From NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/24/technology/24PHIL.html
Start-Up Aims to End Spam
March 24, 2003
By JOHN MARKOFF
In addition to legislative proposals before Congress and
state legislatures, there are efforts under way within the
direct marketing industry to try to deal with spam. And
last week, the Internet Engineering Taskforce, a committee
of technology experts that sets Internet standards, met in
San Francisco to listen to proposals for technical
solutions to spam.
I've been monitoring and contributing to the mail list associated with this
IETF function now for about two weeks. Most of the people are looking for
a magic bullet to cure spam but I think it will not be that simple. If it
were it would have already been done. It seems all the seemingly good long
term spam elimination approaches either require notable changes to the
Internet's email or other infrastructure, make it difficult for some
classes of current email users, or the require the establishment of new
services (e.g., financial infrastructure to support real value e-stamps).
The Mailblocks antispam service is based on a so-called
challenge-response mechanism to block bulk mail sent
automatically to e-mail accounts. When a customer receives
a new message from an unknown correspondent, the system
will intercept the message and automatically return to the
sender a digital image of a seven-digit number and a form
to fill out. Once a human being views that number and types
it into the form - demonstrating that he or she is a person
and not an automated mass-mailing machine - the system will
forward the e-mail to the intended recipient.
E-gold uses this approach. They call it a Turing number (after the British
mathematician, Alan Turing)
https://www.e-gold.com/acct/login.html Challenge responses may eliminate
spam from bogus addresses but it almost sure to set of an image recognition
arms race between other spammers and Turing number technologists as the try
to fashion ever more cleaver images that supposedly can be easily read by
humans but not machines. There are already programs to "read" earlier (and
maybe current versions of E-gold's Turing number images. I would be
surprised if these measures proved effective
steve
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