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RE: [Asrg] Its all over for Challenge Response

2004-01-30 19:15:06
Does anyone have any idea how much it costs to host a porn site?  Does
anyone have any idea how little it costs to send spam (see prior
analysis $0.0000002/spam)?

Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's sensible

-----Original Message-----
From: asrg-admin(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org [mailto:asrg-admin(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] 
On 
Behalf Of Art Pollard
Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2004 12:31 PM
To: Philip Miller; Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: [Asrg] Its all over for Challenge Response


At 09:02 AM 1/28/2004, you wrote:
Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
spammers have found a way to break C/R schemes that have a 'turing 
test' component. You simply set up a free porn web site and 
get people 
to crack the turing tests in return for seeing the porn.

Yes. I agree  ... Sort of.

However, let's put it this way.  Even with all the "free" 
porn sites that 
could potentially be set up and even with the potentially 
large number of 
vistors that they could have, it would still be a signficant 
drop in the 
amount of spam.  I doubt that many would hang around a free 
porn site for 
long if they had to type/decypher a CR each time they 
switched pages.  It 
would simply be too irritating.  And besides, let's say a 
visitor visits 
20-50 pages, that would mean that for one spammer's spam to 
get through to 
1,000,000 addresses, they would need an equal number of page views or 
20,000-50,000 visitors -- a lot for any free porn site.  And 
of course, 
there are all the other spammers trying to do the same thing 
diluting the 
potential number of visitors.  This would still be a major bottleneck.

This sort of workaround seems to make sense for automating 
some things such 
as getting a Yahoo/Hotmail account or similar.  But it 
doesn't seem very 
practical to me for sending out millions of pieces of junk mail.

-Art
-- 
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.


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