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Attention Bonds Gain Momentum
Thede writes "Hi all - the ABM, a proposed solution to spam first posted to /. back in February, is gaining some momentum and refinement. It has been presented it at the Federal Trade Commission, the ACM, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and at the ITU in Geneva earlier this month. The original post referenced an academic article that not so accessible. We now have a short FAQ and a very detailed Q and A that covers a lot of the issues raised over the last five months. Next step (barring gaping holes) is to get a standards effort going - and most of the needed standards already exist."
You haven't read the article.
The sender sends the email, no money attached. If the sender isn't on the recipient's whitelist, the recipient's mail system automatically challenges the sender to attach a bond. The sender either accepts by sending the bond and the mail goes through or the sender refuses and the mail is blocked.
So you only get to keep the money if the sender
1) is not on your whitelist and
2) you request a bond
3) the sender sends the bond
A legitimate mailing list provider would obviously reject bond requests because he has reason to believe that the users want the mail and therefore should have whitelisted him. Requesting a bond from a mailing list to which you subscribed would be interpreted as an unsubscribe message.
2: Who e-mails porn sites? Most web-sites that charge for service ike Transgaming, have you fill out a web form, which you then supply your e-mail address. People will wise up very soon (like one messg and 1 cent) and not e-mail dubious sites.
3: It's not designed to be a profit system, but your ISP could hold your money, say as a small deposit with your account.
4: From the concerns you raise, I'm not so sure that you read the article
..........FULL STOP.
>Next step (barring gaping holes) is to get a
s _4_41/ai_94668338
>standards effort going - and most of the needed
>standards already exist
You do, of course, realize that IBM has already patented this same idea.
They define this as an interrupt cost, but the basic principles are pretty much identical...
Check out http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0ISJ/i
claiming that the HIV virus, the virus that causes AIDS, is a virus that was manufactured in American laboratories between 1962 and 1978.
The US government's claim to invention may be invalidated by prior art. HIV was around before 1959 (though there is some dispute ).
If you look up the patent that supposedly proves that Gallo invented HIV, you will see that it is NOT a patent on HIV, it is a patent on a method of reproducing HIV extracted from humans and it was filed after public research on HIV. Reproducing a pathogen is an important part of conducting research, both as an amplifier for presence tests, to make large numbers of identical samples to experiment on, to allow the American Type Culture Collection to archive the virus and make copies of it, and to allow others to reproduce research. It is much better to copy one virus particle than try to extract lots of HIV, and only HIV, from blood. Now, whether patenting such a process rather than placing it in the public domain is assinine is another discussion.
All the Copyright notices by Zygote Media on many of the web sites that report this do not inspire confidence, either. "Media" in the name sure sounds more like a for-profit venture than an activist to me.
For a total of something like $1000, Boyd Graves will sell you copies of public domain government documents that supposedly support his claim. But given that he misrepresents a patent for reproducing HIV as a patent on HIV itself, your money will not be well spent. And if he sent the spams, you would be supporting a spammer.
There are many urban legends about man made HIV.