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Microsoft Researching Anti-Spam Technique
Tim C writes "Microsoft's Research group are working on a technique to combat spam. Dubbed the 'Penny Black project', it involves making email senders perform a computation taking around 10 seconds, which their recipients can then check for. This delay would limit bulk emailing speeds to around 8000 a day, meaning that to spam all of those 'fresh, guaranteed 25 million addresses' would take approximately 8.5 years." We've reported on this before.
The BBC article doesn't mention one point that's very important to me: How open will the publication of the technique be? I have to be suscpicious of any proposed new internet standard coming from a research foundation funded by Microsoft. Yeah, call that MS bashing, but the fact remains that there's a STRONG precedent here for that suspicion. MS would love to have a new standard adopted that can only work if both the sender and recipient have to use MS products.
In general, the solution they propose is great. Add a slight resource cost to sending an e-mail and it doesn't affect most legitimate e-mails but it does affect massive spam floods. And they came up with a resource cost that will work the same even on a faster computer - so it doesn't get 'fixed' by waiting for faster hardware or by running a bunch of machines in parallel. BUT the really BIG BIG problem here is that it requires that the sender be using a compatable e-mailer. What exactly will it take to be comptable? Is it going to be a published standard that will be easy to implement in the wide variety of mailers out there? Will it be *legal* to do so? If not, will people who reverse engineer it so that they can send e-mails from non-MS platforms be slandered by the industry claiming they are spammers? (In EXACTLY the same way that people trying to view DVD content on non-approved platforms get labelled as DVD pirates.)
The idea at it's core is sound, but I want these questions answered before I would trust that there aren't alterior motives at work here.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.