Botspam apocalypse

1) The problem is centralization. Yes DNS is federated but there is a central registry. This means anyone can spam you@yourdomain.com or visit your web server listening for HTTP connections at www.domain.com

2) DNS is a glorified search engine. Human readable domain names are only needed for dictating a domain name (and listeners often make mistakes anyway). They only map to a small fraction of URLs) namely the ones with “/“ path name. For most others, the human readability adds little benefit.

3) Start using URIs that are not human readable. The titles, favicons and other metadata of resources should simply be cached, and displayed to the user in their own bookmarks, search engines or whatever. For Javascript environments, variables can easily hold non human readable URIs. Also QR codes can resolve to non human readable URIs.

4) There may be some cookie policy for third party hostnames etc. but just make them non human readable also.

5) We should have DHT or other decentralized systems for routing, and here is the key… in this system, you need a capability issued by the website / mailbox owner in order for your message to be routed to them. If the capability is compromised and used to get a ton of SPAM, they simply revoke that specific capability (key).

For HTTP websites you can already implement it on your side by signing the keys / capabilities ie session cookie balues with an HMAC, and there is no need to even do network I/O to verify them, you can upload the whitelist to the edges and check them there easily.

But going further, for new routing protocols, IP addresses should be removed after the first hop in the DHT, because the global routing system will send traffic there otherwise. See how SAFE network does it.

6) I don’t need a “real names policy” or “blue checkmark”. I can know who “The Real Bill Gates (TM)” is through some verified claims by Twitter or someone else. Just because I have the email billgates@microsoft.com doesnt mean I should be able to email him. There can be many Bill Gates. The names are just verified claims by some third party. Here on HN we dont have names or photos, and it works just fine.

7) Most of the celebrity culture, papparazzi, Elon Musk and Donald Trump moving markets and tweeting at 5am to 5 million people at once, are problems of centralization. Both a 1 to many megaphone and a many to 1 inbox. Citizens United is just a symptom of the problem. I have spoken about this (privately owning access to an audience) with Noam Chomsky in an interview I did a year ago:

https://community.qbix.com/t/freedom-of-speech-and-capitalis...

Fox News (Rupert Murdoch), CNN (Ted Turner), Twitter (Elon or Jack), Facebook (Zuck) are controlled by only a few people. Channels on youtube, telegram, podcasts etc are controlled by a few people. This leads to divisions in society, as outrage clickbait rises to the top. Nonprofit models based on collaboration like Wikipedia, Wikinews, Open Source and Science produce far more balanced and benign information for the public.

In short we need alternatives to celebrity culture, DNS and other systems that centralize decision making in the hands of a few, or create firehoses and megaphones. Neither the celebrity nor the public actually enjoy the results.

It is intentionally exclusionary. Not necessarily of the poorest among us, but of those who expect free service. Botters and spammers are disproportionately likely to look for free service. Pretty much any level of required spending in any currency will have a similar effect. By cutting off the abuse-prone free tier that many bad actors depend on, you dramatically decrease your exposure to abuse.

The point is not to keep out the poor people. The point is to make it far more work to get over the hurdle than it's worth for abusers. If you have a way to do the latter without the former that doesn't hinge on pushing a bunch of extra work onto administrators, I suspect quite a lot of people would be very curious to hear about it.