[ih] email at scale

[Miles Fidelman]

paul vixie wrote:
> On 5/15/2012 11:24 AM, Dave Crocker wrote:
>> On 5/14/2012 9:39 PM, paul vixie wrote:
>>> in that case i'd
>>> say, human to human messaging at scale remains an unsolved problem.
>> wow.  some one or two billion regular users; massive numbers of
>> independent administrations.  no central control. what remaining
>> requirements for basic messaging are on the list?
> my previously expressed list was:
>
>> ... doing human messaging at scale in a way that
>> secures the interests of the humans at the endpoints against unwanted
>> traffic, undeserved rejection, eavesdropping, corruption of format or
>> content, forgery or identity theft, or misdirection
> since most people fight each of those dragons at least once a week and
> some of us fight all of them every day, i call them 'basic' in the
> context of your question.

It occurs to me to wonder if these are unsolvable problems.  I mean, 
they've been with us
since the beginnings of language - be it verbal, chiseled on stone 
tablets, scribed on parchment,
printed on paper, or rendered as bits.  What's changed, and continues to 
change is the scale of
things - both the number of messages moving around the world, and the 
attack surface. Perhaps
we're doomed to a continual arms race between attacker and defender.  
(Not to say that we should
stop trying though.)

Miles Fidelman


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra