[HN Gopher] Computational mail for computer-supported cooperativ...
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Computational mail for computer-supported cooperative work (1992)
Author : codetrotter
Score : 20 points
Date : 2023-03-30 07:41 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.guppylake.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.guppylake.com)
| RedShift1 wrote:
| Heh recently I wondered why we don't use SMTP to send for example
| telemetry data around. It has everything for reliable message
| delivery. Instead I went with MQTT for the latest project that
| collected telemetry data and shoved it into a database, out of
| fear the next admin would come to hunt me down for using SMTP for
| a thing like this.
| st_goliath wrote:
| > Instead I went with MQTT for the latest project that
| collected telemetry data ...
|
| If you want broadcast-message-to-topic-subscribers style
| semantics, you could have [ab]used IRC for this, rather than
| SMTP :-P
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| Pretty unreliable [1] though. I'd sooner build some custom
| HTTP thing in front of Postgres or SQLite than try to do
| resending over IRC, a protocol which badly suffers from a
| fuzzy separation between payload and protocol.
|
| [1] If you lose connection, neither side is sure which
| messages they missed, and replaying is not part of the
| protocol. If you're gonna support a memo bot, why not build
| it in?
| theamk wrote:
| SMTP will be fine if you just use a protocol and set up all new
| parallel infra. Overhead will be quite a bit higher but that's
| not a problem in modern world.
|
| But sharing the existing email infra is pretty dangerous. You
| never know when spam filters decide to filter your messages and
| turn your "reliable" message delivery into black hole.
| messe wrote:
| > out of fear the next admin would come to hunt me down for
| using SMTP for a thing like this.
|
| Why would they need to _hunt_ you down? If you're actually
| implementing SMTP sensibly, they could reach you via the Reply-
| To address.
| codetrotter wrote:
| The link posted here https://www.guppylake.com/~nsb/CSCW-
| ATOMICMAIL.txt is the plain-text version
|
| See also the pdf at
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/143457.143463 which has a
| couple of pictures at the end.
| codetrotter wrote:
| I am sharing this link because I think it is interesting how
| close many of the things said here, in 1992, are to what ended up
| happening.
|
| > What is really needed is a platform on which distributed
| applications can be built without concern for the problems of
| distribution, user buy-in, and heterogeneous interaction
| environment.
|
| > [...]
|
| > One solution is to "piggyback" the engine on top of a
| technology that is already at the fingertips of most computer
| users today, electronic mail.
|
| This is more or less exactly what happened. Except it ended up
| happening not on top of email but on top of www.
| lisper wrote:
| One of the things that the world doesn't seem to have realized
| yet even thought it should be glaringly obvious by now is that
| when designing protocols for electronic interactions one must
| choose carefully when to push and when to pull. Email is push-
| only. HTTP is pull-only (or at least it was when it started
| out). To really do the Right Thing you need both working
| together. And there are two rules that should guide the design:
|
| 1. Push should only be used when it is necessary to draw the
| user's attention to something in a timely manner.
|
| 2. Push should never transfer large quantities of data. Large
| quantities of data should always be pulled, never pushed.
|
| Email violates both of these principles, and HTTP doesn't have
| push at all.
|
| The real problem is that email is the only push standard that
| is both open and widely deployed. Everything else is either
| proprietary (Twitter, iMessage, SMS) or niche (mastodon) or
| both.
| zwieback wrote:
| I would argue that SMS is the other popular standardized push
| protocol.
| lisper wrote:
| Yes, I mentioned that in my OP. It's standard, but not
| open. You can neither send nor receive SMS over the
| internet without paying a third party.
| zwieback wrote:
| Oh, I didn't know that. So those services where you send
| an email to an address and it shows up as an SMS are not
| generally open? Yeah, I guess that would move it into the
| proprietary column.
| lisper wrote:
| Nope, those are all run by the cell carriers. If you
| change carriers, your SMS email gateway address changes
| too.
|
| (There are some services that try to be carrier-
| independent but they eventually have to interface with
| the carriers somehow. There is no way to send an SMS that
| doesn't eventually end up in the (proprietary) cell
| network.)
| codetrotter wrote:
| But is the cell network ultimately different from the
| Internet?
|
| You have to pay an ISP too, to connect to the Internet.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I can't formulate a technical reason why there is
| difference.
|
| I guess I have to go with culture... there are very few
| if any systems which talk to each other over SMS.
| Definitely not in a standardised manner, if so. Custom
| SCADA systems, maybe.
|
| (SMS is more like how modems were back in the day, re
| automated systems.)
|
| So there are very few apps on SMS today. Almost all
| communication is either machine system > human. (Spam,
| 2FA, etc.) Or human <-> human.
|
| Edit:
|
| in a parallel reality where we were stuck on SMS for some
| reason (alien invasion in 1989, successfully repelled but
| much of value was lost, for instance) and SMS messages
| were to become cheap or free (as they often are today) I
| could definitely see an "internet" growing up with SMS as
| the transfer backbone.
|
| Much of the basics could be done over SMS, status
| updates, "email", news and so on.
|
| Heck, Twitter ran on sms I'm told. (It was a US thing,
| right?)
| lisper wrote:
| The cell network is radically different from the
| internet.
|
| 1. You need a SIM card to connect to the cell network.
| There is no cell-network equivalent of "free wifi".
|
| 2. If you have a (paid) internet connection you can net
| anyone connect to it with their own hardware. You can't
| share a cell network connection that way.
|
| 3. The internet is packet-switched. The cell network is
| (mostly) connection-based.
|
| 4. The cell network lacks broadcast and multicast
| protocols.
|
| 5. Cell network connections are always peer-to-peer. You
| can't have a "server" on the cell network. The concept
| doesn't even make sense.
|
| I could go on and on.
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