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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."
to get the bond, then why can't they use the same technique to simply stop all unauthenticated email. If the sender is forced to use their real name, spam will stop pretty fast.
Hi all - the ABM, a proposed solution to spam first posted to /.
A spam solution that attempts first posts on Slashdot? I think it failed it.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Short summary: it's an intermediated version of "pay me to read, and I'll pay you back if it's not spam"
Bug summary:
- too many people will keep the money regardless
- the services of escrow agents are not freebies
- nobody will bother to use it when regular email is cheaper, already deployed, and infinitely less fuss
There has to be a working micropayment system and if there isn't one yet, can I be the one who skims 10% of every bond?
Second, who else will profit from this? The escrow companies. Do we really want bankers in charge of the email system? They will simply see this as an opportunity to print money. Before long, you won't be able to contact your mobile phone provider, electricity company etc. without posting a bond - and they will own the escrow companies, and you will be paying them an annual subscription to use their escrow account. It's as good a scam as having special rate phone lines, which means when you call them they get part of the cost of the call.
Third, increased email traffic around the system due to the challenge/response cycle will partly compensate for any reduction in spam.
The only way to fix spam is to make it unprofitable for the people who pay the spammers. Given that Joe Sixpack is the idiot who buys from spam and so makes the system possible, and that he will no more be able to set up an escrow account than he is able to understand to install Firefox to remove annoying popups,and Thunderbird for the junk mail filter, the system won't work - the majority of users will be unaffected, the ones who are affected are probably corporate users with spam blocking tools in place already.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
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.
From the FAQ:
Q: What prevents the recipient from claiming the bond, regardless of the message value?
A:. Nothing, other than perhaps etiquette and good judgment, prevents claiming a bond.
<sarcasm>Yeah, etiquette and good judgment worked so well with the old e-mail system.</sarcasm>
They propose an automatic bond posting system where for example if the bond is less than $0.50 (by the way what happens if I don't use dollars, who determines the the rate of exchange?) the bond is automatically posted. So:
1. Set bond to $ 0.01 to ensure automatic bond posting.
2. Subscribe to 10,000 different mailing lists.
3. Profit!
DAMMIT! Stop trying to break my email! Spam is not that bad.
Which spam are you referring to? The spam you receive, or the spam you send?
If you don't ask for any bond for mail sent to your account, all your mail will get through just fine, complete with the spam.
On the other hand, if you send out mail that the recipients regard as spam, even if you think your spam is "not that bad", the person who's email box you're cluttering is the one who gets to decide. If that "breaks your email" then face it, you're a spammer.
(As a side note, what happens if you receive mail without an associated bond? 12.2Q in the Q&A says "Well, you could still read it", which OBVIATES THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT!!! Yet another idiotic spam "solution", in other words. Oh well. Here's where it scores on the Spam Solution Checklist:)
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
I am Chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are Free. -Eris
Heres 10 off the top of my head...
1) who pays for bounce messages ?
2) who pays for badnwidth needed for billions of bond requests?
3) adds a number of new points of faliure to already flaky e-mail system
4) relies on everyone knowing the 'reputation' of every possibility in the whole of the possible address-space
5) bombarding everyone outside the scheme with bond request messages will make this the most hated thing since spam itself
6) spammers will ddos the hell out of the infrastructure, giving it a reputation for flakyiness
7) 'exposure is limited to the amount in your escrow account' ie it cuts you off from mail every now & then unless you top it up - people are going to LOVE having to do that
8) Faked from fields
9) Introduces ability to 'escrow-ddos' a company by signing up random valid names to lists who then collect on unwanted mail.
10) 'reputation' system will quickly devolve into ebay feedback style AAAAAAAAAAA++++++++++++ garbage.
I could go on for another page or two. Their 'Extended FAQ' says 'yes but we don't care' to half the above btw.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
Does this mean we all need a credit card to sign up for gmail and other similar "free" email accounts?
This Sig is removed due to factual inaccuracy
It's another special case of the same general scheme which I call "tokens". Examples of token-based schemes include whitelists, challenge-response with automatic whitelists, digital signatures, micropayments: the common factor is that the recipient chooses a token that all mail they recieve needs to contain. The token can start out simple (just requiring a special word in the subject line works wonderfully right now) and can be made more complex and expensive as the spammers adapt to it.
The mistake these people make is the same one most "perfect token based schemes" make: they assume that they have to start with the most complex and difficult token that they "know" spammers will never adapt to right from the first day. You don't. You can start out with a simple easily forgable token and worry about switching to one of the cryptographically secure or money-based tokens later... in my case my family has been using simple tokens for a couple of years now and a grand total of two spammers... 419-ers, as it turns out... have bothered to jump through even that simple a hoop.
If companies have to put up a bond for every outgoing email, and lose that bond when recipients don't want to read it, it might even cut down on the number of clueless twits who forward the same tired old jokes, etc., from their work account.
When someone from IT appears at their desk with a log printout and a total cost, and demands repayment on the spot, the idiot user might get the message. First offence, maybe the money gets donated to the corporate charity; second offence, the user in question gets suspended by their underwear from a 40th-floor window and left to rot.
On the other hand, if IT weren't smart enough to figure out who was doing it (or if the user were smart enough to foil them), what would stop some disgruntled employee sending thousands of stupid jokes just to cost the company money?
Several problems with this:
- Banks will possibly want to make money with every transaction, not just with bonds that get collected, especially if you take into account that bonds will rarely be collected. That means that banks will make a sh*tload of money just in order to prevent criminal or annoying behavior of a few spammers.
- It's not clear how the "challenge" step involving the whitelist is supposed to be implemented. Right now, we have mail servers receive mail and store it until the final recipient (client) polls it, e.g. via IMAP/POP3/Exchange. Would this mail server have to store the whitelist and bond info? Probably yes. Privacy issues?
- How does it integrate with the current e-mail world? Not very well. Sure, you can still accept e-mails without a bond and rank them low (i.e. mark them as potential junk). But for quite a while, people will not be able to discard these e-mails automatically. Therefore, there will be no incentive for senders to move to the bond mechanism.
- There are many parties involved: Right now, we're talking about sender-SMTPrelay-mailserver-client. In addition to these four parties we need two escrow agencies: one for the sender, one for the recipient. these will need to be organized, so they can talk to each other - which means there is some kind of additional club involved. (We can get rid of the SMTP relay entitiy mentioned above - this can be done by the client directly.)
The problem is that with the new entities, things can go wrong. They can simply be down (keeping me from sending or receiving e-mail!). Or their security can be compromised.
The bottomline is: this is too complicated.
I wonder what is better about the bond scheme, compared to the challenge-response idea that circulated a while ago, where sending e-mail is simply computionally expensive enough (unless you're on the recipient's whitelist).
I'm gonna say something very ugly here : i find spam not to be a really serious problem. I get approx 50 spams per day, and 45 of these go straight to my MacOSX Junk folder. I hardly notice them at all. At the end of the day I quickly glance trough the folder. Never found a false positive in 1,5 years. The 5 spams that do wind up in my inbox are no problem either, since all known correspondents in my addressbook have their own sub-box. So only new peeps end up in my inbox, which is quick to scan.
I sure as hell ain't gonna pay for something that I don't need.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
even if one assumes that all the prior "there's a hole" posts are wrong . . .
Reason #3: SPF. I didn't even need to read beyond the ABM FAQ's TOC. Just look at the length of the TOC itself. Although there's a TOC item "Will the ABM be complicated to use?", the answer is obvious without reading it. Now contrast this with SPF: how long does it take you to understand SPF, or to explain its BASIC CONCEPTS to someone else?
Reason #2: ABM doesn't itself kill anonymity, but it makes it easier for government to do so. As one poster has already said:
"There isn't a central database from which funds are collected that has everyone's name and bank information. The only requirement is that you have funds available to back up your email, and like it says, this can be accomplished by paying in person with cash for an anonymous e-mail account."
It's a bitter lesson of the past three years -- or it should be, if you haven't already realized it -- that there are few limits to the extent to which government will regulate (read "criminalize") financial transactions in order to control individuals, in the guise of "fighting terrorism".
If you don't believe this, then go to the service desk in any large grocery chain where they sell money orders, and look on the wall for the sign which describes the maximum anonymous cash transaction which can be performed without triggering a report to the government. (I'll provide additional detail and examples if anyone chooses to dispute this.)
Implement ABM, and just how long do you think it will take for some publicity-hungry politicians to propose that all ABM payments require identification?
Reason #1: The ITU supports it. I have no problem with organizations like IETF. But in view of recent trends of trans-national political authorities (like the EU) taking action contrary to human rights, I'm immediately suspicious of a proposal supported by an organ of the UN ("tin-foil-hat" insults notwithstanding).
Not everyone in the world does have access to universal currency. In some countries, you need special permission by the government to buy exchangeable currencies (like, say, USD or EUR). They even put a stamp in your passport if you did, so you don't buy too much! Oh, and btw., most spam doesn't come from there, but from countries with free valuta.
Would you really want to erect yet another economic wall between "us" and "them"?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Would it be possible for me to own my own escrow service and make counterfit escrows?
I have no intention of giving my white list over to an ISP. Yes, I know they could determine who I receive email from by monitoring logs, but it just bothers me to go the extra step of doing the work for them. Step 2 is the government requiring all ISPs to have an interface that allows them to read all white lists. Mining of such a complete social map could crack through a lot of privacy.
Well, some of the problems you point out are valid. . . this is, in part, another micro-payment system and runs into the same problem that almost every other micro-payment system runs into - namely that the transaction costs could potentially be higher than the payment itself.
You ask, "how about I am totally careless with my email address, can i then send repeated claims for bond money from all these companies that want to sell me something.[sic]" (note: when you ask a question, you should end the sentence with a '?' not a '.') Well, yes, if you read the FAQ this is exactly the point - to force spammers to be wary of who they send spam to. Right now the spammers just send them to *everyone* and hope they get less than a 1% response rate. This bond system would force spammers to pick the best candidates, and to post a high enough bond to persuade the mark, err, I mean consumer to read the message. If they are carefull, they should be able to make more than enough in sales revenue to offset the bonds they have to pay.
But, I think you misunderstand something fundamental about the proposal. According to the FAQ posted above, this isn't exactly a pay-per-email system. You state, "This system sucks and white listing sucks too, unless you never lost contact with old friends or changed your isp or got in touch with a company." Well, unless your friends are jerks or idiots, they won't claim the bond, so you don't lose any money. That is, under this proposal, you are saying I am willing to warrant that this message is not spam, and I"ll warrant it in the amount of X dollars. When your friend receives the email, they see it's from you, think "Oh it's good to hear from him again." and hit the 'not spam' button, and the 'add to address book' button. Viola, you get your 25 cents (or whatever you posted) back. In fact, you don't *have* to post anything at all, but it's likely that if you don't post a bond, your friend will never even see your message. I think part of this system even allows you to query to find out what bond amount your friend set for messages to get past his filter.
"heck thinking about it somebody makes a product gets a lot of customer complaints then claims their repeated emails from dissatisfied customers is spam and claims the bonds."
Personally, if this system ever gets implemented, I simply would not do business with a company that requires me to post a bond to send customer support email. Under this system, mail recipients can choose whether they require a bond or not, and how much the bond amount has to be. That being the case, I would expect that the company's customer support would either whitelist me as a customer (if they want to use a bond to discourage spam from being sent to their cust support address), or just not require a bond.
The thing about this system is that it's all voluntary. You are never *forced* to pay for an email. No one might ever see your email if you don't post a bond, but you are never actually forced to.
>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.
This is another attempt to sell micropayments. ." you are likely to decide it is not worth bothering.
It has the same problem as the previous: the cost of deciding if you want to pay.
Also, if you mail someone and then get a reply that says "You have mailed who has decided he requires you to post a bond of 2 cents for him to pay attention to your mail. Please use one of the bond posting services listed at
Sure, there are things wrong with this scheme, but the problems aren't the ones most of you are talking about. Here are some I posted on my Web log:
#1: It creates a great opportunity for traffic analysis by the government, marketers, etc., because the escrow agents can collect data on who's emailing whom. The recipient gets to choose their escrow agent, so an individual participant doesn't have the option of only dealing with reputable or privacy-respecting escrow agents.
#2: It creates a money trail alongside the email trail, making anonymity almost impossible (especially because the recipient can choose the escrow agent, see above). This issue actually could be turned to an advantage because remailers could use the bond system to collect "postage", clear postage between themselves while obfuscating the money trail, and reduce their own spam problem into the bargain, but it'll be a big headache for them, and the anonymity of the remailers to the escrow agencies is hard to maintain.
#3: Trolling can become financially profitable. The business plan goes something like this: 1. Post something to Slashdot or Usenet that lots of people will want to respond to by email. 2. Collect a small enough bond from each responder that they'll be willing to pay it. 3. Profit! One could argue that that's an acceptable business (because you're only collecting money from the people who decide they're willing to give it to you) but I'd argue that it's a bad thing to encourage this business, because it also imposes on many people who do not want to respond to you, and damages the infrastructure for everyone. It's like saying "Selling SUVs is morally okay because I'm only selling them to people who are willing to accept the environmental impact" - hello, it's not just your customers who bear the brunt of the environmental impact!
#4: Participants who are poor, or penniless, just can't have email anymore. That includes children, the homeless, and many people in developing countries. Moreover, even among people with nonzero disposable income, it stratifies email along economic lines: I will demand attention bonds roughly proportional to my income (because otherwise they won't have the intended effect of compensating me for time lost) and then someone with less income than me has to make a disproportionate sacrifice to talk to me, and someone with more income than me can spam me with no hardship. I have received legitimate, important email from a scholarship student in Uganda, and in an official capacity from the legal department of a multi-billion-dollar US corporation; the value of a dollar to those two parties is totally different. Note that it's not good enough to say "Oh, we just won't collect the bond from people who are poor" because they still have to have the money in order to promise it in the first place. Children have no money, not just a small amount - especially if, as would necessarily be the case, enforcement of the bonds is tied to legally binding contracts in jurisdictions where children's right to make commitments is not recognized, so the children wouldn't even be allowed to spend money this way if they got some.
#5: If only applied to email, it'll encourage spammers to move to other media - Usenet, Web BBSes, and referrer logs, for instance. Attention bonds can't be easily applied to some of these.
#6: If you offer to sell your time to all comers for $0.50, then you have to actually do that, and at least glance at all the messages sent to you by people who are willing to put up the $0.50. If it were actually the case that there were lots of evil perverts out there sending pornography more or less at random to innocent children out of sheer perversity (I don't believe that, but many people do), then this kind of arrangement would make it harder to block them. Even under a more realistic threat model for pornography in particular (people only sell that stuff to make money, and so will only send it to you if they think
2. Computers infected with the worm spam random addresses.
3. Sit back and enjoy the chaos.
Or, even better: If authentication is weak, then have the worm email you and collect the bonds.
I read the article and they basically say that this is possible. Their defense is that you can only lose at most the (small) amount that you keep in your ABM account. However, when your account is depleted what happens next? You can't send email anymore? How do you get your money back? Some kind of insurance claims type procedure? No thanks.
I give ABM two thumbs down.
SPAM is a social problem. You can't use market, technical or legislative processes to solve a social problem. Attempts to do so lead to more problems and don't solve the original problem ie: crime, poverty, drugs, all are social problems and none have ben eliminated by any of the above means despite decades of trying.
You need a social solution to the social problem of email spam, though some may call this a technical solution.
numerous aliases, one account.
You have one base email account the address/name of which you never reveal to anyone. No, not even people you trust. Too many worms harvest addresses from messages stored on infected systems.
You then have a web and/or email interface to the mail server with which you can create email addresses on the fly which all dump their mail in the one mail account. These are not "temporary" or "one-time-use" accounts, they are however mutable at will.
You make up an alias for your close family to use, one for your friends, one for each major company you receive email from, one for mailing lists, etc. Despite having many email addresses, all of your mail is delivered in to one mailbox and only one account needs to be checked for mail.
If you should ever start receiving spam on a particular alias, you simply change it alerting the one or few entities that use that address. The remainder of your addresses remain unaffected.
It's also really fun to tell the phone company that your email address is mci@my-domain.com. The look on the librarian's face was priceless when I told her my email address was library@emiaildomain.com.
Does this require work on the part of the email user? Yes. One time for initial setup of the account(s), and then again if spam is received on an address.
The up-side... you only receive spam once on an address, then you change the address. Spam is then stopped before the message is sent from the remote server. Anyone with their own mail server, or an ISP who supports this can start using it right now, it doesn't require any new protocols or changing of any existing ones. It doesn't place any additional burden on the network, and in fact alleviates server loads because sending back a "550 user unknown" after the "rcpt to:" takes up a lot less resources than receiving the entire message and then trying to filter it based on content.
Is it a a perfect solution? No.
What are the flaws:
1. Setting up, remembering and maintaining the list of aliases. This is a problem with laziness of users, not with the idea itself. In the end it will require no more work than installing and training a learning filter.
2. Setting up your mail client to operate with multiple outgoing addresses and only one incoming address. Some mail clients (OS X Mail.app for one) require incoming mail server info for an account (even if it will never receive mail) and require that there be a unique server/username combo for each "account". But there are workarounds.
3. Still susceptible to brute force guessing of the main account or the aliases (which requires changing one or both). Most mail servers today have hardening against brute force attacks though. Even if your mail email address (the one you never give out) is guessed, you can have it changed and all of the aliases re-directed to the new address without having to tell anyone about it. All the aliases stay intact.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people