forged cancels (Re: Entrust Technologies's Solo - free download)

[Adam Back <aba@dcs.ex.ac.uk>]

Some people have been arguing that cancelling other peoples posts
based on their own subjective views is a good thing.

It would seem that they are arguing that it is a good thing because it
saves bandwidth, and because it gives them satisfaction to silence
unpopular minorities.

Foo on that.

It's censorship.  If you didn't write it, you have no business
cancelling it.

NoCems are a good solution to mailing list and USENET groups spams.
Then each person can take their pick of which posters article ratings
to use, or can create their own rating service.

For email spams (not talking about cancels here), I'd suggest
attaching electronic payment to emails as a condition of delivery.

A temporary fix for emails, or another approach, is to use hashcash.
Hashcash is a token of CPU time.  It proves that the sender has
consumed a given number of seconds/minutes/hours CPU time.  The
receiver sets their software to reject mail (bounce with explanation,
or put into potential spam folder) to squelch out spam.

A description of hashcash, and an implementation can be found here:

	http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/hashcash/

Mail from known addresses (friends, mailing lists) would be marked as
exempt from postage requirements.

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

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