First Monday has e-published "Giving E-mail back to the users". As an alternative to proposals for more strict legislation and "bounties" on spammers, the authors proposed a code solution to the spam problem.
From the abstract: "This paper argues that current legislative and private attempts to stop spam are either ineffective, or involve unacceptable tradeoffs. The key to solving the spam problem is recognizing the importance of e-mail authentication and the granting of permissions. Properly used, digital signatures can easily authenticate e-mail for effective spam control. The ability to manage public keys for verifying digital signatures provides each e-mail user the individual power to control who communicates with her and can therefore completely eliminate the practice of spamming. Finally, we recommend that software developers build the requisite capabilities for managing public keys into their e-mail programs. We argue for a technological solution as opposed to government legislation." (More ... )
The article, by grad students Trevor Tompkins and Dan Handley, is one of the peer-reviewed articles on First Monday, an online journal of academic papers dedicated to the Internet. First Monday is a Great Cities Initiative of the University of Illinois at Chicago Library, which (according to its website) has published 466 papers in 87 issues; these papers were written by 567 different authors. First Monday reports that it is indexed in INSPEC, LISA, PAIS and other services and that in the year 2002, users from 642,954 distinct hosts around the world downloaded 4,036,340 contributions published in First Monday.
First Monday is free, online, and digitally searchable. It invites paper submissions for possible publication, and provides an excellent style guide to writing for Internet publication.
Past contributors include Phil Agre, Virgilio Almeida, Aleksander Berentsen, John Seely Brown, Steve Cisler, Paul Duguid, Esther Dyson, Simson L. Garfinkel, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, Michael H. Goldhaber, Andreas Harsono, Bernardo A. Huberman, David R. Johnson, Brian Kahin, Jessica Litman, Clifford Lynch, Miranda Mowbray, Bonnie Nardi, David F. Noble, Andrew M. Odlyzko, Ilya Prigogine, David Post, Eric S. Raymond, David Ronfeldt, Pamela Samuelson, Abigail Sellen, Linus Torvalds, Hal R. Varian, and Richard Wiggins.
Thanks to beSpacific for the pointer to this article.
DougSimpson.com/blog
Posted by dougsimpson at September 3, 2003 05:00 AM | TrackBack