Encryption on Mailing lists sensless?

Garreau, Alexandre galex-713 at galex-713.eu
Wed Nov 19 12:55:37 CET 2014


Le 19/11/2014 à 12h17, Peter Lebbing a écrit :
> On 19/11/14 01:31, Robert J. Hansen wrote:
>> No.  Client-side, you get to inspect (fully) only your data, and you
>> have to develop a statistical model of spam based on only your data.
>> When Gmail filters, it inspects (fully) traffic to *millions* of users,
>> and uses that to create a model no individual user can hope to match.
>
> I agree with several other important points you raise, but this one is not a big
> deal. I have a highly customized mail setup. My SpamAssassin downloads rules
> from the internet, but trains its Bayesian filter on only the e-mail I
> personally receive.

And you can even share within a F2F meshed system the bayesian-trained
rules. For example everybody could send her “friends” her set of rules,
including the one of her friends, dividing the “credibility” of rules
according number of hops they made (with a logarithmic progression).

You could even define more categories than just “looks-like spam (ads)”,
but also the same about insults/troll (comparing the number of
exclamation marks with the size of message or this kind of details can
be useful to gain a *lot* of time), shaming messages, menace messages
(so useful if each MUA in the world could automatically filter rape
menaces feminist activists receive, for instance, or for any other
particulary dangerous/rude activism), racism (“'nigger' = -10 000”, for
instance) , LGBTIA-phobia, fascism (“'(natural|objective) differences' =
-100”, “'not like us' = -100”, etc.), etc.

And all that could be shared in a point-to-point and F2F manner, so that
you’re sure activists of a certain struggle will have their common rules
really perfectionned against certain things, and you’ll be sure all that
will automatically adapt according people and their milieus, and
language/expression evolution (antisemitism, for instance, is not
expressed today the same way than yesterday).

Oh, and imagine that everything of that could be used not only in email,
but in common on every type of asynchronous communication. *Everywhere*.
Including blogs/comments, microblogging, mailing-lists (you could even
imagine the F2F rules sharing extend to mailing-lists themself so some
could contain “advisory rules” for clients), etc.

That would avoid horrible situations like “transexual people don’t using
anymore the Internet to discuss”, “feminists don’t allowing comments
anymore —loosing a great amount of potential really interesting
analysis— and even developping plugins to automatically mask comment
systems on blogs“, or “having someone who’s psychologically hurting a
lot of people, wanting a safe space for them but also wanting to have a
collaborative space to debate with her to try to fix that and make her
able to speak peacefully with others so we can reintegrate her”.

Of course good luck if you expect from an authoritarian centralization
to become nice and struggle for people rights against the system of
inequalities, classes, races or patriarchy… Oh yeah, they /tried/ “nice
centralization to free people” in the East. Didn’t work. Quite the
opposite (ostracizing gays and foreigners, forcing women to found
families, workers to work, what a success…).

However: if you expect freedom from centralization, good luck.

> [1] Actually that is a case where the distributed solution truely
> excels: quickly homing in on the latest mass mailing. The sheer number
> of identical mails alone is a big warning sign, and a lot of people
> will start reporting them as spam.

And that’s why I spoke about cryptography, and notably about “hashes”.
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