The Internet Is Broken (original) (raw)

Not only has e-mail been designed without privacy in mind, which is why PGP encryption on top of mailis so hard and unnatural to use, it was also invented at a time when all participants on the network were friendly professionals who would not send unsolicited spam mails.

The problem with spam is how the mail system still has no awareness of who is who. It tries to blacklist the evil sources in a universe where the nasty sources are exploding in number instead of whitelisting the trustworthy senders since in many regular mail systems there is no feedback channel from the user interface, telling the mail servers which mail sources were actually welcome.

Among the 600 spam mails I received today, there were 4 legitimate mails that shouldn't have ended up in the spam folder. This makes e-mail technically an unreliable communication medium – you can never be sure it actually works.

This technological absurdity has created a multi-million market for corporate solutions. Since homegrown indie spam protection isn't sufficiently effective, anyone who'd like to have an acceptable e-mail experience needs to use a surveillance economy offering such as G-Mail or Microsoft Hotmail. Even then, that really important mail might have ended up in the spam folder, which makes corporate walled gardens the ultimate peaceful haven: if you want no trouble from spammers, use Facebook, Twitter or Riot/Telegram/Signal/Whatsapp.

Why is their model working? Because they map the social graph information of who is a real person rather than a spambot, directly onto the delivery mechanism.

As described in and , in a GNU Internet you cannot send an unsolicited message to a complete stranger. You either have a social network link that credibly confirms you are a real person, or, for example, you submit a plea on that person's public website to get back to you, automatically adorned by cryptographic authentication, so when that person responds to you they will be put through directly into your inbox. In other words, in a GNU Internet, the spam business and criminality model is terminated.