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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.
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.