[camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project

[Richard Clayton]

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>On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
>
>>  But using your spam size, , the slowdown factor becomes roughly
>> 73 times.  So they would need 73 machines running full tilt all the time
>> to regain their old throughput.
>
>Believe me, the professionals have enough 0wned machines that this is
>trivial.
>
>On the flipside, it means the machines are "burned" faster.

only if the professionals are dumb enough to use the machines that are
"making" the stamps to actually send the email (since it is only the
latter which are, in practice, traceable)

>> unfortunately, I think you making some assumptions that are not fully
>> warranted.  I will try to do some research and figure out the number of
>> machines compromised.  The best No. I had seen to date was about 350,000.
>
>It's at least an order of magnitude higher than this, possibly 2 orders,
>thanks to rampaging worms with spamware installation payloads
>compromising cablemodem- and adsl- connected Windows machines worldwide.

the easynet.nl list (recently demised) listed nearly 700K machines that
had been detected (allegedly) sending spam... so since their detection
was not universal it would certainly be more than 700K :(

>---------------------------------------------------------------------
>The Cryptography Mailing List

and in these schemes, where does our esteemed moderator get _his_ stamps
from ? remember that not all bulk email is spam by any means...  or do
we end up with whitelists all over the place and the focus of attacks
moves to the ingress to the mailing lists :(

<moan>
I never understand why people think spam is a technical problem :( let
alone a cryptographic one :-(
</moan>

- -- 
richard                                              Richard Clayton

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.         Benjamin Franklin

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