Slashdot Mirror
Beat Spam Using Hashcash
Shell writes "If they want to send spam, make them pay a price. Built on the widely available SHA-1 algorithm, hashcash is a clever system that requires a parameterizable amount of work on the part of a requester while staying "cheap" for an evaluator to check. In other words, the sender has to do real work to put something into your inbox. You can certainly use hashcash in preventing spam, but it has other applications as well, including keeping spam off of Wikis and speeding the work of distributed parallel applications." If you're specifically interested in hashcash for your mail server, Camram has some interesting ideas -- their Frequently Raised Objections page may be illuminating.
Those damn police dogs can smell through plastic pretty well!
And remember, you can't spell "Budget" without "Get Bud".
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You make me pay precious CPU time to e-mail my mother-in-law? you insensitive clods!
...because I was out of hash cash.
Yeah, it's not even a new Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP).
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I think it would be great if /. implemented this. If posting took 200 sec of computation then only people with something interesting to say would bother. Much less spam and karma-whoring.
:)
Flamewars would be restricted to people at work posting from supercomputers
-J
Fur sail 2 u nou: 5 mil-leeun facter numberz
Yuz cun b-u-l-k f4ster wit dis CD uv all-ready calcoolated leest uf numbors. Fer onlee $99.95, u getz ohver fiv milyun numz ant wee tos in freeee a miliun fresh A-O-L addys. Vizut us @ hotprimefactors.biz to ordur.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's easily solved. Just buy the CD of pre-calculated prime factors from the spammers.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Wow, they can see the future!
They've been telling people for YEARS that anything under the top-of-the-line computer won't be able to send email or brose the internet!
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
reminds of what I used to call my student loans while in college...
100% Insightful
Funny this story should appear today.. I have been trying to find a mirror of hashcash.org for the last few days...
Oh, they've got mirrors, but you needa hashcode to read 'em
Table-ized A.I.
Leave the poor misguided fools alone. Seriously, if they're putting in the effort to do this anyway, just let them try. They can even start demanding HashCash if they want - and it's their problem when the rest of us just decide it's not worth the additional effort to send them email.
Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
There is one foolproof approach to ensure you never, ever receive another spam email again. Shut down your mail server and stop using email. Or insist senders provide HashCash tokens - it amounts to the same thing.