On Mon, 26 May 1997, Troy Morrison wrote:
> On Mon, 26 May 1997, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
>
> | president@whitehouse.gov
> |
> | May 26, 1997
> |
> | Dear Mr. President,
> | [ ... snip! ... ]
> | Please find someone to look into this developing mess and
> | bring it under control.
>
> Just what we need: government regulation of the Internet. Does the
> blue-ribbon campaign ring a bell?
You have a point, of course, Troy, but at the rate this is going the net
will be useless _anyway_. USENET has been destroyed. It's getting to the
point where some people are just turning off their email accounts for
people who don't supply some kind of "password" in the subject line, or
PGP sign their messages, or meet some other criteria.
In fact, it's getting to the point where some people have suggested
creating some kind of privacy-enhanced, spammily-challenged "ClueNet".
People in the ClueNet, when it's sufficiently developed, drop all mail
from people not on the ClueNet. If a domain proves to be a major problem,
they are simply dropped and banned from the network. Any traffic they
produce is bounced on sight. Of course, this is nailed by goobermint
restrictions on cryptography; an American can't develop jack, and has to
yield the development job to some non-American citizens.
My signature should make it reasonably clear where I stand on the
political spectrum, but this has turned into a major mess. USENET is the
worst right now. USENET is completely and utterly useless at this point
except for some remaining clue havens. Even those are in jeopardy, if not
from spam then from the fact that many of the clueful people have fled in
disgust. I think that provides a very grim foretelling of where the rest
of the network is rapidly careening.
I wanted to provide a rebuttal to Troy's statement, but can we now please
take the discussions on spam and such off the mailing list? Maybe we can
create linux-kernel-spam or linux-kernel-spew for it, but spamming the
list with discussions about spam is *almost* as counter productive as the
spam itself. The only real difference is that it is nowhere *near* as
offensive.
-- Good government. Good government. Sit. Stay.