Sure there is, a one-time pad. IANAC (I Am Not A Crytanalyst) but this works by basically having a key that's as large as the data and completely random. Then you can just xor them. The clever thing about this is that without knowing the key, every possible sequence of data is equally likely and equally correct. With some ciphers (like those PGP uses), you at least know when you've got the key right. With a one-time pad, you don't. So "Tomorrow we attack the Justice Department" and "Did you buy milk for the baby" might both be possible decryptions. There is no way to prefer one over the other. Therefore, without having some other reason to believe a certain key is correct, nobody can find the real text. It is, I believe, the one algorithm proven mathematically to be perfect -- you *cannot* find the data without the key. (Of course, it has other problems -- you need a secure place to store the key, and if you have that, why don't you just store the data there?)
I disagree with your first point, but I don't think it would be productive to argue about it, as we're unlikely to convince each other.
As to your second point, sure, bandwidth is a limited resource and needs to be managed. But there are content-neutral ways of doing that. My college, a small but well-respected technical school in California, has what seems to me to be a very fair method. They track bandwidth usage by user. When they notice someone using far more than their share, they send them a polite email saying, "We remind you that the Internet connection is intended for educational purposes. Please reduce your usage or demonstrate that your use is educational." Of course, it rarely is (mp3s, porn, or, most often, pirate TV shows), and so the offender then cuts it back to a reasonable level.
If bandwidth usage becomes a problem, there are much much easier ways to deal with it than trying to determine what is porn (I've yet to see a successful filter to do so) and filtering it.
IP addresses are not always static. This might discourage the spammer (as the poster who claimed to be the spammer admitted him/her/itself), but if they were using a dialup or something, the next (innocent) person to be assigned that IP would suffer. It might be a reasonable price to pay, though. This is a difficult question. Moderation seems to be handling this case reasonably well, but I hate to see the spammer sucking up all those points that could be used for higher purposes. The more crap they have to filter here, the less crap they can filter elsewhere...
I'm nominating Eli Zaretskii, member of the DJGPP project and amazingly prolific newbie helper. See comp.os.msdos.djgpp sometime for an example. Because of the nature of DJGPP (a port of GCC and much more to DOS/Windows), its newbies are often very very newbie-ish (often seen: "I downloaded the compiler but I don't know how to enter my source code!"). Eli manages to answer an astounding quantity of all sorts of questions with superhuman patience. I can't think of anyone more deserving.
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Sure there is, a one-time pad. IANAC (I Am Not A Crytanalyst) but this works by basically having a key that's as large as the data and completely random. Then you can just xor them. The clever thing about this is that without knowing the key, every possible sequence of data is equally likely and equally correct. With some ciphers (like those PGP uses), you at least know when you've got the key right. With a one-time pad, you don't. So "Tomorrow we attack the Justice Department" and "Did you buy milk for the baby" might both be possible decryptions. There is no way to prefer one over the other. Therefore, without having some other reason to believe a certain key is correct, nobody can find the real text. It is, I believe, the one algorithm proven mathematically to be perfect -- you *cannot* find the data without the key. (Of course, it has other problems -- you need a secure place to store the key, and if you have that, why don't you just store the data there?)
I disagree with your first point, but I don't think it would be productive to argue about it, as we're unlikely to convince each other.
As to your second point, sure, bandwidth is a limited resource and needs to be managed. But there are content-neutral ways of doing that. My college, a small but well-respected technical school in California, has what seems to me to be a very fair method. They track bandwidth usage by user. When they notice someone using far more than their share, they send them a polite email saying, "We remind you that the Internet connection is intended for educational purposes. Please reduce your usage or demonstrate that your use is educational." Of course, it rarely is (mp3s, porn, or, most often, pirate TV shows), and so the offender then cuts it back to a reasonable level.
If bandwidth usage becomes a problem, there are much much easier ways to deal with it than trying to determine what is porn (I've yet to see a successful filter to do so) and filtering it.
Yeah, I did the same thing. That would kind of limit the potential market to Chief Software Architects...
IP addresses are not always static. This might discourage the spammer (as the poster who claimed to be the spammer admitted him/her/itself), but if they were using a dialup or something, the next (innocent) person to be assigned that IP would suffer. It might be a reasonable price to pay, though. This is a difficult question. Moderation seems to be handling this case reasonably well, but I hate to see the spammer sucking up all those points that could be used for higher purposes. The more crap they have to filter here, the less crap they can filter elsewhere...
I'm nominating Eli Zaretskii, member of the DJGPP project and amazingly prolific newbie helper. See comp.os.msdos.djgpp sometime for an example. Because of the nature of DJGPP (a port of GCC and much more to DOS/Windows), its newbies are often very very newbie-ish (often seen: "I downloaded the compiler but I don't know how to enter my source code!"). Eli manages to answer an astounding quantity of all sorts of questions with superhuman patience. I can't think of anyone more deserving.