Paul Tenny explained:
Please pardon me for jumping in on a conversation that I have definitely not
kept up with in any way, but I have something to add here. Spamming is a
business. Not all of them are people of low intelligence and not all of them
are one man operations. Not all of them are running on financial fumes.
understood. It is going to take a combination of factors to take out spammers.
I have a couple in my back pocket I will reveal with camram 0.2. Some of the
others proposed will also help by attacking other weak parts of the spammer
equation.
I do believe the cost was somewhere in the range of $15,000 - $20,000 for the
hardware and they were blowing away PC clusters with nodes well over 200.
Because these chips don't have anywhere near the transistor count of a PC
processor they didn't generate anywhere near the equivalent amount of heat.
Their performance simply wasn't tied to the clock cycle like PC processors
are.
That's a small price to pay, and that was back in the late 90's.
If the idea here is to cause penalty for sending email (doesn't matter in
what way), it's fundamentally flawed. Whatever the software does, it has to
run on a processor of some sort, and not necessarily the kind you want it to
be run on. Linear speed is not always going to be a limiting factor.
we did talk about that earlier and the advantage is always in the hands of the
distributed network. unfortunately, I can't locate the posting in the archives.
In any case, the basic line of thought was it a spammer does it brute
force/bloody ignorance with specialized hardware, Taiwan Inc. can replicate the
work cheaper and faster, put it on every motherboard and a bunch of PCI cards
for the earlier motherboards which means there'll be a big jump in the cost of
postage and we're back at square one with the spammers still losing[1].
Remember, the advantages always in our hands because we can increase postage at
any time. For every bit of postage increase, the spammers workload doubles. We
can also afford a greater postage increase that a spammer because we have the
advantage of a white list which significantly reduces the load of generating
stamps at our end. However, I believe a more probable approach will be the
development of proof of work puzzles that are not so amenable to hardware
solutions. But the advantage still remains.
---eric
[1] big caveat. As much as we pontificate and postulate on this list, we have
virtually no clue where the future will go or how our inventions will mutate in
wonderful and horrible ways. spam is an evolutionary process and as our tools
change so will spam which means we will change in response. I say let's
experiment and with that, I'm going to vanish for a couple days to apply a big
evolutionary hammer to my code.
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg