Subject: SMS, New media, old media

From: [email-masked] (Dan Kolis)
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 16:51:58 -0400

Said presumably moments ago:
>we (the e-mail producing/consuming community) have the technology, we have
>the collective wit and wisdom, we have the proven commercial value of the
>service.  what we lack, dear ietf, is simply: leadership.
>Paul Vixie

Dan (Me) says. Well. I like Short Message Service on cellular phones a lot,
and use it solidly every weekend to organize my life. I noted that when i
mentioned spam is starting to show up on SMS, the first few (free tickets to
the movies, Drinking adventures, etc). Everyone I told it too who use SMS
more or less seemed pleased one of these days they might get some fun
thing... pretty well, the preverbial free lunch of some sort. I mention
this, becuase SMS is mostly decoupled from POP and SMTP mail. So is paper
unsolicited mail and telemarketing by phone, and all have more in common
with each other than techno differences. 

Technologies like http's PIC's are far too complex for non technocrats:
http://www.w3.org/PICS/

In order to not getted mugged, etc, some people elect to live in walled
cities. Others always let machines pick up voice calls before returning
them. All kinds of strategies exist and coexist to manage unsolicited bits
of reality.

I guess (its particularly interesitng to see Paul V as a recipient of this):
no one ever made a technology that let one person annoy 60 million people,
even in one lifetime before, much less in seconds in ease and comfort!

But mostly, if people didn't endlessly want something for nothing, this
problem (and Los Vegas) wouldn't exist. I think maybe SPAM volume is at a
natural equalibrium point now, and as young people get used to never
responding, the traffic will turn the corner downward? Don't know.

I know its been discussed 10E9 times before, but the IETF probably does best
with engineering that's not associated with "social engineering". Of course,
though, authentication etc mixes who'w who, with hows-it-work about 50/50.

PICS though, is a really well intentioned negative example. Not the first
time MIT has made a solution for a non problem few people can figure out;
(and... not that last, bless there ferroresenant, buckyball fuelled little
hearts).

Regs
Dan