Subject: Re: [Asrg] New take on emerging idea. (yet another C-R system?)

From: "John Fenley" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:37:36 -0600

>From: Chuq Von Rospach <[email-masked]>
>On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 11:45  AM, J C Lawrence wrote:
>>Frankly I don't think its possible to build a system which can prevent
>>spam which doesn't also prevent valid/desirable communication.  There's
>>a scale.  You get to pick a point on the scale with its associated
>>tradeoffs.
>
>exactly. At this point, I'll take a system where I can put a role account 
>on a web page, and know ten years from now it won't be getting spam unless 
>the spammer is grabbing the account right now. That solves 90% or more of 
>the problems with role accounts (and other accounts stuck on web pages) we 
>see. And it means the spammers are going to have to work harder to hide. If 
>every email on a page has a unique token generated for every page scrape, 
>it's not much more work to track when it was scraped, where it was scraped 
>from, and that makes the spammer that much more visible and exposed, with 
>very little window to wiggle in, grab and find a new hole to hide in.
>
>>If spammers need to do near-realtime scrap and send, I have little doubt
>>they will,
>
>but it gives us new tools to fight that, too, because then we can start 
>tracking and blocking the scraping as well.

Am I the only one here that believes that for an e-mail address to be 
usefull you must be able to write it down on a piece of paper and give it to 
someone? how do you dynamicaly create a consent token on a piece of paper?

John Fenley

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From: Chuq Von Rospach <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 12:52:00 -0700

On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 12:37  PM, John Fenley wrote:

>> but it gives us new tools to fight that, too, because then we can 
>> start tracking and blocking the scraping as well.
>
> usefull you must be able to write it down on a piece of paper and give 
> it to someone? how do you dynamicaly create a consent token on a piece 
> of paper?
>

Maybe you don't. But then, there's no assumption here you need one. 
Perhaps that e-mail you write down is set to go into a "these emails 
need to be evaluated" folder. Perhaps it's set to do a 
challenge/response like current whitelists do? You actually have a lot 
of flexibility -- a system like this doesn't generate a "thing", but 
gives you the ability to tailor a suite of things to your needs:

the "contact me" address generates a 24 hour token; after taht time, 
it's rejected.

the address on your business card goes to a "unvalidated but trusted" 
folder to be looked at -- and the user can accept, reject, send for a 
C/R, discard, whitelist, whatever.

pull out a pen and make a minor change to the card, and the user now 
has an address that's pre-whitelisted.

register for Apple eNews with only whitelists the apple.com domain, the 
first time you get email using that registration token, it changes the 
whitelist to that address, not the entire domain.

set up your amazon.com account that accepts email from all of 
amazon.com, but only if the email relays in from a defined netblock.

the nice thing is a system like this can be built simple enough for MY 
MOM, but can have features that people can use once they figure out 
they want to use them, but which they aren't required to figure out 
ahead of time..

---

From: J C Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:03:04 -0700

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 13:37:36 -0600 
John Fenley <[email-masked]> wrote:

> it to someone? 

Nope, and nothing we've discussed prevents that.  

> How do you dynamicaly create a consent token on a piece of paper?

TMDA-style keyword address that auto-negotiated and mutates on first
email into a fully negotiated address (possibly with your MUA rewriting
your address book entry to match)?

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
[email-masked]               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.
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From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 16:57:43 -0400

>has an address that's pre-whitelisted.

If you can do that in your head, then the spammer can certainly 
figure it out.  No?  Also, keep in mind the sender's system.  When 
you give people an address, they have this nasty habit of actually 
remembering it.  They put it in their address book, they put in their 
paper note taking system.  They put it in their database.  If I need 
to shunt them to a permanent address, I need an easy way to do it. 
Kind of like HTTP's permanent redirect.  (And keep in mind that for 
reasons that escape me, nobody has bothered using that to update 
anyone's bookmark's file.)

>register for Apple eNews with only whitelists the apple.com domain, 
>the first time you get email using that registration token, it 
>changes the whitelist to that address, not the entire domain.

Would that actually work?  I know a lot of my Apple email seems to 
come from different addresses, but I couldn't swear as to which 
subscription caused which one.

>amazon.com, but only if the email relays in from a defined netblock.

Great until they contract something out to mx0.net or some such.

>the nice thing is a system like this can be built simple enough for MY MOM,

As you just described it I'd be real reluctant to try and pitch that 
one to my mother.  And having just spent half an hour explaining to 
my father that the little dialog box that Pagemaker brings up when he 
prints, that says, "Some images may not print correctly because they 
could not be found, please see the Links dialog" was related to his 
problem (some images weren't printing correctly), I think we'll pass 
on explaining temporary addresses.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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From: Chuq Von Rospach <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 14:23:11 -0700

On Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 01:57  PM, Kee Hinckley wrote:

> If you can do that in your head, then the spammer can certainly figure 
> it out.  No?

Depending on how it's done, it could be open to dictionary attacks. You 
wouldn't want system-defined standards here, just a way to create 
layers of addresses. Still better than what we have now, but there's 
clearly a tradeoff between ease of use and how secure it is. Details 
TBD.

>   Also, keep in mind the sender's system.  When you give people an 
> address, they have this nasty habit of actually remembering it.  They 
> put it in their address book, they put in their paper note taking 
> system.  They put it in their database.  If I need to shunt them to a 
> permanent address, I need an easy way to do it.

noted for later reflection.

> subscription caused which one.

It would, I think, and the confusion you bring up is one reason why I 
mentioned this. It goes back to the layers of consent. Subscribing to 
one newsletter doesn't imply subscribing to all, or to other marketing 
stuff, or... So once you know what addresses what you asked for are 
coming from, you want some way to know if you're getting other stuff, 
too.

> Great until they contract something out to mx0.net or some such.

again, it's the company's responsibility to deal with this, IMHO. set 
the expectations, warn about changes, or deal with the consequences of 
not informing users what's going on. I consider this a feature in that 
it tells you what is being done so you can make a decision whether to 
accept it. It makes it harder for companies to do "consent creep" on 
you, because you can, to the level you care, set up your permissions to 
enforce it.

> one to my mother.

As I have it in my head, I would. but there's a lot to be noodled out. 
But my model is basically how mail.app on OS X does spam processing. 
For the individual on a cable modem or home DSL, it doesn't have to get 
too fancy or complex. So for the "individual" system, the idea would be 
to generate functionality that could be used within the context of a 
GUI MUA without lots of geekiness. Worrying about more complex stuff 
will go into the organizational whitelisting system, or some hidden 
wizard mode for some stuff.

---

From: J C Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 14:28:43 -0700

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 16:57:43 -0400 

> If you can do that in your head, then the spammer can certainly figure

Let's say its an unstandardised plus address ala bubba+oddword@domain;
trivial to amend on a business card or postit note.  But, still spammer
abusable as there will be a tendency for people to pick the same/similar
keywords.  So the MUA filters messages to that address into a custom
folder for not-totally-unknown-but-not-yet-friends mail.

> permanent address, I need an easy way to do it. Kind of like HTTP's
> permanent redirect.  (And keep in mind that for reasons that escape
> me, nobody has bothered using that to update anyone's bookmark's
> file.)

Address shunting/rewriting is a good point, but one I don't see as
handleable without direct MUA support.

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 20:09:51 -0400

>handleable without direct MUA support.

Agreed.  However a standard for what the message would look like that 
notifies someone of an address change would be a useful item in 
general.  What I'm not sure of is whether it's possible to do it 
securely.  And if you don't, the ramifications are kind of nasty.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

---

From: J C Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2003 19:31:07 -0700

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003 20:09:51 -0400 

> general.  

Yeah, I just spent most of a 100 mile drive (San Jose -> Richmond -> San
Jose) thinking about that one.  Summary: There are lots of ways,
including several that are friendly to non-supporting MUAs and even
foreign language speakers (via abuse of MIME).

What would be more interesting (to me), and I think more useful in
general is a generically portable and useful way of encoding command
sets in email ala XML/RPC which are both human readable and
machine-friendly.  If such already exists we should plug into it.  I
haven't yet done a literature survey to see if such already exists --
hopefully someone here knows and can save me some time.

> What I'm not sure of is whether it's possible to do it securely.  And
> if you don't, the ramifications are kind of nasty.

Yeah, that's a worrisome end.  There's some token rights negotiation
there that's just not pretty.

---

From: Kee Hinckley <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 12:32:12 -0400

>machine-friendly.  If such already exists we should plug into it.  I

Well, you could do SOAP over SMTP/MIME.  But would you want to?

This reminds me of General Magic's Telescript.
-- 
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/          Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/   Writings on Technology and Society

---

From: J C Lawrence <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 09:54:31 -0700

On Fri, 11 Apr 2003 12:32:12 -0400 

> Well, you could do SOAP over SMTP/MIME.  But would you want to?

No, I'm hoping for something fairly simple and even (hope!) well
supported with minimal effort by readily available tools.  I'd rather we
not reinvent if we don't have to.