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all comPlex ecosystems have Parasites
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All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
(Originally given as a paper at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference,
San Diego, California, March 16, 2005.)
AOL hates spam. AOL could eliminate nearly 100 percent of its
subscribers’ spam with one easy change: it could simply shut
off its Internet gateway. Then, as of yore, the only email an
AOL subscriber could receive would come from another AOL
subscriber. If an AOL subscriber sent a spam to another AOL
subscriber and AOL found out about it, they could terminate the
spammer’s account. Spam costs AOL millions, and represents a
substantial disincentive for AOL customers to remain with the
service, and yet AOL chooses to permit virtually anyone who can
connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world, to send email to
its customers, with any software at all.
Email is a sloppy, complicated ecosystem. It has organisms of
sufficient diversity and sheer number as to beggar the imagina-
tion: thousands of SMTP agents, millions of mail-servers, hun-
dreds of millions of users. That richness and diversity lets all kinds
of innovative stuff happen: if you go to nytimes.com and “send a
story to a friend,” the
NYT
can convincingly spoof your return
address on the email it sends to your friend, so that it appears
that the email originated on your computer. Also: a spammer can
harvest your email and use it as a fake return address on the spam
he sends to your friend. Sysadmins have server processes that
send them mail to secret pager-addresses when something goes
wrong, and GPLed mailing-list software gets used by spammers
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