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 Wednesday, November 02, 2011 |
| Why I was wrong about SPF (sender policy framework) |
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In a previous post about Sender Policy Framework (SPF) I was not enthusiastic. SPF is a field type in a DNS record. It points to a mail server. Rememver the Domain Name Sustem (DNS) resolves a url, like www.damon4.com, to a physical address, such as 12.34.89.100. SPF helps mail servers reject spoofed email. It is imperfect security. I am reassessing my position on this. But first a quick story or two. You will see the relevance.
When I was in China the students told me two stories. The first one was of a child who was kidnapped. The kidnappers asked for 200K RMB. The parents called the police. They were waiting for the kidnappers at the money/child handoff. There was a chase, but then the police caught the kidnappers and shot them dead. Right on the spot. No F*ing around. I felt safe in China, there was some petty crime (pickpockets etc), but not much violent crime.
 The second story the kids told me was of a bus that ran outside the cluster of Universities that was involved in an accident. Apparently many students were hurt and several died. The problem is there was nothing reported in the news about this. The students were in a vacuum as to the status of their classmates. They were upset about this. Chinese media control of an embarassing event.
This is why I have come to the conclusion that there is trade-off between security and freedom. Perhaps SPF is the best trade-off of the two. Think about it. If you can absolutely block Spam then you have complete censure control as well.
Perhaps the SPF imperfection is just enough to make Spam less attractive monetarily, but perhaps it also allows enough anonymity to foil censure. |
damon at 7:03 PM |
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