The Internet Engineering Task Force has shut down the working group that was coming up with standards for e-mail authentication. E-mail authentication, for those who haven’t been following this whole process, is thought to be the first step in getting rid of spam, phishing, etc.
*sigh*
I know authentication will be happening in one form or another, as Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo! and Earthlink are going to do something. (Probably all different things, but that’s another story.) I’d had this utopian idea that a bunch of engineering types could sit down together and work things out. Alas, it was not to be.
From Ted Hardie’s e-mail announcing the dissolution:
The group was originally chartered with a very tight time frame, with the expectation that a focused group of engineers would be able to produce in relatively short order a standard in the area of DNS-stored policies related to and accessible by MTAs….. Each [possible solution] represents trade-offs, and the working group has not succeeded in establishing which trade-offs are the most appropriate for this purpose….The group remains divided on very basic issues.
Well, I once thought the FTC’s planned sit-down in November would be fairly boring, because, of course, everything would have been worked out by then. But now…