How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp
Actually, it's not just "sender pays", it's "a whitlist for my friends, all other others pay cash", but "sender pays" will do for a start. :-) Cheers, RAH ------- <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/business/yourmoney/13digi.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=> The New York Times February 13, 2005 DIGITAL DOMAIN How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp By RANDALL STROSS OMPARE our e-mail system today with the British General Post Office in 1839, and ours wins. Compare it with the British postal system in 1840, however, and ours loses. In that year, the British introduced the Penny Black, the first postage stamp. It simplified postage - yes, to a penny - and shifted the cost from the recipient to the sender, who had to prepay. We look back with wonder that it could have ever been otherwise. Recipient pays? Why should the person who had not initiated the transaction be forced to pay for a message with unseen contents? What a perverse system. Today, however, we meekly assume that the recipient of e-mail must bear the costs. It is nominally free, of course, but it arrives in polluted form. Cleaning out the stuff once it reaches our in-box, or our Internet service provider's, is irritating beyond words, costly even without per-message postage. This muck - Hotmail alone catches about 3.2 billion unsolicited messages a day - is a bane of modern life. Even the best filters address the problem too late, after this sludge has been discharged without cost to the polluter. In my case, desperation has driven me to send all my messages sequentially through three separate filter systems. Then I must remember to check the three junk folders to see what failed to get through that should have. Recipient pays. Do not despair. We can now glimpse what had once seemed unattainable: stopping the flow at its very source. The most promising news is that companies like Yahoo, EarthLink, America Online, Comcast and Verizon have overcome the fear that they would prompt antitrust sanctions if they joined forces to reclaim the control they have lost to spammers. They belong to an organization called the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, formed only last year. It shares antispam techniques and lobbies other e-mail providers to adopt policies that protect the commons. Civic responsibility entails not merely screening incoming mail to protect one's own customers but also screening outgoing mail that could become someone else's problem. Carl Hutzler, AOL's director of antispam operations, has been an especially energetic campaigner, urging all network operators to "cut off the spammer's oxygen supply," as he told an industry gathering last fall. And those operators who do not "get smart soon and control the sources of spam on their networks," he said, will find that they "will not have connectivity" to his provider and others who are filtering outgoing e-mail. He did not spell out the implications for customers, but he doesn't need to: we can select a service provider from the group with a spam-free zone, or one that has failed to do the necessary self-policing required for joining the gated community and is banished to the wilds of anything-goes. One measure backed by advocates like Mr. Hutzler is already having a positive impact: "Port 25 blocking," which prevents an individual PC from running its own mail server and blasting out e-mail on its own. With the block in place, all outgoing e-mail must go through the service provider's mail server, where high-volume batches of identical mail can be detected easily and cut off. Internet service providers are also starting to stamp outgoing messages with a digital signature of the customer's domain name, using strong cryptography so the signature cannot be altered or counterfeited. This is accomplished with software called DomainKeys, originally developed by Yahoo. It is now offered in open-source form and was recently adopted by EarthLink and some other major services. A digital signature is what we will want to see on all incoming e-mail. If your Internet service provider is not on the working group's roster, you can insist that it take the oath of good citizenship. This month, MCI found itself criticized because a Web site that sells Send-Safe software gets Internet services from a company that's an MCI division customer. Send-Safe is spamware that offers bulk e-mail capability, claiming "real anonymity"; it hijacks other machines that have been infected with a complementary virus. Anyone can try it out for $50 and spray 400,000 messages. MCI, for its part, argues that it has an exemplary record in shutting down spammers, but that the sale of bulk e-mail software is not, ipso facto, illegal. Unfortunately, there has been no good news on the legal front. When the first batch of antispam bills was introduced in Congress in 1999, one could have reasonably expected that legislators were ready to stamp out unsolicited e-mail, just as they had banned unsolicited faxes with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991. While spam-filled e-mail boxes do not entail monetary costs in the form of fax paper and toner, they cost us dearly in time. Surely Congress would not be so literal-minded when comparing e-mail with faxes as to miss the parallel and equally offensive notion of "recipient pays"? The years passed, the antispam bills multiplied, hearings were held and more bills were introduced, with each session's bills weaker than the previous ones. In the end, in 2003, we got the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, or Can-Spam. Its backers took a brave stand against deceptive subject lines and false headers and then went home. The law did not prohibit unsolicited commercial e-mail and has turned out to be worse than useless. "Before Can-Spam, the legal status of spam was ambiguous," said Professor David E. Sorkin, an associate professor at the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago. "Now, it's clear: it's regarded as legal." Only fraudulent representations in unsolicited bulk e-mail are verboten, but "unsolicited" has now been blessed, and so, too, has "bulk." Katie, bar the door! Instead of giving marketers access to our e-mail boxes only if we expressly indicate that their attention would be welcome, which is an "opt in" system, Can-Spam gives the direct marketers the gift of an "opt out" system, where the onus is on us to notify each sender, one by one, that we do not wish to be on its list. Recipient pays, again and again. If one goes back and reads the transcripts of the hearings held in the summer of 2003, before the bill's passage, one is treated to an edifying "how a bill becomes law" lesson. An especially enlightening moment was when Representative Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican since elected to the Senate, spoke passionately about unsolicited commercial e-mail: "I think there is one thing that we can all agree on. One, we would all like to get the discount airfare offers, we would like to get the discount hotel offers. We never know when they are going to be advantageous to us." Looking to the future, let's not count on Congress to do any better in spurning the blandishments of the Direct Marketing Association. And let's not count on authentication technologies like DomainKeys as a panacea. Even when most mail is properly authenticated, we will still have to figure out whether to trust names that are unfamiliar to us. What we need is a way to make all bulk e-mailers pay for the privilege of using our e-mail boxes. That would make legitimate businesses focus on the best prospects, just as bulk mailers of ordinary junk must do. And it would force spammers to shell out for an expense unfamiliar to them: buying "stamps." That would bring a swift, permanent end to their activities. What we need, in other words, is what was proposed in 1992 at the International Cryptology Conference. In a paper titled "Pricing Via Processing, or Combating Junk Mail," two computer scientists, Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor, came up with a way to force a sender to pay every time a message was sent - payment not in money, but in time, by applying the computer's resources to a computational puzzle, devised on the fly for that particular message. Ms. Dwork now works at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley and has continued to work on the project. It has yet to be adopted in a commercial e-mail service, but it shows promise in its current form. The puzzle uses an intricate design involving the way a computer gains access to memory and resists a quick solution by speedy processors, requiring about 10 seconds. It is not so long that you'd notice it for the occasional outgoing message, but if you have eight million Viagra messages queued up, good luck in getting each one "stamped." Use of the system would always be voluntary, and wholly unnecessary when sending to friends and family. On the receiving end, your e-mail program could be set to filter incoming messages arriving from unfamiliar senders on the basis of proof of completion of the assigned problem. No stamp, no entry. Ms. Dwork and her colleagues have named this the Penny Black Project. Sender pays. Randall Stross is a historian and author based in Silicon Valley. E-mail:ddomain@nytimes.com. Copyrigh -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Oh no, the idiotic penny black idea rides again. Like the movie "War Games" when a young Matthew Broderick saves the world by causing the WOPR computer to be distracted into playing itself tic-tac-toe rather than launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike. It was a MOVIE, made in 1983 nonetheless, get over it. More seriously, what attracts people to this penny black idea is that they realize that the only thing which will stop spammers is to interject some sort of economic constraint. The obvious constraint would be something like stamps since that's a usage fee. But the proposer (and his/her/its audience) always hates the idea of paying postage for their own email, no, no, there must be a solution which performs that economic miracle of only charging for the behavior I don't like! An economic Maxwell's demon! So, just like the terminal seeking laetrile shots or healing waters, they turn to not even half-baked ideas such as penny black. Don't charge you, don't charge me, charge that fellow behind the tree! Oh well. Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services. I know, we'll work around it. Of course by then they'll have a multi-billion dollar messaging business to make sure your attempts to by-step it are outlawed and punished. Consider what's going on with the music-sharing world, as another multi-billion dollar business people thought they could just defy with anonymous peer-to-peer services... The point: I think the time is long past due to "grow up" on this issue and accept that some sort of limited, reasonable-usage-free, postage system is necessary to prevent collapse into monopoly. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> writes:
Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services.
And the spammers will be using everyone else's PC's to send out their spam, so the spam problem will still be as bad as ever but now Joe Sixpack will be paying to send it. Hmmm, and maybe *that* will finally motivate software companies, end users, ISPs, etc etc, to fix up software, systems, and usage habits to prevent this. Peter.
Peter Gutmann wrote:
Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> writes:
Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services.
And the spammers will be using everyone else's PC's to send out their spam, so the spam problem will still be as bad as ever but now Joe Sixpack will be paying to send it.
Hmmm, and maybe *that* will finally motivate software companies, end users, ISPs, etc etc, to fix up software, systems, and usage habits to prevent this.
My view - as controversial as ever - is that the problem is unfixable, and mail will eventually fade away. That which will take its place is p2p / IM / chat / SMS based. In that world, it is still reasonable to build ones own IM system for the needs of ones own community, and not to have to worry about standards. Which means one can build in the defences that are needed, when they are needed. Chat is already higher volume (I read somewhere) in raw quantity of messages sent than email. A fate for email is that as spam grows to take over more of the share of the shrinking pie, but consumes more of the bandwidth, the ISPs will start to charge people for email, and not for IM. Those left paying for it are going to discover it is cheaper to ditch it and let the spammers fight over the shreds. That's just one plausible future, tho. iang -- News and views on what matters in finance+crypto: http://financialcryptography.com/
On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 03:29:21PM +0000, Ian G wrote:
Peter Gutmann wrote:
Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> writes:
Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services.
And the spammers will be using everyone else's PC's to send out their spam, so the spam problem will still be as bad as ever but now Joe Sixpack will be paying to send it.
Hmmm, and maybe *that* will finally motivate software companies, end users, ISPs, etc etc, to fix up software, systems, and usage habits to prevent this.
My view - as controversial as ever - is that the problem is unfixable, and mail will eventually fade away. That which will take its place is p2p / IM / chat / SMS based. In that world, it is still reasonable to build ones own IM system for the needs of ones own community, and not to have to worry about standards. Which means one can build in the defences that are needed, when they are needed.
Better start on those defenses now then- there is already significant amounts of IM and SMS spam. I would be suprised if the people designing IM and SMS systems have learned much from the failures of SMTP et al. Eric
My view - as controversial as ever - is that the problem is unfixable, and mail will eventually fade away. That which will take its place is p2p / IM / chat / SMS based.
Which are easier to spam and less secure than smtp. SMTP is p2p by definition, though you can use servers if you want. SMS *IS* email , just a different kind of email - and a less secure, more expensive kind, in which the infrastructure is more in the hands of the large companies that run it and less accessible to users installing their own protections.
In that world, it is still reasonable to build ones own IM system for the needs of ones own community, and not to have to worry about standards. Which means one can build in the defences that are needed, when they are needed.
as we can for smtp
Chat is already higher volume (I read somewhere) in raw quantity of messages sent than email.
I suspect you don't get much traffic. The beauty of a non-real-time store-and-forward system like smtp (or SMS, or oldstyle conferencing systems with off-line readers) is precisely that it can be automated. I don't have to see mail I don't want.
A fate for email is that as spam grows to take over more of the share of the shrinking pie, but consumes more of the bandwidth
A higher proportion of the snail-mail I get is junk than the email. In fact almost all of it is (& most of what isn't is bills :-( - usually already paid by the bank) I throw more than half of my incoming paper mail in the bin unopened, and about half of what is left is just put in a cupboard in case I get into some dispute tithe the bank or the electric company or whoever. A higher proportion of the landline phone calls I get are junk. At least 4 out of 5 calls, maybe 9 out of 10. Email is doing quite well.
the ISPs will start to charge people for email, and not for IM.
Why should they charge more for qa service which is not only cheaper for them to run, but has more competition and is harder to subvert? A serious proportion of the rootkits and so on that have been plaguing us for the last few years involves chat & instant messaging & so on. I'd block it at the boundary firewall. People who use it should just learn how to use mail. They'd get through more. Chat is for functional illiterates. Learn to read at adult speed and you'll prefer mail. Why should they put up with being limited to someone else's typing speed?
On 2005-03-03T11:52:59+0000, ken wrote:
Chat is already higher volume (I read somewhere) in raw quantity of messages sent than email.
I suspect you don't get much traffic. The beauty of a non-real-time store-and-forward system like smtp (or SMS, or oldstyle conferencing systems with off-line readers) is precisely that it can be automated. I don't have to see mail I don't want.
You don't have to see IMs you don't want, either. You can refuse them from people not on your buddy list.
A fate for email is that as spam grows to take over more of the share of the shrinking pie, but consumes more of the bandwidth
A higher proportion of the snail-mail I get is junk than the email.
A higher proportion of the landline phone calls I get are junk. At least 4 out of 5 calls, maybe 9 out of 10. Email is doing quite well.
With 3 or 4 RBL blacklists, greylisting, and making sure senders don't ehlo with my ip address, I don't even have to use dspam or Spamassassin I get so little spam.
A serious proportion of the rootkits and so on that have been plaguing us for the last few years involves chat & instant messaging & so on. I'd block it at the boundary firewall. People who use it should just learn how to use mail. They'd get through more. Chat is for functional illiterates. Learn to read at adult speed and you'll prefer mail. Why should they put up with being limited to someone else's typing speed?
I don't think email will disappear either, but IM is good for 2-way conversations. Helping someone debug a problem via email gets tedious very quickly. Strangely enough, a good number of people I've talked to over the phone have had their IQ drop by about 100 points when I start using a phonetic alphabet to spell things. I usually end up having to repeat the phonetic spelling several times; it's really strange. IM eliminates that whole problem. Unless communicating in a standard, often-spoken language, phones lose their utility. There's a place for both IM and email. I agree, though, that IM may suffer from a poor S/N ratio. -- Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936
Thus spake Peter Gutmann (pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz) [16/02/05 01:04]: : Hmmm, and maybe *that* will finally motivate software companies, end users, : ISPs, etc etc, to fix up software, systems, and usage habits to prevent this. Doubt it'll motivate the ISPs. They'll be the ones making the 15c/msg. If they clean it up, that's lost income.
Bingo, that's the whole point, spam doesn't get "fixed" until there's a robust economics available to fix it. So long as it's treated merely an annoyance or security flaw there won't be enough economic backpressure. On February 16, 2005 at 18:38 pgut001@cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Gutmann) wrote:
Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> writes:
Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services.
And the spammers will be using everyone else's PC's to send out their spam, so the spam problem will still be as bad as ever but now Joe Sixpack will be paying to send it.
Hmmm, and maybe *that* will finally motivate software companies, end users, ISPs, etc etc, to fix up software, systems, and usage habits to prevent this.
Peter.
-- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
Wrong. We already solved this problem on Cypherpunks a while back. A spammer will have to pay to send you spam, trusted emails do not. You'll have a settable Spam-barrier which determines how much a spammer has to pay in order to lob spam over your barrier (you can set it to 'infinite' of course). A new, non-spam mailer can request that their payment be returned upon receipt, but they'll have to include the payment unless you were expecting them. This way, the only 3rd parties are those that validate the micropayments. -TD
From: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> To: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> CC: cryptography@metzdowd.com, cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:29:05 -0500
Oh no, the idiotic penny black idea rides again.
Like the movie "War Games" when a young Matthew Broderick saves the world by causing the WOPR computer to be distracted into playing itself tic-tac-toe rather than launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
It was a MOVIE, made in 1983 nonetheless, get over it.
More seriously, what attracts people to this penny black idea is that they realize that the only thing which will stop spammers is to interject some sort of economic constraint. The obvious constraint would be something like stamps since that's a usage fee.
But the proposer (and his/her/its audience) always hates the idea of paying postage for their own email, no, no, there must be a solution which performs that economic miracle of only charging for the behavior I don't like! An economic Maxwell's demon!
So, just like the terminal seeking laetrile shots or healing waters, they turn to not even half-baked ideas such as penny black. Don't charge you, don't charge me, charge that fellow behind the tree!
Oh well.
Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services.
I know, we'll work around it. Of course by then they'll have a multi-billion dollar messaging business to make sure your attempts to by-step it are outlawed and punished. Consider what's going on with the music-sharing world, as another multi-billion dollar business people thought they could just defy with anonymous peer-to-peer services...
The point: I think the time is long past due to "grow up" on this issue and accept that some sort of limited, reasonable-usage-free, postage system is necessary to prevent collapse into monopoly.
-- -Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
And how do you fund all this, make it attain an economic life of its own? That's the big problem with all micropayment schemes. They sound good until you try to work the business plan, then they prove themselves impossible because it costs 2c to handle each penny. And more if issues such as collections and enforcement (e.g., against frauds) is taken into account. This is why, for example, we have a postal system which manages postage, rather than some scheme whereby every paper mail recipient charges every paper mail sender etc etc etc. On February 16, 2005 at 12:38 camera_lumina@hotmail.com (Tyler Durden) wrote:
Wrong. We already solved this problem on Cypherpunks a while back.
A spammer will have to pay to send you spam, trusted emails do not. You'll have a settable Spam-barrier which determines how much a spammer has to pay in order to lob spam over your barrier (you can set it to 'infinite' of course).
A new, non-spam mailer can request that their payment be returned upon receipt, but they'll have to include the payment unless you were expecting them.
This way, the only 3rd parties are those that validate the micropayments.
-TD
From: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> To: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> CC: cryptography@metzdowd.com, cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:29:05 -0500
Oh no, the idiotic penny black idea rides again.
Like the movie "War Games" when a young Matthew Broderick saves the world by causing the WOPR computer to be distracted into playing itself tic-tac-toe rather than launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
It was a MOVIE, made in 1983 nonetheless, get over it.
More seriously, what attracts people to this penny black idea is that they realize that the only thing which will stop spammers is to interject some sort of economic constraint. The obvious constraint would be something like stamps since that's a usage fee.
But the proposer (and his/her/its audience) always hates the idea of paying postage for their own email, no, no, there must be a solution which performs that economic miracle of only charging for the behavior I don't like! An economic Maxwell's demon!
So, just like the terminal seeking laetrile shots or healing waters, they turn to not even half-baked ideas such as penny black. Don't charge you, don't charge me, charge that fellow behind the tree!
Oh well.
Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services.
I know, we'll work around it. Of course by then they'll have a multi-billion dollar messaging business to make sure your attempts to by-step it are outlawed and punished. Consider what's going on with the music-sharing world, as another multi-billion dollar business people thought they could just defy with anonymous peer-to-peer services...
The point: I think the time is long past due to "grow up" on this issue and accept that some sort of limited, reasonable-usage-free, postage system is necessary to prevent collapse into monopoly.
-- -Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
-- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
At 8:12 PM -0500 2/16/05, Barry Shein wrote:
And how do you fund all this, make it attain an economic life of its own?
I can send you a business plan, if you like. Post-Clinton-Bubble talent's still cheap, I bet... ;-) Still estivating, here, in Roslindale, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
Well, basically it's pretty simple. Someone will eventually recognize that the idea has a lot of economic potential and they'll go to Sand Hill and get some venture funds. 6 months later you'll be able to sign up for "Spam Mail". Eventually the idea will spread and Spammers, who are already squeezed via Men With Guns, will start running out of options and so will be willing to pay, for instance, 1 cent per email. After that, of course, the price will likely go up, except for crummier demographics that are willing to read email for 1 cent/spam. Actually, this points to why Spam is Spam...Spam is Spam because it has zero correlation to what you want. Look at Vogue, etc...it's a $10 magazine consisting mostly of advertisements, but they're the advertisements women want. Pay-to-Spam will work precisely because it will force Spammers to become actual marketers, delivering the right messages to the right demographics..in that context the Price to send spam is a precise measure of Spammers lack-of-marketing savvy and/or information. Hell, if they're good enough at it they'll probably get women to pay THEM to spam 'em. -TD
From: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> To: "Tyler Durden" <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> CC: bzs@world.std.com, rah@shipwright.com, cryptography@metzdowd.com, cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 20:12:59 -0500
And how do you fund all this, make it attain an economic life of its own?
That's the big problem with all micropayment schemes. They sound good until you try to work the business plan, then they prove themselves impossible because it costs 2c to handle each penny. And more if issues such as collections and enforcement (e.g., against frauds) is taken into account.
This is why, for example, we have a postal system which manages postage, rather than some scheme whereby every paper mail recipient charges every paper mail sender etc etc etc.
Wrong. We already solved this problem on Cypherpunks a while back.
A spammer will have to pay to send you spam, trusted emails do not. You'll have a settable Spam-barrier which determines how much a spammer has to
On February 16, 2005 at 12:38 camera_lumina@hotmail.com (Tyler Durden) wrote: pay
in order to lob spam over your barrier (you can set it to 'infinite' of course).
A new, non-spam mailer can request that their payment be returned upon receipt, but they'll have to include the payment unless you were expecting them.
This way, the only 3rd parties are those that validate the micropayments.
-TD
From: Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> To: "R.A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com> CC: cryptography@metzdowd.com, cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: Re: How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2005 17:29:05 -0500
Oh no, the idiotic penny black idea rides again.
Like the movie "War Games" when a young Matthew Broderick saves the world by causing the WOPR computer to be distracted into playing itself tic-tac-toe rather than launching a pre-emptive nuclear strike.
It was a MOVIE, made in 1983 nonetheless, get over it.
More seriously, what attracts people to this penny black idea is that they realize that the only thing which will stop spammers is to interject some sort of economic constraint. The obvious constraint would be something like stamps since that's a usage fee.
But the proposer (and his/her/its audience) always hates the idea of paying postage for their own email, no, no, there must be a solution which performs that economic miracle of only charging for the behavior I don't like! An economic Maxwell's demon!
So, just like the terminal seeking laetrile shots or healing waters, they turn to not even half-baked ideas such as penny black. Don't charge you, don't charge me, charge that fellow behind the tree!
Oh well.
Eventually email will just collapse (as it's doing) and the RBOCs et al will inherit it and we'll all be paying 15c per message like their SMS services.
I know, we'll work around it. Of course by then they'll have a multi-billion dollar messaging business to make sure your attempts to by-step it are outlawed and punished. Consider what's going on with the music-sharing world, as another multi-billion dollar business people thought they could just defy with anonymous peer-to-peer services...
The point: I think the time is long past due to "grow up" on this issue and accept that some sort of limited, reasonable-usage-free, postage system is necessary to prevent collapse into monopoly.
-- -Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
-- -Barry Shein
Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD The World | Public Access Internet | Since 1989 *oo*
participants (9)
-
Barry Shein -
Damian Gerow -
Eric Murray -
Ian G -
Justin -
ken -
pgut001＠cs.auckland.ac.nz -
R.A. Hettinga -
Tyler Durden