The BIGGEST mistake in the history of the public internet was in letting Marc Andreesen get away with adding the IMG SRC tag to NCSA Mosaic in 1992/3-ish.
The second-biggest mistake was allowing browsers to automatically load all images in a web page.
In both cases, the perpetrators should have been tarred and feathered, publicly mocked, then tarred and feathered again until they repented.
We should ban video from the public internet. It's the only way to be sure.
@ysbreker @cstross Programmers by and large share the general ignorance of systems under selection.
Email begets spam because the cost to send an email is zero; if you can make any money by sending email, it drowns.
If you want to make the thing work, you've got to acknowledge selection and build it so anti-social behavior rapidly acquires intolerable costs without building it so that it's a machine for enforcing normalcy.
What we've got is a machine enforcing the normalcy of advertising.
The biggest cost, in Germany or otherwise, is the people who do the talking to the callees. It dwarfs the costs of RTNR and suchlike.
That has long since (i.e. decades ago) been optimized, both by mechanizing the Hell out of the call filtering process and enabling remote operations where labour costs are cheap; and mass telephone calling is really not a counterexample to the claim that expense makes such things difficult.
Indeed, what has happened, rather, is that a demand for outbound call centres has given the world cheap off-the-shelf set-ups for this stuff, complete with everything from answer 'phone detection to agent activity/performance tracking.
@bithive Spam phone calls hereabouts don't necessarily originate from licit network endpoints.
More formally, spam email has zero incremental costs; once you're connected to the network, spam email n+1 is functionally free.
Setting things up so you can't tell who said that and can make spam intolerably expensive to send is hard.
(Police are a major nexus of domestic abusers and you want someone being assaulted to be able to say so and get help truly anonymously.)
@8r3n7 Junk mail makes its money from the people paying to send it, who are operating on belief. (You can't prove people didn't come to your store because of the weekly flyer and people do use the coupons so it works, right? If you stop sending the flyer, people will stop coming!)
I get laminated discount cards and offers with every order, some places. Someone has a business as a successful parasite on the place I order from; it happens to involve sneezing flyers.
@snippy Like everything else, bad actors in a system mean matching variety, system constraints, or some kind of variety amplifier in the system.
Part of the problem with the internet goldrush era is that those things are socially distributed in ways that make them unavailable to any one responsible party managing the system. (Your sysadmin can't send you to jail. Which is probably for the best except they kinda need to sometimes.)
@snippy @cstross @graydon @aiusepsi @ysbreker this fails to take into account the context of the era in which these technologies emerged. Bad design? Yes. But it's unclear if it could have been any other way.
TCP/IP was the underdog in the early 90s; telcos and the big computer manufacturers were betting on ISO/OSI and their own proprietary goo (DECnet, SNA, etc). The Internet was viewed as a prototype, not a production system, and the design of many of the protocols reflected that. SMTP and authentication? Who needed that when the only people who got access to the network were more or less trusted entities at research organizations? Sure, some precocious undergrads might screw around with forging email, but what's the harm in that? It's a lot less destructive than many campus pranks. Yes yes, I know some folks who were there will vehemently disagree, but I was there too and that was my experience ca 1994.
Then Berners-Lee sort of stumbled on the web and it became the Internet's "killer app". The Clinton administration moved the Internet from a research project to something that could be commercialized. OSI was years delayed, complex designed by committee, the tech people hated it (it was designed by the telecom people, not the computer people), TCP was pretty good for most use cases and IP was good enough, and the Internet was already here, now. I remember looking at the web for the first time and thinking, "wow, this is garbage; who would ever use this?" HTTP was clearly an inferior protocol with excessively high overhead, HTML was overly verbose yet anemic to an extreme for representing complicated documents, and the thing wasn't interactive at all unless you were using a NeXT machine; using early web "apps" was like using a glorified 3270 terminal with pictures. But people loved it because it was graphical and had pictures, and in many ways it democratized access to the 'net: you didn't _have_ to internalize the esoterica of the abstruse command-line interfaces of the systems of yore, let alone how to use TELNET or anonymous FTP; that was all hidden away under a point-and-click veneer.
So of course it's all built on a teetering house of cards, but when viewed across the evolutionary arc of the whole thing, each little step along the way seemed to make sense locally.
Charlie Stross
ysbreker
A. R. Younce
Graydon
BitHive 
JdeBP
Account: Computers
Poligofsky 🇨🇦 .. 🚫🤖
Chakat Firepaw
Andy Simpson
Snippy
Piers Cawley
Dan Cross