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A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

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Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#241

Post by lolsal »

jackson1442 wrote: post #173
lolsal wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order. Why?

Things you have to use email for: * applying for jobs * getting covid tests/vaccines * buying virtually anything online * interacting with the government online (I needed to provide an email address to update my driver's license and vehicle registration) * opening a bank account * renting an apartment These are important things, so we might as well have some guaranteed way to access these services. Especially because…

I know that you do not need an email for some of the things you mentioned. I doubt you need an email for the rest.

I don't think the change we need to make here is "everyone should require email for everything, and therefore we need government subsidized emails for everyone." If anything, the change should be "email is not required", because it's not.

Furthermore, these are not rights but privileges:

> buying virtually anything online > interacting with the government online (I needed to provide an email address to update my driver's license and vehicle registration) > opening a bank account > renting an apartment

I feel strongly the other things aren't rights either, but don't want to argue about it.

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#242

Post by signatoremo »

mcdonje wrote: post #113
tarkin2 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "playing golf with government minister" should be called out for what it is: a probable or possible bribe. It won't be money in a brown paper bag but the result will be the same. It's endemic. We like to think bribery and corruption happens to other countries but there's plenty of it in the UK: it's just higher up the totem pole and largely accepted.

Same thing in the US. I always laugh whenever I see a list of corrupt countries and the US isn't near the top. Codifying bribery into law as lobbying and superpacs doesn't make it not bribery.

Ha, do you have any experience doing business with those countries top of the list to say so?

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#243

Post by shukantpal »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #222
shukantpal wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but the government is still further away from control; besides, web3 is bringing decentralized DNS (see Handshake Protocol) to fix that.

Until they make it easy to bridge decentralized DNS queries with regular DNS even on mobile phones (without using a middleman) but apps that run and do this for users, then no web3 is not bringing decentralized email. Also, email providers would need to bridge decentralized DNS and it is in their interests not to. So Gmail, Outlook, etc which most companies have migrated to will not support it.

Time will tell. I'm optimistic. There's no proof it can't happen.

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#244

Post by adolph »

rocqua wrote: post #234
adolph wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quite the opposite. It should charge the user per-e-mail on an at-cost basis. When you write “charge” do you mean money? When you say “at cost” do you mean at the cost of the sender, receiver, both? If charge means money, isn’t money just a transaction cost inefficient method of proving stake? Maybe a new SMTP would ask the sending server to perform some work on behalf of the reciever in order for the recover to ac…

In this case, you'd want the sending client to do some POW. Verified either by the sending server (to prevent it being blacklisted) or by the recipient (as a much wider anti-spam system). I still would expect this breaks down from ASICS and generally the price not being high enough.

It might be cheaper to make the POW fuzzy and cross verified by the POW of other Senders instead of verified by the recipient.

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#245

Post by jackson1442 »

lolsal wrote: post #241
jackson1442 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things you have to use email for: * applying for jobs * getting covid tests/vaccines * buying virtually anything online * interacting with the government online (I needed to provide an email address to update my driver's license and vehicle registration) * opening a bank account * renting an apartment These are important things, so we might as well have some guaranteed way to access these services. Especially because…

I know that you do not need an email for some of the things you mentioned. I doubt you need an email for the rest. I don't think the change we need to make here is "everyone should require email for everything, and therefore we need government subsidized emails for everyone." If anything, the change should be "email is not required", because it's not. Furthermore, these are not rights but privileges: > buying virtual…

Would you like to tell me more about this society where having a roof over your head is not a right, but a privilege? More of a privilege than applying for a job?

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#246

Post by unixbane »

Email is a pile of garbage created with the same mentality of web and UN*X. This stupid shit in 2000 and 2020 still sends my IP address to the receiver for no reason so I have to use the web interface which removes it but then I can't control headers so I probably can't use PGP because some idiot wants to use that S/MIME shit (which was unsurprisingly broken due to the E-Fail bug). Coming up with a bunch of ad-hoc key-value pairs with keys you hope people will adhere to is not engineering. It's web shotting. When you do this it makes a sound of web being shot like *THWIP*.

Coming up with yet another way of encoding key-value pairs (or any type of serialization) is not engineering; you have not addressed the concrete problem in any way what so ever other than explaining what the syntax will be.

Like wtf is wrong with you people? How hard is it to call encrypt_message(your_message) and verify_message(their_message) without introducing RCE vulns? There is nothing hard about delimiting different entries in a list (for argv or whatever). This is pre-school stuff. The reason people omit it is becaues UN*X makes the path of least resistance to be insecure shit like system(), but even then it's still easy to work around it time after time if you are above the age of 12.

Federation is also a hare-brained concept. Why in the hell do I want my address to be qualified with some stupid string? Is this so I can make a group and LARP about firing missiles from mydomain.com to yourdomain.com? How is it possible that XMPP was created with the same idiotic concept once we already knew email was garbage? Federation is absolutely and thorougly pointless. The literal only reason it makes any sense is because if it was fully centralized, the service would just be dead once comapny #1 dies.

DAY OF THE SEAL SOON

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#247

Post by derbOac »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #229
derbOac wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see the USPS expanded to become a public / municipal ISP of sorts. If you read about the history of the institution, this is really what was intended in its constitutional incorporation. It really wasn't about physical mail per se, and you can't hold the founders accountable to something that was outside the realm of imagination at the time. There's all sorts of information-structural things that are in t…

My main reservation with the USPS becoming an ISP lies in its investigative powers and long history of politically driven, unconstitutional use of its police force. Namely suppressing socialist newsletters, pornography, and the like. I'm guessing most Americans do not realize that going back more than a decade, the USPS has scanned and stored imagery and metadata for every single piece of mail that passes through the…

That's a good point, and I share that concern to some extent. But in thinking about it I guess I'm of the impression this happens anyway with private ISPs and the government? Private courts, state privilege, etc. Maybe if it were through the USPS it would force some transparency as well due to it not being private.

Also, I would be concerned if all the private ISPs disappeared also. Ideally I'd like to see something like is the case with physical delivery, where you have the USPS, FexEx, UPS, DHL, etc. Having the USPS be an ISP of sorts would hopefully not kill private offerings, along the same lines. Especially so given that we're in a de facto monopoly situation at the level of specific geographic locations often now. Introducing competition where the market has failed to do so shouldn't be a problem, and if it is, there are larger issues.

If anything I could see this being selling point for private ISPs, "use us and don't worry about the government because we have everything locked down in X, Y, and Z manner."

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#248

Post by dqv »

zaik wrote: post #76
dqv wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t get it. I was waiting for you to say “in favor of…” but you never got to that part. Let email die in favor of what? What is the viable alternative? Not a single messaging app I’ve used comes close to email. And I can’t use one messaging app, I have to have 6! I would be way more willing to move on from email if a solid viable alternative came along. XMPP, for example, is still too ephemeral and barely anyone…

I decided to delete all messaging apps except an email and an XMPP client (Internet Standards instead of proprietary protocols). 90% of my messages are to relatively few people (close friends or family members). For an acceptable messaging experience you just need to get those people on XMPP. The other 10% can still reach me via email or SMS.

I wish I could get people on XMPP, but I just accepted that, to communicate with my family, I need to use iMessage. I've had businesses try to get us to use their closed source communication thing and it just didn't work. Logging on to their weird thing every week or so to communicate with them and having to do any transactional communication manually just isn't really that great.

As far as XMPP for business, there are still things I really appreciate about email - threading/subjects to isolate different interactions being one. I would still love to be able to have it as a tool for bvb comms. Email is a very nice archival tool for both correspondence and documents. It's one of the few things in my life that is mostly organized and gives me easy access to things I need. Recently someone from a government agency said "you never sent x document" and I was able to go back in my email and say "yes I did on this date, I will send it to you again".

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#250

Post by hiptobecubic »

b3morales wrote: post #185
Bud wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not paying attention to the salaries part, though. Look at the pay for members of the House and Senate, in real dollars, over the last 50 years. Also pay attention to how much stupid noise there is about how members of Congress are supposedly overpaid. The pay for all US Senators combined (under $18M) is less than half of what LeBron James makes (over $41M) in salary alone in a year.

That's not a very informative comparison. LeBron James is a outlier's outlier in a sector that already has exceptional pay. Senators' salaries would more usefully be compared to the (upper) middle-class white-collar workforce that they would most likely occupy if they weren't in office.

I don't see how you can compare being a senator to being a middle manager at some bank. The problem is that the banker faces huge consequences if they do something stupid to earn a little money by abusing their position and the upside isn't even that big. By comparison, senators have the opportunity to earn literally millions by doing things that aren't even technically illegal, like being given a wink-and-nod promise of a revolving door-style highly paid position in industry, "insider" trading that for some reason just doesn't count, etc.
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