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cory doctorow
and people running high-volume mailing lists alike.
You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize func-
tions like identity verification, limit the number of authorized
mail agents and refuse service to unauthorized agents, even set
up tollbooths where small sums of money are collected for every
email, ensuring that sending ten million messages was too expen-
sive to contemplate without a damned high expectation of return
on investment. If you did all these things, you’d solve spam.
By breaking email.
Small server processes that mail a logfile to five sysadmins
every hour just in case would be prohibitively expensive. Con-
vincing the soviet that your bulk-mailer was only useful to legit
mailing lists and not spammers could take months, and there’s
no guarantee that it would get their stamp of approval at all. With
verified identity, the
NY Times
couldn’t impersonate you when
it forwarded stories on your behalf — and Chinese dissidents
couldn’t send out their samizdata via disposable gmail accounts.
An email system that can be controlled is an email system
without complexity. Complex ecosystems are influenced, not
controlled.
The Hollywood studios are conniving to create a global net-
work of regulatory mandates over entertainment devices. Here
they call it the Broadcast Flag; in Europe, Asia, Australia, and
Latin America it’s called DVB Copy Protection Content Manage-
ment. These systems purport to solve the problem of indiscrimi-
nate redistribution of broadcast programming via the Internet,
but their answer to the problem, such as it is, is to require that
everyone who wants to build a device that touches video has to
first get permission.
If you want to make a TV, a screen, a video-card, a high-speed
bus, an analog-to-digital converter, a tuner card, a DVD burner
— any tool that you hope to be lawful for use in connection with
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