Slashdot Mirror
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?"
I dont consider a white list to be a "good" method. For one thing, most spam I get is claiming to be from a known source (ie someone who knows me has a worm and is spamming from their address book). So you cant just filter by sender. Also, white lists dont deal with the fact that a lot of email is from first time corresponders such as online retail outlets.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Others have mentioned that this will make it easier for the user to notice that their PC has been hijacked, but another side-effect is that it will perform a rate-limiting service on that zombie. If each zombie can only send 100 messages an hour instead of 100,000 then that is another important benefit.
It seems to me that one should need only one stamp generator. I receive a payment request containing a message encrypted with a short private key, and as "postage" I need to decrypt the message and return it. As computers get faster, the key length used to encrypt the message gets longer. The receiver can thus decide how much postage is required.
This way the stamp generator doesn't need to have any secret component, and could be written in any language. It could be part of the mail client.
And how many messages does the Linux Kernel Mailing List send per day?
You think large legitimate lists will count on everyone subscribing whitelisting the list correctly?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
So the next spam zombie worm will just whitelist everyone?