[IP] E-mail is broken
E-mail is broken
Four Internet pioneers discuss the sorry state of online
communication today. The consensus: It's a real mess.
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By Katharine Mieszkowski
Oct. 2, 2003 | Somewhere between that spam promoting spyware
disguised as a chipper e-greeting and the latest e-mail-borne virus
masquerading as an urgent software upgrade, something got lost.
Not just a single overlooked urgent message from your boss, lodged in
a sea of ghastly teenage bestiality spam, but something more
fundamental, something more essential.
It's impossible to say exactly when the ritual of opening the e-mail
in box went from being the lure that brought you online in the first
place to a slough of deleting drudgery, full not only of irritating
commercial messages that you never signed up to receive, but also of
potential threats that could bring down your computer. But there's no
use being nostalgic for that earlier, simpler time, whenever you got
online, whether that was in 1984 or 1998. You can't go home again, or
at least, you can't go back to a home without spam.
The questions now are: Can e-mail be saved? How bad is the problem,
really ? And what can be done to fix it?
Salon interviewed four Internet pioneers, computer scientists who
have been online longer than most of the rest of world and who, in
some cases, helped set up the systems we use today.
Dave Farber, who sometimes calls himself "the grandfather of the
Internet" because many of his students went on to be its fathers, is
now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's school of computer
science. He first went online in 1962 and started on the Internet in
the late '60s "near the day it was born," when his student Dave
Crocker, now a principal in Brandenburg Consulting but then part of
the original Arpanet research community, "got the damn thing working."
Brad Templeton, chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, first used e-mail in 1976 and started the first ".com"
company, in 1989. And Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert and principal
of Nielsen Norman group, started using e-mail in 1981 and the
Internet back in 1985, when he worked at IBM's T.J. Watson Research
Center: "Every single time I sent e-mail to a non-IBM address, a
screen came up to warn me that we were sending information outside
the company and asked the user to confirm that no confidential
information was included."
....
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/10/02/e_mail/
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