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.

Comments

Names, shmames

[Anonymous Coward]

Hashcash, Camram...... Jeez!

Re:Slashdot Spam Form Response

[fatphil]

Thank you. The thread is now closed.
Right, on to the next story...

FP.

Re:Slashdot Spam Form Response

[Modesitt]

Most people use it in the context of someone who is deliberately screwing things up for other people, similar to the word asshole. For example, "It was working great until the asshats got a hold of it and ruined it."

Another defition of asshat is "One who has their head up their ass. Thus wearing their ass as a hat".

Go to http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ass hat has a few other definitions of Asshat.