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The Register have an article about this guy from 12 years before this where he apparently besieged a mailing list with his plans for a revolutionary anti-spam s

The Register have an article about this guy from 12 years before this where he apparently besieged a mailing list with his plans for a revolutionary anti-spam system: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/11/weve_found_the_perfect_solution/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/07/11/weve_found_the_perf...

henrikschroder 7y ago
Holy crap what a rabbit hole indeed! "Thirdly, we deliberately introduced confusion over the systems architecture. This was not to protect any secrets we had, it was just another tactic in the controversial marketing tactic." So it's not that he can't explain how it works, he deliberately introduced errors in the explanation, which allows him to conveniently claim that people poking holes in his crap don't actually understand the system, because he hasn't accurately described the system! Haha! Gotcha! Therefore the system is perfect! "I had done it, I was the first in the world to prove, beyond any doubt, that the pyramids of the Giza Necropolis were, in fact, a scale representation of the three inner planets." Wow. Just wow. That took a turn. Extensive pattern matching is a marker for mental illness, and is no joke. That explains so much about the author.
wolfgang42 7y ago
To be fair to Mr. McCarron, having muddled my way through his accusations against ASRG and life history, the basic idea of his scheme¹ is simple and appears sound; when DKIM was later standardized it would achieve the same result (albeit by cryptography rather than a simple token check). Unfortunately, he seems to have missed the idea of just adding a new envelope header and SMTP command, and instead gone the route of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and reinventing not only the wheel, but quite possibly the concept of circularity itself. Not only was GEIS to have replaced SMTP (in an entirely incompatible way), but he even went so far as to declare that “all 'GIEIS' servers will run on a separate transmission protocol (not TCP/IP).” Add to that protocol megalomania some impenetrable architecture diagrams, a curious bit of Egyptology, self-admitted arrogance, and a very suspicious bit of sock-puppetry, and it's no wonder that the Register gave him such a send-up. ¹(include a nonce when sending an email, which the recipient can check with the originating server to confirm that the email is genuine)
aritmo 7y ago
Wow! Was all that the result of excessive praise during childhood that made him unable to self-criticize in adult life?

henrikschroder 7y ago

Holy crap what a rabbit hole indeed! "Thirdly, we deliberately introduced confusion over the systems architecture. This was not to protect any secrets we had, it was just another tactic in the controversial marketing tactic." So it's not that he can't explain how it works, he deliberately introduced errors in the explanation, which allows him to conveniently claim that people poking holes in his crap don't actually understand the system, because he hasn't accurately described the system! Haha! Gotcha! Therefore the system is perfect! "I had done it, I was the first in the world to prove, beyond any doubt, that the pyramids of the Giza Necropolis were, in fact, a scale representation of the three inner planets." Wow. Just wow. That took a turn. Extensive pattern matching is a marker for mental illness, and is no joke. That explains so much about the author.

wolfgang42 7y ago

To be fair to Mr. McCarron, having muddled my way through his accusations against ASRG and life history, the basic idea of his scheme¹ is simple and appears sound; when DKIM was later standardized it would achieve the same result (albeit by cryptography rather than a simple token check). Unfortunately, he seems to have missed the idea of just adding a new envelope header and SMTP command, and instead gone the route of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and reinventing not only the wheel, but quite possibly the concept of circularity itself. Not only was GEIS to have replaced SMTP (in an entirely incompatible way), but he even went so far as to declare that “all 'GIEIS' servers will run on a separate transmission protocol (not TCP/IP).” Add to that protocol megalomania some impenetrable architecture diagrams, a curious bit of Egyptology, self-admitted arrogance, and a very suspicious bit of sock-puppetry, and it's no wonder that the Register gave him such a send-up. ¹(include a nonce when sending an email, which the recipient can check with the originating server to confirm that the email is genuine)

aritmo 7y ago

Wow! Was all that the result of excessive praise during childhood that made him unable to self-criticize in adult life?