[ih] Unhappy with the free service (was Re: The UCLA 360/91 on the ARPAnet/Internet)

[Jack Haverty]

Hi John - yes, I agree.  Those are key system components that "we"
never provided.   Good summary.

I was curious though about *why* such important aspects seem to have
been neglected, when so many other hard problems have been handled
pretty well over the decades.  Was it too hard a problem?  Was there
no one who "picked up the ball"?   Did we just forget and it fell into
that long list of have-to-do-this-someday items that always graced the
corner of the whiteboard at Internet meetings?  Maybe it was a
side-effect of the culture of distrust of authority and "the
establishment" from the era?    Did the forces seeking anonymity
prevail over those seeking privacy and security?  Did it just become
uninteresting to everyone when more fun or profitable opportunities
were competing for attention?   Did it get so encumbered by the
installed base growing so quickly that the technology got effectively
frozen before it was complete - in the same glacier that IPV6 is just
now escaping?  Did it get sandbagged by X.400 et al, which then failed
to appear on stage?   Did government(s) fail to set in place some
legal or regulatory machinery - adapting the rules and processes of
the last several centuries of physical mail for use in the network
environment?  Did whoever should have done something even know they
should do it?  All of the above?

Over the last 40 years, it seems to me that there must have been a
bunch of things like the above that happened, and prevented the
introduction of the mechanisms you listed.  Historians rarely pay
attention to what didn't happen.   But engineers and scientists often
wonder why things didn't turn out as expected and desired.   We
techies should all know that to be stable, systems require negative
feedback - i.e., the mechanisms you listed.   Hoiw'd we miss that...?

I guess I'm one of those kinds of historians.

/Jack


On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 1:02 PM, John Curran <jcurran at istaff.org> wrote:
> On May 14, 2012, at 2:03 PM, Jack Haverty wrote:
>> With all the technology and expertise that's been working on
>> The Internet over the last 3+ decades, why haven't we made more
>> progress in email?
>>
>> What happened, or failed to happen, to cause the world of spam,
>> phishing, malware, et al that we suffer today?  That might be an
>> enlightening history topic, if anybody's interested.
>
> We provided no systematically effective recourse against bad actors
> within the Internet system, and insufficient association between
> Internet entities and "real world" entities (i.e. people, companies)
> to allow for any meaningful legal recourse.
>
> Ut sementem feceris ita metes,
> /John
>