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Tables of contents: Spam's in your mailbox, spam's in all the newsgroups you read, spam is even starting to make it into mainstream news coverage and bills in Congres (which mostly means reporters and congressmen are finally starting to get spam :-). You're mad as hell and want someone to do something about it! There are several moves afoot to try to get legislation written. There are various organized and not so organized attempts to track down and sue (or just harass) individual spammers. And there is (naturally, or it wouldn't be the net) a whole lotta flamin going on. But with all this anti-spam activity, I haven't been able to find many individuals or groups working on the kind of solution that would actually work: a technological one which doesn't depend on trying to change human behavior, but instead tweaks the basic way the infrastructure operates so that spam-like activities become much less fulfilling for the spammers and much more fulfilling for the majority of folks who just want on topic discussions in their news groups and relevant mail in their mailboxes. This is not to say there aren't technological solutions out there. I am aware of cancelbots and NoCem, but they seem to be very clumsy systems which are both time and bandwidth hogs. They are trying to fix a fundamentally flawed system by operating within it, and are therefore restricted by all the flaws of the system. Of the technological solutions which are out there, GroupLens, seems to be very much on the right track, but even it seems to have limitations due to the desire to wedge itself into the existing very clumsy usenet infrastructure. It is, of course, still very much a research project, and using as much of the existing system as possible is definitely the best way to get it used and experimented with, but hopefully it will outgrow the existing system someday. Certainly the rating algorithms and human interface techniques it develops should play a very important role in guiding the future development of usenet. I would be happy to learn I am wrong about this. If someone can point me other groups beavering away at designing the "net of tomorrow" (especially an entirely new usenet news system), I'd love to hear about it. Please send me mail and let me know where to find them. In the long run, I want to be able to hook up with like minded individuals and share ratings. The ratings would make sure the articles I saw were relevant, and if I happend to be the first one to stumble across spam, I could take positive action by proagating my own ratings. The more folks you share ratings with, the less likely you are to be the first one to see any spam, and the less likely you are to see any at all. OK, we have just designed a system to propagate ratings for articles in newsgroups, but why stop at news? Once ratings are carried on news servers and propagated across the internet to be widely available and easily accessible, why not allow ratings by themselves even if they aren't attached to usenet news articles? Anything which can be uniquely identified can easily be rated. For instance, web sites all have unique URLs which make for a perfect unique identifier. So why not allow ratings to rate web sites? Teach web browsers how to dig up the current ratings information from the rating server and display it, or use it for a parental access control. But why even stop at web pages? Cable companies are getting into the internet provider business, internet providers are web-enabling TVs, everything is coming together. Why shouldn't television programs have unique URLs and be rated like everything else? Instead of getting a single rating system from the networks, anyone who wants to can set themselves up as a critic or moral beacon or whatever they want to call themselves and rate any TV show. Imagine the instant gratification of being able to push the "this stinks!" button on your remote and have it instantly propagate your warning around the globe :-). Web-enabled TVs can then be programmed to access the ratings and block sex or violence or OJ trial coverage. Web-enabled VCRs and DVD recording systems can be programmed to automatically record the best shows so you don't miss them. If everyone starts recording everything and watching it time delayed, people can even share broadcast times for commercials and automatically fast-forward past them when watching the shows later. On the face of it, the oft-quoted Marxist nutshell philosophy "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" sounds like a rational way to run a planet full of people and provide all of them with the best possible standard of living. Unfortunately, it collides with the fundamental fact that we human beings tend to have a large streak of greedy pig in us. An economic system which relies on assumptions that are simply false is doomed to failure. Capitalism, on the other hand, has a basic philosophy of (to paraphrase the X-Files slogan): "The Greed Is Out There". Being a much closer model of reality, it is no wonder capitalism has succeeded better than Marxism. Anyway, enough of this amateur political philosophy. The point I am trying to make is that "the net" suffers in many areas from the same bad assumptions as marxism. The most outstanding example being usenet news which evolved in an academic environment of cooperation and is trying to exist now in the world at large populated by a wide assortment of greedheads, scam artists, and the merely technically challenged. It is time for a new design which doesn't depend on cooperation from all the users to work, but does allow the cooperation of any sets of users who happen to feel like it. |