A True History of the Internet

The Wicker Man and the Spam Men

(I say men as I cannot believe that a class act like women, would ever do something as nefarious as spam).

So there are zillions of people trying to become famous and save the world by finding a solution to the spam problem. I am already more famous than I want to be, so the reason I am suggesting this solution is to stop people patenting it and charing you for it.

The idea is this:

Spammers have to harvest lists of e-mail addresses. This is abottleneck as it takes time, although once you have them, you get to use them a lot. Some spammers even target e-mail quite well by getting other info from the e-mail address context (location, web page, institution, etc).

Users want e-mail, with all its warts -the ability to send a message to someone who hasn't heard of you appears to be appealing. (Some people have moved off e-mail to chat rooms and IM where the invitation only process prohibits mass misuse much more effectively - we'll leave them to their success).

So here goes. What if I change my e-mail once a day? once an hour? once a minute?

Oh, you cry. what about all those people who have my _old_ email address in their address book?

No problem, I respond. If they have it in an address book, and they send me a message to my old e-mail address I can do one of several things.
1. i probably have old e-mail from them, or they are in my address book - so I just take the mail and send them a response with my new address (standard tools already support change of address stuff.
ii. if i want to reduce load on my mail server as well as reduce reception of spam, I could pro-actively tell everyone in my address book each time I change my address.

What if the spammers harverst address books? They alerady do, but it takes time.
What if they use exploited machines address books? Well, I won't turn off my current spam technology, so when I get spam from someone who should know better, I delete them from my address book, and wait for them to get my new e-mail address.

How do people get my new e-mail address?
Easy: I publish it on my web page. This is cool, because it means that in a year, I could publish 525600 different e-mail addresses, only one of which will work in any given minute.
The spammers have now hadd their spam dilulted by 5-6 orders of magnitude.

next?

A True History of the Internet

Finally, a use for Qunatum Computing:
Network coding is proposed as a way to do efficient many-to-many content distribution (see Network information flow, by Ahlswede, et al, and dozens of papers since implementing it) - if we wanted to do this at really high speed in an optical core network (A million HDTV stations from the home) for fault tolerance etc, we cannot do it in conventional h/w and s/w - why not use a quantum computer - rateless coding is very like crypto - so the algorithms from quantum crypto might actually work well - might even solve he probiem of very large blocksizes (e.g. tornado code multiple movies in a SINGLE 10Gbyte file each for 1 short transmission!)

You saw it first here, so DO NOT patent it now:-)
7/12/2006

A True History of the Internet

A True History of the Internet

what we need is an automated patent system -the way to do this is to use ontologies- as per berners-lee - then we could get rid of all the stupid patent offices that let people get "IPR" on bad, old, obvious ideas.

The Patent Office Ontology (Poo)
Built on Agents and RSS

game over...