Re: Excerpt on SPAM from Edupage, 11 February 1997

[ichudov@algebra.com (Igor Chudov @ home)]

Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
> > Clearly, spammers who pay their readers to read their messages (and who
> > do get them to read) will have a very high response rate. That may 
> > justify adding postage to their letters.
> 
> It should also spur development of intelligent agents which can retrieve
> this cash without human intervention.  Spammers will doubtless alter
> their pages to require more interaction to find the key to the cash.
> Then the IA's will be improved.  Then... remember the copy protection
> wars?  This isn't necessarily a negative point.
> 
> > The advantages are obvious. The disadvantage is a possibility of someone
> > stealing the money on the way, if the letters are not encrypted.
> 
> Or that the money wasn't there in the first place (absent a trusted
> signature system), or the key doesn't exist, or the wrong key is
> offered, or the sender put the same e-dollar on all 60000 mails sie
> sent and it's already been redeemed.

Well, if the trusted party performs the encryption by both recipient's
public key and the "retrieval key", the problem that you mention can 
be avoided.

	- Igor.