Flashes of Panic

Jeremy Zawodny linked to an excellent ACM article by Eric Allman. Allman (whose claim to fame is that he wrote sendmail, the MTA which handles mail transmission on something like 80% of the *nix hosts on the internet) complains that by addressing the spam problem through block lists and filtering (as I do) is solving the problem at the expense of the same people shafted by the spam problem in the first place - the average user. He's right, of course, but the ultimate solution, shifting the cost of spamming from the recipient to the sender, would require replacing the SMTP standard, which would mean a wholesale shift in the plumbing of the internet. To put this in everyday terms, imagine the telephone shift from pulse dialing (the clicks produced by rotary phones) to tone dialing. Now imagine if people with pulse dialing hadn't been able to call people with tone dialing while the transition was happening. See the problem? Not one I've got a solution to, certainly, which is why I go on filtering.

Articles like this make me wonder if I should join ACM (in addition to my Usenix/SAGE membership) so they'll keep them coming.