Cartoon by Peter Steiner. The New Yorker, July 5, 1993 issue (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20) page 61 

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog

After last night's discussion about whether having anonymity on the web is a good thing, this article from cnet caught my eye...how to prove you are indeed who you say you are on the web.

One paragraph in particular struck me:

Still, technologists have been trying for years to develop systems for authenticating the identity of e-mail senders in order to cut down on fraudulent spam. But those systems have yet to be fully worked out among industry leaders.

It is still too easy to send an email pretending to be someone else. If campaign emails and peer to peer networks are really to be a success, I need to be confident not only that the information someone is sending me is reliable, but it is indeed from whom I think it is from. Few people know how to validate an email address, and the current systems are too cumbersome for most people to set up and manage.

But being able to validate a sender will be crucial if email is to continue to be useful as a publishing and informational mechanism. If not, emails from campaigns will be removed from the spam filter, and a tremendously powerful medium will become useless. Meanwhile, Howard Dean's online campaigners would never have got beyond that volunteering page...