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I was reading this post on jet lag cure at Lifehacker (a great site, by the way), when I saw this line: "What really helped was watching what I ate and drank before, during, and after the flight." My mind read this twice as: "What really helped was eating and drinking before, during, and after the flight."

Oh my.

. . .

Leedar asked a great question as a comment in my previous post.

How do we deal with internet spam?

Honestly, I've only given a short thought to this growing problem, so the answer I'm writing here is pretty vague, but should give you a rough idea of how I think it might be accomplished.

Ultimately the problem of spam comes down to the balance between anonymity and privacy versus identity authentication on the web. These two items are mutually exclusive ... so where you have give priority over to anonymity, you will have greater problems with spamming.

Quite honestly, I think the best solution is to have some sort of centralized, federated authority system. This is in, no way, a system to track the activities of individual users on the web; it's sole purpose would to give ONE central identity 'card' to each legitimate user on the web.

You would be required to provide some sort of solid government-issued identification to receive this identity ... and this identity would only be issued once. One identity per person.

When creating an account on Tabulas, for example, you could provide the username/password for your federated identity card, which would through a series of activities check back to a primary server to verify your identity. Tabulas might provide you an incentive to use this identity card during the registration process, although users can still register without the card (opt-in).

In essence, it's vaguely similar to OpenID, but a bit different by forcing a bit more of authentication and storing a bit more information about the user in one place.

Now, this really goes against what everyone believes the Internet is all about, but in reality, privacy on the internet is a joke.

To take advantage of any site on the web, what do you have to do? You have to register. Look at how many registrations you have floating around, with that information being sold to whoever? All this federated system would do is create ONE repository of basic information and provide an API for verification by third-party sites. Since this would not be a for-profit site, it would have to be set-up by either a non-profit organization (preferable) or run by the government (no thanks).

The reality of the matter is that there is no such thing on privacy on the web already, and since this would be an opt-in measure, it wouldn't have to bother anybody at all. Everyone on the Internet already has registered to at least one site - it would just be a matter of registering to the federated system and using that system as a springboard for registration elsewhere.

Amazon could do this already. They already are able to verify individual users; just provide a username/password API to check ... and we can link third-party sites to Amazon's log-in system.