[13252] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: economics of spam (Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Sommerfeld)
Tue May 13 08:59:57 2003
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
From: Bill Sommerfeld <sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us>
To: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace.org>
Cc: Matt Crawford <crawdad@fnal.gov>, bear <bear@sonic.net>,
cypherpunks@lne.com, cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 12 May 2003 21:45:57 BST."
<20030512214557.A9261480@exeter.ac.uk>
Reply-To: sommerfeld@orchard.arlington.ma.us
Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 21:52:12 -0400
> The other side of this equation is what a second of CPU costs in
> monetary terms to a spammer. (To an end user it is essentially free
> because his CPU is mostly idle anyway; the limiting factor for the
> user is his preference for fast mail delivery (and in the dialup
> case an unwillingness to sit waiting for tokens to be calcluated
> before his mail can be sent).
If you believe http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2988209.stm,
spammers are beginning to use viruses to deploy spam relays.
If a spammer has a zombie army of a few thousand compromised systems,
the spammer's cpu time costs for hashcash will also essentially be
free.
- Bill
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