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October 03, 2003
spoiling it for everyone
As I sat down to write this, I found a post by Clay, probably expressing these themes far better than me. Like him, I've got a gut feel of despondency - and for me it's not just about email.
I found a love for newsgroups and mailing lists pretty much as soon as I got "proper" Internet access, at University: October 1995. Seemingly my affair with Usenet tailed off in Feburary 2002, with a few sporadic sojourns to old haunts since. I'd witnessed many good, friendly, useful groups go the way of all others, swamped by spam, binaries and every kind of freak. I even became a voted-in moderator for a group - however the group became mainly meta, talking about fairness, voting methods and moderation. The new faces dried up or were scared away, attrition became faster, and the group (for me anyway) died.
It's a real shame - many newsgroups were really useful for people, an obvious door to enter, and meet people that have gone through the same things as you. I owe an awful lot to newsgroups, maybe even my life, so I do have an affinity. Stopping reading and participating in Usenet was a real wrench for me.
Is the same happening with email? Well, you can't trust official messages as more - too many subject lines such as "account problems" or "shipping notification". Spammers are getting smarter, and subjects and authors are getting so close to something that may be real, and really interest me, even with my natural slippery untrusting coating, that I've been tricked into clicking on a few recently. Of course, I make sure my email program doesn't do anything stupid, like retrieving images or running any kind of script. But I still feel gutted. I can't tell real email from spam anymore.
Personal email is no better. "hello", "hi", "an idea", "proposal", "thanks!" get junked, Bayesian filters set to kill. I'm not sure if it's just me, that has a large amount of mailing lists and real, asked-for commercial messages, but spam filters of any sort just don't seem effective anymore. For several years, I've wondered why spammers were so stupid: now they're not, and all kinds of real email get washed out with the detritus of my mailbox.
Furthermore, when sending email, I have no idea if it will ever be read, whether it will even get to the ISP of my recipient, let alone their account, and a mailbox they actually read. Legislation doesn't work. Filtering doesn't work. Firefighting doesn't work. When ISPs give up, I'm left wondering where this is leading. I've always been a great email advocate, but my work email sporadically doesn't work, my various personal addresses may work at best. The psychological benefit of reliability has been lost.
Unfortunately, it doesn't stop there. One of the successors of newsgroups and mailing lists, the web board or group, is under attack too. Not neccessarily spammers, but it's very easy for a single person, or small group, to cause havoc. Small boards may just shut up shop, large commercial platforms decide it's not worth the effort anymore.
What next? Weblog comments. Several sites are considering shutting down their comment functionality. The floodgates are open. Some people think that it should all be turned to trackbacks - people posting comments on their own weblog, and referencing the original. They are not the answer - would I have to create another weblog to post comments? (I have a main weblog, and a link list, and comments would look strange in either). What is unsightly for me is impossible for others: creating a weblog is a high hurdle for just commenting on a post. Understanding trackbacks is even higher.
This in turn causes skewed results for aggregation services - daypop and blogdex have both suffered from commercial spam via magnitude of links.
More realities - Google is compromised. As I have mentioned before, people creating spider's webs of terms and links can blast a topic from the top 50. Search for any kind of product, from hotels to DVD players, and rather than reviews, you get hundreds of links to affiliate pages. Small pieces loosely joined; distributed promise of profit cause infrastructure meltdown.
We're not quite done. P2P systems have mislabelled, bad quality songs and files, part on purpose (from RIAA et al) to braindead helpful types, ripping music so it fits on floppy disks. For something so distributed, social engineering means that poison files spread quickly.
Where does that leave us? I hope it's not in hinternets, or gated communities. The open Internet, the easily searchable Internet, the non-commercial Internet, is an amazing thing, something to benefit everyone. Hiding away, locking down, is as bad as non-existance. It used to be you, your computer, and a direct dial up connection to the Internet. Now, any access requires the building of firewalls, the constant maintenance of every OS, every user to be a sysadmin. Firefighting is too little too late; fires are occurring in most PCs without the current knowledge of their users.
It could even kill the next big thing, pervasive, always-on, mobile access. SMS spam is growing, but whilst there is a cost associated, it's going to be curtailed. Many of the apps and services I'm working on need peer-to-peer communication, sharing, talking to each other, trusting each other. Nefarious types are already potentially finding holes.
So, what are the rays of hope? What can make me see an open future? I'd be grateful for any comments, anything that makes you think the future of the Internet isn't quite as bleak a picture as I've just painted.
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