Calum Grant

Spam

99% of companies don't give out your email address. But just occasionally, there are ones that do. For example Nochex.com. Another problem is that my mum used an "email story to a friend" facility on a newspaper, that, guess what, farmed my email address. I'm pretty annoyed at my mum, since my old email address calum at visula dot org is now completely useless. So don't send me cutesy e-cards in case my email address gets farmed. (I'm just pretending that people send me cutesy ecards, actually I am far too much of a grump to get any of those!)

I don't quite understand why spam hasn't been solved. Maybe there should be a default charge (say) 50p for every email one receives. The receiver can then volutarily refund that to the sender, and set up an auto-refund policy for your friends. With electronic cash and strong encryption, this would be no problem.

But why has it taken so long for encryption, micropayments and electronic cash to be adopted? I have a theory, which is that it isn't terribly good for national security to allow secure, anonymous transactions and communication.

posted by Calum Grant @ 3:42 PM