Internet Drivers' Licenses

[mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos)]

Bill Stewart writes:

> Anybody for an Internet Driver's License?

At this point, I would love the ability to filter news and mail 
according to some criteria related to the sender's probable
reputation.  Back in the early days of C&S, spam was an 
intellectual issue.  Now it is a good chunk of the entire
bandwidth of major components of the Net.

I am now getting more junk email than email from people I 
care to correspond with.  It seems one can't even read the
scholarly newsgroups anymore without "Come Watch Us Lick
Ourselves on the Web" messages popping up regularly.

It's really getting to the point where the time-honored
suggestion of "just hit your delete key" cannot deal with the
obverwhelming amount of Drek posted, much of it with subject
lines deliberately designed to blend in with the newsgroup
topic.

Just being able to filter out posts from Net addresses that
don't correspond to real identifiable humans posting under
their legal names would be a good first step.  

Purely voluntary, of course, since any filtering would be
done at the reading end, and people could still post anything
they liked.

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     mpd@netcom.com     $    via Finger.                      $