[extropy-chat] About SPAM again

[Robert J. Bradbury]

Commenting on my comment regarding mail protocols that impose a
cost on the sender -- On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Paul Grant wrote:

> What would be the point; spammers would just buy faster processors (in
> case of computationally intensive "tokens");
> either that, or forge the headers (in case of honor-bound, I waited ten
> seconds).

The problem is that much of the SPAM now-a-days is coming from compromised
Windows machines that are functioning as open relays.  Try to send a million
SPAM messages thru one of these machines and the user is likely to notice
that his machine is running slowly doing all that extra computing.  (This
was how I found a computer virus had infected my laptop once -- the internal
fan was always on because the virus was using the CPU for heavy duty number
crunching.)  Shortly after that all of my Windows machines went behind a
firewall as the easy way to avoid having to continually monitor Microsoft
for security patches.

FYI: A /. article a while back that commonly users installing Windows off
of a CD that may be a year or more old do *not* have time to download
and install all of the security patches from Microsoft before their
machine becomes compromised (even if they even knew enough to do this...).
Any individual that connects a Windows machine directly to the net
is playing Russian roulette but most people are clueless.  If a million
SPAM haters were to swamp one of these relay machines such that it
made a dent in the ISP or DNS provider performance -- then they would
get serious about cutting off clients who are providing free resources
to the SPAMers.

Robert