Live from Austin!

"…no online database will replace your daily newspaper…no computer network will change the way government works. … Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure."

"We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet–which there isn’t–the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople."

–Clifford Stoll, 1995

The Guardian:

In recent years networking sites like MySpace and Facebook have seen remarkable growth and become some of the most heavily trafficked destinations on the internet. But Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of California and internet sociologist, says populations of different networks are now divided on a rough class basis.

Her evidence, collected through a series of interviews with US teenagers using MySpace and Facebook over the past nine months, shows there is a clear gap between the populations of each site.

“MySpace was the cool thing for high school teens and Facebook was the cool thing for college students,” she wrote in a paper available online. “The picture is now being blurred … it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.”Typical Facebook users, she said, “tend to come from families who emphasise education and going to college. They are primarily white, but not exclusively”. MySpace, on the other hand, “is still home for Latino and Hispanic teens, immigrant teens” as well as “other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm”.
[...]
“A month ago, the military banned MySpace but not Facebook. This was a very interesting move because there’s a division, even in the military. Soldiers are on MySpace; officers are on Facebook.”

According to Ms Boyd, Facebook is not used by young soldiers, who are generally less well-educated and from poorer backgrounds, and there is an element of social conflict in the ban.

So, MySpace is Facebook for the uneducated?

AP reports:

Saying surfing the web is equivalent to reading a newspaper or talking on the phone, an administrative law judge has suggested that only a reprimand is appropriate as punishment for a city worker accused of failing to heed warnings to stay off the Internet.

In his decision, Spooner wrote: “It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.”

He added: “For this reason, city agencies permit workers to use a telephone for personal calls, so long as this does not interfere with their overall work performance. Many agencies apply the same standard to the use of the Internet for personal purposes.”

This is something I’ve been saying for a while in the periodic arguments over whether businesses should try and lock down the Internet to only “approved” sites. Do the same businesses search employees at the door to make sure they don’t bring in newspapers, magazines or mobile phones? Generally not. (If you work for the NSA, your mileage may vary.)

Slacking is a time-honored tradition. If you ban the Internet, people will spend their time talking about last night’s TV, making paper planes, or whatever.

Now, get back to work.

In part 1, I enumerated the approaches to spam eradication I was aware of, and explained my conclusion that the only approach which will work is an economic approach. In part 2 I discussed various options for tackling spam economically, ending with the one I think would actually be acceptable and useful: attention bonds.

Now I’ll run through (and shoot down) a few of the objections commonly brought up when the possibility of involving actual cash in e-mail sending is raised.

Continue reading »

In Part 1 I took a “from first principles” look at the spam problem, and concluded that the only way to actually solve the problem was to make people pay to send e-mail.

Now, it’s time to look at what I mean by that—because there are almost as many ways to implement “pay to send” as there are ways to implement filtering.

This is going to be a bit more technical than part 1. I’m going to assume you know basically how SMTP e-mail works. If not, there are tutorials available.

Continue reading »

A great many words have been written on the subject of e-mail spam. Effort has been poured into all kinds of technological measures against it. In my view, many of these efforts have been a waste of time, because they have failed to address the fundamental problem of spam.

To explain my thinking, I’ll start with some basic statements:

1. Your attention is a valuable resource. If you doubt this, you need only look at the amount of money spent on advertising in an attempt to acquire your attention.

2. Therefore, your inbox is a valuable resource. Many people, perhaps most people, now check e-mail multiple times a day. In fact, according to some surveys college students spend more time on the Internet than watching TV. They check their e-mail inbox more than they look at ad breaks.

3. SMTP e-mail allows anyone to send mail. There’s no centralized registration required in SMTP; there’s no control over the growth of the SMTP e-mail network. While some servers restrict which SMTP clients may connect to them, there’s essentially no control over who sends mail, as it’s always possible to open a new web e-mail account, buy a new ISP dial-up account, or whatever.

4. SMTP e-mail is free for the sender. Sure, many people pay for their Internet access; but once you have an Internet connection, sending e-mail basically doesn’t cost you anything—it has marginal cost.

Now, let me re-cast those four statements:

We have unrestricted access for anyone in the world to use arbitrary amounts of a valuable resource.

Can you think of any case where there has been a system like that, and it has worked? I can’t. The canonical example is the tragedy of the commons, but there are plenty of others, including the Cambridge ‘Green Bike’ scheme and the overfishing of cod.

In order to avoid a “tragedy of the commons” situation, we need to alter the situation so that one of the statements above is no longer true. Let’s go through them again and consider our options.

Continue reading »

“I’m the only person in the United States Senate who has been elected four times who has voluntarily refused to ever take one dime of political action committee, special interest money in my elections”

—John Kerry

AP continues the story:

Kerry collected more than $470,000 directly from companies and unions in 2002 [just before those types of donations were outlawed] for his Citizen Soldier Fund, and spent large amounts of it sowing goodwill in key primary states just before Congress banned the use of such “soft money” donations, according to records his group filed with the IRS.

More than $100,000 of those donations came from telecommunications and Internet companies that have had a direct interest in the work of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee on which Kerry serves.

For instance, nearly every major cellular phone company donated to Kerry’s committee, including AT&T Wireless ($7,500), Nextel ($5,000), Verizon Wireless ($5,000), T-Mobile ($5,000), and Cingular ($5,000). The head of Internet publishing giant International Data Group gave $50,000, while the chairman of the Google Web site chipped in another $25,000.

MIT Technology review has an interesting article on “How the Postman Almost Owned E-Mail“.

I find it interesting—but not for the historical reasons. Rather, it illustrates the kind of delusional state people enter when they work too long in law or politics. The author of the piece seems to believe that if the US government had allowed the US Postal Service to operate an e-mail system, we’d all have ended up with USPS e-mail accounts.

In the UK, the Post Office did get permission to run e-mail systems. They had a system called PRESTEL. It was briefly relevant during the 80s, but bulletin boards grew up around it, then began connecting together. Soon there was a UUCP network. The situation was farcical by the early 90s; UUCP was chugging along at 9600bps or faster, but PRESTEL was still 1200bps to receive your mail—or a mind-numbing 75bps to send it. Then the UUCP networks got overseas links, TCP/IP started being rolled out to businesses, and it was all over for PRESTEL. Something similar happened in France with MiniTel, and I have no doubt that the same pattern would have been followed in the US if the USPS had been allowed to set up an e-mail system.

It’s probably blindingly obvious to everyone likely to read this, but passing laws and setting policies does not make things happen. If it did, there wouldn’t need to be a war on (selected) drugs. Yet even now, politicians who apparently live in a fantasy world are contemplating new laws to prevent Internet file sharing. Record companies apparently believe that if they get themselves proclaimed as the official source of online music, they will own the system of digital music downloads. They will then be able to build in whatever retarded copy protection systems they like.

The Post Office thought the same. They owned e-mail, so why did they need to offer faster downloads, file attachments, or international connectivity? They were the official system, and if they said 1200/75 with no error correction was good enough for the public, then it was. I mean, what were the public going to do—build their own e-mail network?

We have cable modem!