ietf-asrg
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Re: [Asrg] The fundamental misconception about POSTAGE METERS

2008-12-03 22:25:05


All the sender does is present his identity.  The recipient's postage
meter issues a stamp which is only good for sending one message to that
recipient.  The sender's "coin" has to come from a bank trusted by the
recipient   [...]

But can we please stop arguing from the assumption that senders can
arbitrarily print and re-use one stamp for many recipients?

In the scenario above, what happens when a sender buys one coin and
simultaneously presents it to 1000 recipients?

Although possibly a moral risk (i.e., it offends one's sense of
fairness), presenting it to 1,000 recipients isn't really the problem.

It's when they present it a million times that they can actually be a
noticeable problem.

At which point they'll probably get caught, someone like World would
have an incentive to watch them go by for example, and then won't be
able to buy a cert again or whatever punishment is in store for them.

We have to keep saying to ourselves: Spammers need to send on the
order of billions of messages per day, by and large for free, to be
the problem they are.

Any time one scales it down to try to draw an example they're throwing
the baby out with the bathwater. Use numbers like "millions" and see
if it still seems so intractable.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

The World              | bzs(_at_)TheWorld(_dot_)com           | 
http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD        | Login: Nationwide
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