Re: Hardening lists against spam attacks

[ph@netcom.com (Peter Hendrickson)]

At 11:47 AM 12/31/1996, Lucky Green wrote:
>At 10:25 AM 12/31/96 -0800, Peter Hendrickson wrote:
>> The easiest and fastest solution is to set up toad.com to charge a
>> dollar per message.  (Proceeds to be spent by John Gilmore as he
>> sees fit.)

>> We can then leverage off the existing e-cash infrastructure which
>> already provides blinding software for free on all major platforms.

> I am not sure that this proposal would work. Some of the spammers on this
> list are rather dedicated. They might gladly pay a dollar per message.

Let's try it and see how it goes.  If it doesn't work, we can try
a more complicated scheme.  (I volunteer to modify Majordomo to
make this happen.  We could have this feature in the near future.)

I think we should understand that two features are being discussed.

One is protecting the list from spam attacks.  By this I mean attacks
where somebody sends very large numbers of messages to the list
and brings the mail server to its knees.  Charging a dollar a message
solves this problem - just buy more hardware with the proceeds.  If The
Enemy wishes to finance the cypherpunks list - more power to him.

The other feature is filtering.  I do not need anybody to filter
my mail.  I am quite capable of doing it myself, thank you.

If somebody wants to set up a tokened filter scheme, that
is great, but let's see it implemented as an added header to
the cypherpunks messages.  Then people can filter on it if they
want, but it should be their choice.

Anybody who cannot set up such a filter, or find somebody who can
set up such a filter for them, or cannot find somebody who will
forward only filtered messages to them, is too helpless to be a
cypherpunk.

I have seen a lot of complaints about "too much noise".  That is
not a problem.  The problem is too little signal.  I can extract
the signal - unless it isn't there.

I propose that we spend the money on food for the monthly meeting.

Peter Hendrickson
ph@netcom.com