Wednesday, September 4, 2002

Nearing reading-stack overflow: October Atlantic with the last part of Langewiesche's 9/11 must-read; September 9 New Yorker with promising stories on Enron and Pim Fortuyn; for much-needed frivolity, dreams of snowy adventures in the fall Patagonia catalog. Still Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. And that's just the non-work reading... 11:46:38 PM

Big push to outlaw spam. The problem isn't the spam, its the ability of people to send unsolicited e-mails without paying for the priviledge. If all unsolicited e-mail cost $0.05 to send (with $0.03 going to the person getting the mail), spam would dry up quickly. [...] If Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail instituted a $0.05 policy tomorrow (all except for the addresses you entered into your buddy list), they would probably generate tens of millions of $$ in a year in revenue. [...] A simple sign up process in order to be registered to send e-mail (to register your address on the server as one that can send e-mail) would be all it would take. I bet Paypal would be a great way to do this. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] The correct diagnosis --- free sending engenders spam --- but an overly complicated solution, which will need to account for every email. I think a peering-based bulk payment is more scalable and easier to implement, given the already existing peering arrangements between ISPs. 11:04:53 PM