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Re: non-censorous spam control (was Re: Spam is Information?)
> > I agree. If charging for mail would eliminate spam, then I should not
> > be getting the mailboxfull of physical junk mail I receive every
> > morning. Postage benefits the MAIL CARRIER, not the recipient, and it
> > is in the best interests of the mail carrier to carry MORE mail, not
> > less. So, e-postage will almost certainly cause more spam, not less.
Hashcash is a more elegant and simple solution to UCE: most UCE is sent
by small companies looking for a cheap way to get big exposure, they
aren`t going to have the hardware to generate partial hash collisions for
every address they want to mail, it would be prohibitively expensive for
them to buy fast hardware to generate the collisions. Of course large
companies who can afford to buy, or already have, mainframes will be able
to send UCE, but most large companies are smart enough to realise that
with the response rate gained from UCE, the reputation capital lost
through sending it, and the valuable mainframe time used to generate the
hashcash, it all adds up to a big shit sandwich.
Adam Back: I haven`t read the hashcash paper/description for a while,
can you give us some figures on how much processor time is required to
generate hashcash for a 10,000 recipient spam, for n recipients?
Sudden and very exciting idea:
What if we could find a way to make the amount of hashcash required grow
exponentially with the number of recipients? Of course the spammer could
then find the optimum number of recipients and divide the list of
addresses to be spammed into blocks of that size but that is a waste of
sendmail time, also a waste of bandwidth and the overall time would
probably still be prohibitively high.
Datacomms Technologies data security
Paul Bradley, [email protected]
[email protected], [email protected]
Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
"Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"