all the great religious traditions and the great secular traditions of humanistic learning also. I would grieve it a little further. You cannot think, you cannot be cognitively acute without memory. Remembering is absolutely essential to thinking. And if you don't read and read deeply and if you don't possess whether you memorize it or not, you don't powerfully and deeply possess very strong works of literature and thought indeed, then you will impoverish your thinking.

one of the two major presidential candidates is perhaps the least distinguished graduate of the entire history of Yale University, and I've taught there for 46 years, though I never taught this gentleman. But he has boasted to the press, at least until his people told him to talk differently about it, but he began by boasting to the press that he had never read a book through since he left Yale. And indeed, he laughed, he hadn't read many through there.

Message Integrity

the assumption is that the sender or the receiver does not consent to the changes made to the message, and thus that there is a third party involved in making the change. If both sides agree to a change, such as in the example of a newspaper digesting a press release instead of re-printing it directly, or informed consent to one of these technologies by both sender and receiver, then there is no issue.