On Fri, Nov 14, 2003 at 01:12:50PM -0500, Yakov Shafranovich wrote:
Eric S. Raymond wrote:
+ Another possible form of sender-pays is to impose costs
+ at mail-transaction time without trying to clear them as
+ payments in the real world -- so-called "hash-cash" schemes.
I forwarded the comments to Dave Crocker. However, my question is
whether we should add a comment here about the fact that spammers can
build specialized computers to do hashcash calculations and then perhaps
rent it out to other spammers to use. That possibility has been
mentioned on the list before. Even though it increases their costs, that
increase might not be enough to make spam not profitable.
Another issue is that it begins a trend of requiring CPU power to
participate in the Internet.
That's a bad thing for people who want to provide inexpensive computing
to third world countries, and for the retro-computing crowd.
Once Hashcash became widely used, CPU vendors would have an incentive to
encourage spam, in order to push the rate of 'stamps' up, and make
people upgrade their machines. For the single home user, it wouldn't
matter so much, but I run some mailing-lists for friends...
Basing an anti-spam mechanism on technology have/have-nots would seem to
be a difficult balance to achieve, when the spammers have financial
incentive, and I don't.
--
David Maxwell, david(_at_)vex(_dot_)net|david(_at_)maxwell(_dot_)net -->
All this stuff in twice the space would only look half as bad!
- me
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