Re: Less is more

[Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> 
> On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 11:20:54 -0400, Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> >> * Use one and only one charset (my advise: utf-8)
> >
> > so you don't want people to be able to send documents that happen to be  
> > written in other charsets?  or you want to force them to translate,  
> > sacrificing transparency?
> 
> Sending documents in other charsets are fine by me (but why do we keep on  
> using all these charsets? Lets move on, shall we?). If the document is  
> going to be parsed or displayed by a mail-ng server or client I actually  
> DO want it forced into utf-8 (or whatever charset is best suited)

So mail-ng shouldn't be extensible?

> >> * Use one and only one content transfer encoding (my advise: 8-bit)
> >
> > so you don't want binary transparency?
> 
> OK, a bitstream then. What I don't want is QP, BASE64, DQUOTES,  
> quoted-pair, HTML-entities and the lot.

So you don't want any kind of nesting or opacity, and you want everything
to be length-delimited? 
 
> >> I would like to have a header specifying the jurisdiction the email is  
> >> sent by.
> >
> > absent some way to authenticate that information, I'd simply claim that  
> > the mail was sent from the jurisdiction with the least restrictive rules.
> 
> Which is fine by me, but unless I have whitelisted you it would of course  
> cause me to drop the mail long before it reached my screen.

you can whitelist or blacklist whatever you want based on whatever criteria
you choose.  but if you're whitelisting or blacklisting based on unreliable
criteria, don't blame other people for when those criteria don't work well.

> >> I expect spam to be a non-issue in mail-ng, but having a jurisdiction  
> >> header would make it easier to drop messages violating local laws
> >
> > nah, the spammers would just move to some other country.
> 
> I already pointed out that I expect spam to be a non-issue, but with a  
> legally binding country code in the header, my point is that you can run  
> to whatever country you want. If you send me content that violates my  
> laws, I have two choices. If you are within your local laws, I will block  
> your country, and if you are outside your local laws, I will sue you.

I'll send you content that violates your local laws and claim that the 
content is from a country that honors your local laws.  You won't want
to block the country (because you think the content is legitimate) and
you won't be able to sue me without crossing national borders.
 
> >> Filtering based on the ISO Country Code List would be
> >> much easier than keeping a list of IP ranges up to date.
> >
> > the last thing we need is to encourage more stupid spam filters.
> > see http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/opinions/spam-filters.html
> 
> The spam-filtering that article discusses is seriously outdated.

perhaps, but it's still in wide use and it reflects things that I've
run into within the last month or two.

--
Regime change 2004 - better late than never.