Saturday, May 17, 2008
Four Internet pioneers discuss the sorry state of online communication today. The consensus: It's a real mess.
Oct 2, 2003 | Somewhere between that spam promoting spyware disguised as a chipper e-greeting and the latest e-mail-borne virus masquerading as an urgent software upgrade, something got lost.
Not just a single overlooked urgent message from your boss, lodged in a sea of ghastly teenage bestiality spam, but something more fundamental, something more essential.
It's impossible to say exactly when the ritual of opening the e-mail in box went from being the lure that brought you online in the first place to a slough of deleting drudgery, full not only of irritating commercial messages that you never signed up to receive, but also of potential threats that could bring down your computer. But there's no use being nostalgic for that earlier, simpler time, whenever you got online, whether that was in 1984 or 1998. You can't go home again, or at least, you can't go back to a home without spam.
The questions now are: Can e-mail be saved? How bad is the problem, really? And what can be done to fix it?
Salon interviewed four Internet pioneers, computer scientists who have been online longer than most of the rest of world and who, in some cases, helped set up the systems we use today. (The four men were interviewed separately, but for clarity their answers have been grouped by subject.)
Dave Farber, who sometimes calls himself "the grandfather of the Internet" because many of his students went on to be its fathers, is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's school of computer science. He first went online in 1962 and started on the Internet in the late '60s "near the day it was born," when his student Dave Crocker, now a principal in Brandenburg Consulting but then part of the original Arpanet research community, "got the damn thing working."
Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, first used e-mail in 1976 and started the first ".com" company, in 1989. And Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert and principal of Nielsen Norman group, started using e-mail in 1981 and the Internet back in 1985, when he worked at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center: "Every single time I sent e-mail to a non-IBM address, a screen came up to warn me that we were sending information outside the company and asked the user to confirm that no confidential information was included."
How bad is spam, really?
Farber: I'm seeing a fairly wide variety of people, from old, grizzled network people to major investors in technology companies who say: "Who needs this pain? I get spammed to death. I get viruses. I get the spam caused by viruses. I get forged messages."
One guy sent me a note today saying, "I spend about an hour and a half a day cleaning out my e-mail." And he uses a spam filter, but there's still a major amount of noise.
The reliability of e-mail has suffered incredibly from the need to put in spam filters that don't work that well. I think that there's a danger that people are going to say more and more: Who needs it?
At some point in the game you're going to see people saying: "I can make a phone call; with voice mail, maybe I'm better off.
Over the last six months the amount of spam has gone up phenomenally. This last virus or worm that started generating huge volumes of e-mail sort of broke the back. It's not too late, but I think it's getting to be close to too late. If you believe in the old atomic scientists' clock, it's five minutes to midnight.
During the height of the worm that was generating automatic spam, I was getting close to about 3,000 messages every five hours that were junk. Luckily, I have a broadband connection. If I had had a dial-up connection, I probably would have thrown the computer against the wall.
Crocker: Rather than a slow, regular increase, there have been moments in which spam has jumped up higher. There have been massive increases in bursts. The consensus is that it's happened a number of times in recent years.
A lot of the problem with spam is the distraction; in its current volume it makes it difficult to find the important messages.
There is a huge portion of the e-mail user population that is fed up. Whether they are as fed up as the media are portraying them, I'm not sure. Whether being fed up means that e-mail has become unproductive, I'm not sure about. We need to look at these kinds of statements and assessments in a larger context. People are fed up with gas prices and traffic congestion. We don't have any consumer revolts about any of them. You don't have people demanding alternate forms of mass transit.
Jakob Nielsen: "You've got mail" is not a happy sound anymore. People aren't really looking forward to their e-mail anymore. It's a stressful endeavor.
People are very pressed for time when they process their in box. They are really very, very frustrated with their in box and have no idea why they're getting things.
Spammers poison the well for everybody, because users have no way of really differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate e-mail.
I really do think that we have to do something to change e-mail.
Templeton: Spam has scared people so much that they want to do anything that they can to stop it.
It's the problem of the automation of good and evil. Moving into the online world allowed us to automate all sorts of good things. An ordinary guy with a Web site can reach millions of people and use that automation to change the world.
The downside is that one person can also write a program to automate doing something bad. There have always been bad folks. But there are not very many of them in a decent society. So if you look at Sears, the department store, they don't have a lot of security there. We have mostly built our society on the idea that there will be some bad folks, but they'll be a very small portion of the population.
But if I could build a thousand robots that could come in off the street and take all the merchandise, then they would have to put a gate around the store. That's what happens in the online world. Computers amplify both the good and the bad we can do, and spam is yet another example.
What do you do to protect your own in box?
Farber: I am a big user of e-mail, and I haven't given up yet. All the protection that I put in place has filtered out mail that's important to me. For instance, my tax person sent me stuff as an e-mail attachment. Twice, I never got it. I don't know where it went.
E-mail was always a very sure way of getting things to people. Now it's not so sure. What I eventually said, after two times, is "Fax it to me." And that's not what you want!
I will probably not get to the place where I would give up, because I can put up a lot of defenses, but the average person can't.
Crocker: I'm forced to use the available mechanism -- filtering. And that's pretty much it. I don't think that any of the authentication techniques have gained a critical mass of utility yet.
Nielsen: I have stopped using e-mail and hired staff to do it for me. That's not a scalable option. That's an option that only works if you're the boss of a company.
Templeton: I wrote my own spam-blocking tool in 1997, which was the first of the "challenge-response" tools. It takes a secretary-type approach for my public address, which I put on Web sites and postings.
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