[ih] The UCLA 360/91 on the ARPAnet/Internet

[paul vixie]

On 5/14/2012 4:13 AM, Jack Haverty wrote:
> ... very sad that, after four decades, we still
> don't have reliable, secure, and private email in common use.  I
> rarely see any email which is even signed to verify its source, except
> in some hardcore techie neighborhoods like linux developers mailing
> lists.

the people who are willing to put that much effort into their e-mail
communications are few and far between. we can build for utility at
scale, or privacy and authenticity at scale, but not both. in this
heterogeneous distributed system the quality of your used experience
will depend on other people's tools and other people's skill levels.

so, sad, but inevitable. "show me a system that even a fool can use" and
so on.

On 5/14/2012 6:15 AM, Tony Li wrote:
> I suspect that Jack was instead suggesting that we really need a secure identity mechanism.  If we had that, then mail servers would be able to truly identify senders and small details like multiple accounts used by one person would be a trivial case.

i don't see how we'd ever do that. have only one such mechanism, that
is. or several that interoperate in ways that don't combine into a
hairball similar to the one we have now. we already have dozens of
things that work this way for their own walled gardens, each of which
exists because of profitability for somebody. doing it universally,
interoperably, at internet scale, would by definition lack that incentive.

> We are not done with the work that we need to do.

yea, verily.

paul

-- 
"I suspect I'm not known as a font of optimism." (VJS, 2012)