[extropy-chat] About SPAM again

[Rik van Riel]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Paul Grant wrote:

> > Microsoft (and others?) have a proposal (the Penny Black project) out
> > that would force unsolicited incoming emails to consume something like
> > 10 seconds of CPU time on the sender CPU before they are accepted.  I

In the late 1990's, this used to be known as hashcash.

> What would be the point; spammers would just buy faster processors

Why buy them when you can get a spamware trojan running
on hundreds of thousands of Windows systems and use
other people's bandwidth and CPU time ?

Estimates are that there are about 900.000 Windows systems
out there with a spam trojan running.  That's a LOT of CPU
for any hashcash like scheme.


Major <extropy at audry2.com> wrote:
> I didn't know this was Microsoft's.

It's not. I think hash-cash was first proposed over 10 years ago.

> this may be the first really *good* thing the evil empire has done.

Too bad it's been obsolete since the point where spammers
started to use dedicated spam trojans, about 2 years ago.

cheers,

Rik
-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan