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Impoverish a Spammer Today
esj at harvee writes "Recently the Camram project released its latest version of a hybrid sender-pays anti-spam system. The project has proven that sender-pays works and has demonstrated how to make it work with existing e-mail systems. Camram has developed hybrid sender-pays techniques that scale down to the desktop and up to the enterprise. It's a completely decentralized system that can put spam-fighting power in the hands of individuals. It gives you control of not only the current generation of spam, but also any future commercial spam -- why replace Viagra ads from a scam artist with Viagra ads from Pfizer?"
This could really change the way e-mail is distributed.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
What happens when your box has just been highjacked by the latest MS exploit and used as a Spam server/relay.
"We all know that Crap is King" - Don Henley
Or maybe businesses should find a new way to communicate internally?
It is just bush and the other idiots who signed the federal law, killed it and made it a recipient suffers system.
Fight Spammers!
Yes, but the point of this is making to make it trivial to send 50 or so e-mails a day, while making it prohibitively expensive in computation costs to send 50 million emails a day.
If it takes 3 seconds per e-mail, the average user won't notice the addition, but the average spammer will have to spend 1700 hours computing stamps to send his 50 million emails.
Ah, but the spammers aren't and won't pay for their servers. They will continue to hijack other peoples machines through worms and trojans and just eat up the CPU time of the zombie machines. This might slow down the overall flow of spam some as the total computational time available is certainly less than the total bandwidth available if the computation function is tuned that way but it's not going to eliminate spam at all.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
On their site they address zombie machines. They claim that users of zombies would be more likely to notice the infection if it sucked up all their CPU and made their systems run hot...
I somehow doubt that.
But what I can't disagree with, is that getting the same amount of spam sent as they currently are, would take many (orders of magnitude) more zombies. They claim on their site that if you maxed out every known zombie you couldn't generate stamps fast enought to send spam at the current rates.
This could be a step in the right direction, but I am worried about many issues for a sender pays system.
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Ah, but the spammers aren't and won't pay for their servers. They will continue to hijack other peoples machines through worms and trojans and just eat up the CPU time of the zombie machines.
sender pays stamping is a decent solution to spam, but it's not any solution to stupid lusers.
The solution to the luser problem is:
People need to stop objecting to spam solutions based on the existance of other problems. Sender pays stamping doesn't stop viruses and trojans because it's not supposed to, other systems like firewalls, patches, and anti virus tools are supposed to. Rather than complaining that spam solutions don't solve the malware problem, we ought to be educating people on how to use these things and working on improving them.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Did you even read the proposal? I ask because both your original post and your response the the first reply iindicate that you still have no idea how this works, even after someone has been kind enough to save you from your own laziness and point out this proposal is not talking about a montary transation.
So, for your benefit, here is the "proof of work for complete idiots" version:
-You send your spam. Each recipient asks you to perform a proof of work, a mathematical problem that requires some CPU cycles.
-Your CPU starts chugging away at the requests and eventually performs all of the required proof of work.
-Your system responds to the proof of work request and the message is delivered.
-Your spam to your users is delivered, but not instantly because several hours of CPU work were required.
-Cost to you: nothing except a bit of electricity to keep your CPU chugging.
It doesn't matter whether spammers hijack others' machines or not. proof-of-work stamps will still reduce the amount of spam. Without PoW stamps, a spammer with the same number of machines will be able to send an order of magnitude more spam.
Proof of Work stamps don't magically give spammers a horde of zombie machines to spam with. They have those machines whether or not real people use stamps.
I suspect the goal of a program like this really is not to stop spam. The goal would be to increase the marginal return from the spam that gets sent and for the network to grab a piece of the action.
When someone is paying you, it is extremely difficult to make judgments on quality of the mail. I've seen lots of email lists and newsletters start with good intentions then devolve into a garbage fountain.
In the end the pay to send networks will take money from anyone.
The real goal of such schemes is simply to increase the marginal returns from the spam. As the amount of spam sent to open email accounts reaches astronomical proportions, I can't help but think that the amount of cash the spammers get per email is dropping. I can't help but think that the end goal of pay for spam is that by throwing a rich third party into the equation, they will increase their return.
Your example of "Email from nonspammer - not going to get filtered, if it does, will send again." is somewhat flawed. Do you think a (reasonable) spam filter will not detect two similar emails from apparently the same source and draw the obvious conclusion? Looking at my Yahoo! Mail Bulk Folder, the spammers are sending me the same emails every day, often with the same From: lines.
Ultimately, yes, they'll find a way to contact you for the first time, but it'll take a little trying and they will not necessarily know they failed at all. Or they can send you a stamp with their first email, and everything will just work.
What this system does is provide a mechanism that guards against the destruction of legitimate email and ensures you are always easily contactable by anyone making the effort to contact YOU specifically. If the time comes that your filters are useless, you can turn off those filters, turning them on again for those occasions you're expecting legitimate non-stamped email.
As far as the last sentence goes, the economics are all wrong. Spammers want to send email to everyone. If this idea has widespread adoption, they'll need a few billion dollar's worth of Apple G5s to get a single message out. If this idea doesn't, well, they're not going to even care much about not being able to contact you. It's a win-win situation for you, and a lose-lose situation for the spammers.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
No, it's not perfect. But not much is. People can and always will be able to spam. However, this measure does help. A lot.
:]) Heck, even mainstream outlets like CNN would be more likely to report on the issue if it's this obvious. Now, there will always be the utterly clueless who will continue to operate regardless. But there will be not be enough of them to provide the critical mass needed for spammers.
For starters, sending out 1/10 your E-Mail means you're no longer making a pile of money. Odds are, it will still be profitable. But that's not very motivating. Some spammers might not mind just running a few scripts to automate getting 1/10 of a pile money. However, the drop in profits will significantly ruin the market for spamming tools. If spammers no longer make a boatload, they're no longer going to pay a boatload for anonymailers, zombies, E-Mail lists, etc. Thus, people are going to be less motivated to code these damn things in the first place. That will make it a lot more difficult for those who actually want to spam to actually pull it off.
And with the more obvious symptoms of infection, more people will get it cleared up. And the more this happens, the more word will spread. Nobody educates a luser like another luser. (They at least speak a common language.
--LordPixie
You may be an anti-spam kook if...
Click Here, it's funny in the so-true-it's-sad way