[15115] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: why "penny black" etc. are not very useful
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ben Laurie)
Wed Dec 31 10:40:30 2003
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
X-Original-To: cryptography@metzdowd.com
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 11:12:11 +0000
From: Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk>
To: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>
Cc: cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: <87isjy5n9f.fsf@snark.piermont.com>
Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> In my opinion, the various hashcash-to-stop-spam style schemes are not
> very useful, because spammers now routinely use automation to break
> into vast numbers of home computers and use them to send their
> spam. They're not paying for CPU time or other resources, so they
> won't care if it takes more effort to send. No amount of research into
> interesting methods to force people to spend CPU time to send mail
> will injure the spammers.
If you set the price to 1 minute of CPU, and spammers own 10% of all
machines on the 'net, then the average machine can only receive 144
spams per day. That's a significant improvement on my situation.
Plus I'd've thought that having 100% CPU utilisation all the time might
attract attention. But maybe not.
Cheers,
Ben.
--
http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he
doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
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