Yoused
up
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2020
- Posts
- 6,840
- Solutions
- 1
Everybody loves e-mail.
Not.
It almost seems like the worst possible way to communicate, giving rise to endless rivers of spam and compelling you to shovel out the mailbox with a bulldozer. I do not use it much, so my load tends to be less than a hundred messages a week (except, of course, during election season).
So, I envisioned a different, broader standard that could embody a wide range of communications, including a large fraction of social media and boards/forums. Naturally, I would be remiss to not mention what Randall had to say about it,
The challenging part of my vision is the MUID (multiverse unique ID) packets, which would greatly reduce the effectiveness of phishing and provide the means to access various social media platforms without having to create logins and remember a bunch of passwords.
The packet would contain the unique identifier number (probably 128 bits) along with public encryption keys and a verification word for validating the packet (and encrypting exchange data). There would have be some way that the packet could not be faked, such as a secondary semi-public encryption key that the visible public key would resolve. I am not very smart about things like this, but there has to be a way to make a protocol that is very difficult to spoof.
E-mail would be replaced by a sort of DM protocol that relies on the MUID for getting messages to the user. The user would receive the header (routing and subject text) and would retrieve the message from the sender at their own convenience, rather than receiving the entire message content on their own machine/server. Hence, clearing garbage out of one's messages would become somewhat less of a chore – marketing content could just be ignored until it expires.
Naturally, the user would have the option of marking certain communications for priority auto-fetch so that they do not risk the messages becoming inaccessible at the time that they want to see them. And, naturally, marketers will want to encourage people to set their messages to auto-fetch, just because. This could be handled by the user setting the machine to fake the auto-fetch (receive the content packets and discard or bin-cache them) for certain sources, eliminating the two-step process for deleting unwanted content (the user could set timed or replacement-limit deletion for marketing-type content).
There would be a short message scheme similar to phone texting, where the subject line is the entire content of the message. The client and/or server would filter short messages to eliminate any links or urls, for safety: if a sender wants to link, they have to use a full message.
And the user would have the option of providing a collaborator with something akin to direct access to their own local categorization hierarchy, such as "send it to me at tony(project7)@mymsgs.net", where messages sent to tony@mymsgs.net are generic, but adding the (project7) sends them to the project7 folder (or fails if project7 does not exist).
Social platforms would serve in a way that is not web based but would look more like a decorated subset form of usenet, but easier to navigate (the platform would select its look and structure for the user and the messaging client would implement it, retaining the art and widgetry (updating as necessary) so that only the content has to be loaded).
I am not sure whether a scheme like this would be practical or well received, but the way things are seems annoyingly kludgy to me.
Not.
It almost seems like the worst possible way to communicate, giving rise to endless rivers of spam and compelling you to shovel out the mailbox with a bulldozer. I do not use it much, so my load tends to be less than a hundred messages a week (except, of course, during election season).
So, I envisioned a different, broader standard that could embody a wide range of communications, including a large fraction of social media and boards/forums. Naturally, I would be remiss to not mention what Randall had to say about it,
The challenging part of my vision is the MUID (multiverse unique ID) packets, which would greatly reduce the effectiveness of phishing and provide the means to access various social media platforms without having to create logins and remember a bunch of passwords.
The packet would contain the unique identifier number (probably 128 bits) along with public encryption keys and a verification word for validating the packet (and encrypting exchange data). There would have be some way that the packet could not be faked, such as a secondary semi-public encryption key that the visible public key would resolve. I am not very smart about things like this, but there has to be a way to make a protocol that is very difficult to spoof.
E-mail would be replaced by a sort of DM protocol that relies on the MUID for getting messages to the user. The user would receive the header (routing and subject text) and would retrieve the message from the sender at their own convenience, rather than receiving the entire message content on their own machine/server. Hence, clearing garbage out of one's messages would become somewhat less of a chore – marketing content could just be ignored until it expires.
Naturally, the user would have the option of marking certain communications for priority auto-fetch so that they do not risk the messages becoming inaccessible at the time that they want to see them. And, naturally, marketers will want to encourage people to set their messages to auto-fetch, just because. This could be handled by the user setting the machine to fake the auto-fetch (receive the content packets and discard or bin-cache them) for certain sources, eliminating the two-step process for deleting unwanted content (the user could set timed or replacement-limit deletion for marketing-type content).
There would be a short message scheme similar to phone texting, where the subject line is the entire content of the message. The client and/or server would filter short messages to eliminate any links or urls, for safety: if a sender wants to link, they have to use a full message.
And the user would have the option of providing a collaborator with something akin to direct access to their own local categorization hierarchy, such as "send it to me at tony(project7)@mymsgs.net", where messages sent to tony@mymsgs.net are generic, but adding the (project7) sends them to the project7 folder (or fails if project7 does not exist).
Social platforms would serve in a way that is not web based but would look more like a decorated subset form of usenet, but easier to navigate (the platform would select its look and structure for the user and the messaging client would implement it, retaining the art and widgetry (updating as necessary) so that only the content has to be loaded).
I am not sure whether a scheme like this would be practical or well received, but the way things are seems annoyingly kludgy to me.
