On 12 Jan 2005 at 0:21, Owain Sutton wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > > What I consider to be remarkably rude is the attitude that you *do* > > have that right, and that's the only interpretation I can give to > > the indignation over challenge/response systems. > > Implicit in your suggestion that widespread adoption of > challenge/response would be a good thing is the attitude that we > should automatically demand everyone who contacts us to go out of > their way to identify themselves. . . .
But spam exists precisely because of the *lack* of such a requirement. The only alternative to a challenge/response system is, in fact, some kind of non-crackable identity verification. That would require a complete re-engineering of the underlying protocols by which email currently works, as well as the replacement of all email clients. And you'd be depending on some kind of 3rd-party mechanism for identity verification. Who do you trust to do that? > . . . Everyone has the right to contact > me via a public system - and I have the right to ignore them. Challenge/reponse is a way of accomplishing two things: 1. allowing you to get someone's attention 2. allowing the recipient to ignore those who aren't interested in identifying themselves. > Automatically answering the phone with 'who shall I say is calling?' > can also easily be construed as rude. But it's *not* rude just because you choose to respond to it emotionally as though it is rude. Is blocking non-identified calls with CallerID rude? I don't think so. > (And while you're one of the unfortunates receiving vast amounts of > spam, wouldn't that burden simply be shifted to those who legitimately > send out many emails to new contacts? The time that you spend > scanning through your span folder would be insignificant compared to > the time needed to respond to every challenge.) No, you're simply WRONG. You respond to the challenge ONE TIME, the first time you email the individual. And, unless the recipient removes you from his whitelist, YOU'LL NEVER NEED TO AUTHENTICATE WITH THAT PERSON AGAIN. We're talking about a very small portion of actual email correspondence, unless you're someone who sends out large quantities of email messages to strangers (in which you case you may actually be a spammer). You're arguing over a *very* small burden that insures that your message gets read, as opposed to a system in which your unsolicited message is likely to be completely lost among the spam -- challenge/response benefits *you* as much as it benefits the individual using it to avoid spam. I'm done here, more or less. It seems to me to be impossible to have a reasonable discussion on this issue with the Luddites on this list. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
