Forgeries

[P3D John W Roberts <roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I considered the forgery "joke" to be in very poor taste. I read photo-3d
mainly to get *information*, and it does provide a tremendous amount of
very useful information. Frauds of any kind reduce the value of all of the
information, but forgeries are especially bad - if I'm fooled, I want to
know *who* to be less trusting of in the future. (By the way, that's
one valid use of the "smiley" - to separate the credibility of a *statement*
from the credibility of the person making the statement.)

Society works to the extent that it does largely because most people are
willing to voluntarily follow certain conventions - for instance, we get
to have the convenience of pay telephones and vending machines because *most*
people don't consider it a good joke to squirt epoxy in the coin slots.
When a sufficient number of people consider a convention no longer worth
following, either some benefit we've been enjoying is taken away, or our
lives become more regimented - e.g. all the security provisions at airports.
I knew a person who kept sending forged email to his boss, despite vehement
instructions to desist. His attitude was "it doesn't bother *me*, so it
shouldn't bother anyone else, and I'll ignore requests to stop because they're
wrong to be bothered by it". Eventually he was slapped down hard enough
that he *did* stop, and fortunately he stopped while he still had a job.

Perhaps someday there will be authentication built into the Internet -
machines on the net could just refuse to pass on messages without
authentication (I doubt that there's a constitutional "right to forge").
The more people abuse the current system, the more pressure there will be
to institute this type of policy. For now, security measures such as
PGP will work, though they seem to me to be a little awkward to use.
The simplest measure for the time being, if a message affects you and
if there's a chance it's not authentic, is to send email directly to that
person, with the message in question quoted, and asking a question of
your own that doesn't obviously derive from the message in question.
There are probably ways to break into that communication, but much more
difficult than a simple forgery. (And don't trust "really important"
communications to email alone. :-)

Note: in the US and France, at least, it seems to be considered socially
acceptable to post an occasional harmless gag (presumably with your own
name attached), provided that it's posted on April 1, and preferably with
substantial hints that it's a joke.

John R


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