Eric Allman

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, the FTC, and Spam

The Federal Trade Commission held a forum on spam in Washington, D.C., April 30 to May 2. Rather to my surprise, it was a really good, content-full event. The FTC folks had done their homework and had assembled panelists that ran the gamut from ardent anti-spammers all the way to hard-core spammers and everyone in between: lawyers, legitimate marketers, and representatives from vendor groups.

Complying with Compliance

“Hey, compliance is boring. Really, really boring. And besides, I work neither in the financial industry nor in health care. Why should I care about SOX and HIPAA?” Yep, you’re absolutely right. You write payroll applications, or operating systems, or user interfaces, or (heaven forbid) e-mail servers. Why should you worry about compliance issues?

The Economics of Spam

You know what I hate about spam filtering? Most of what we do today hurts the people who are already being hurt the most. Think about it: Who pays in the spam game? The recipients. That’s what’s wrong in the first place - the wrong folks pay for this scourge.

The robustness principle reconsidered

Seeking a middle ground.

E-mail Authentication: What, Why, How?

Internet e-mail was conceived in a different world than we live in today. It was a small, tightly knit community, and we didn’t really have to worry too much about miscreants. Generally, if someone did something wrong, the problem could be dealt with through social means; “shunning” is very effective in small communities. Perhaps we should have figured out what was going to happen when Usenet started to go bad. Usenet was based on an inexpensive network called UUCP, which was fairly easy to join, so it gave us a taste of what happens when the community becomes larger and more distributed—and harder to manage. Even the worst flame wars seemed fairly innocuous in the grand scheme of things, and kill files were really enough, but there was a seed of something ominous that was going to germinate all too soon.

A Conversation with James Gosling

As a teenager, James Gosling came up with an idea for a little interpreter to solve a problem in a data analysis project he was working on at the time. Through the years, as a grad student and at Sun as creator of Java and the Java Virtual Machine, he has used several variations on that solution. “I came up with one answer once, and I have just been repeating it over and over again for a frightening number of years,” he says.

A Conversation with Peter Ford

Instant messaging (IM) may represent our brave new world of communications, just as e-mail did a few short years ago. Many IM players are vying to establish the dominant standard in this new world, as well as introducing new applications to take advantage of all IM has to offer. Among them, hardly surprising, is Microsoft, which is moving toward the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as its protocol choice for IM.

A Tribute to Jim Gray

Computer science attracts many very smart people, but a few stand out above the others, somehow blessed with a kind of creativity that most of us are denied. Names such as Alan Turing, Edsger Dijkstra, and John Backus come to mind. Jim Gray is another.

Wireless Networking Considered Flaky

Oh sure, I can get on the ’net from anywhere at Usenix or the IETF, but those are _hostile_ _nets_. Hell, all wireless nets are hostile. By their very nature, you don’t know who’s sharing the ether with you. But people go on doing their stuff, confident that they are OK because they’re behind the firewall.

A Conversation with Chris DiBona

He was hooked from the moment he installed Linux on an old PC when he was a teenager.