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

[Tim May]

(I have removed the various other mailing lists. People, please stop 
cross-posting to all of Hettinga's lists, plus Perrypunks, plus this 
CAM-RAM list.)


On Dec 30, 2003, at 7:11 PM, Bill Stewart wrote:

> At 07:46 PM 12/30/2003 +0000, Richard Clayton <richard at highwayman.com> 
> wrote:
> > [what about mailing lists]
> Obviously you'd have to whitelist anybody's list you're joining
> if you don't want your spam filters to robo-discard it.
>
>> <moan>
>> I never understand why people think spam is a technical problem :( let
>> alone a cryptographic one :-(
>> </moan>
>
> The reason it's partly a cryptographic problem is forgeries.
> Once everybody starts whitelisting, spammers are going to
> start forging headers to pretend to come from big mailing lists
> and popular machines and authors, so now you'll not only
> need to whitelist Dave Farber or Declan McCullough if you read their 
> lists,
> or Bob Hettinga if you're Tim (:-), you'll need to verify the
> signature so that you can discard the forgeries that
> pretend to be from them.

I don't have to whitelist anyone. If mail doesn't get to me, less junk 
to read. I certainly won't be running some "Pennyblacknet" scam 
promulgated by Microsoft.

This "pennyblack" silliness fails utterly to address the basic 
ontological issue: that bits in transit are not being charged by the 
carriers (if by their own choice, fine, but mostly it's because systems 
were set up in a socialist scheme to ensure "free transport"...now that 
the free transport means millions of e-mails are charged nothing, they 
want the acapitalist system fixed, they hope, with either government 
laws or silliness about using memory speeds to compute stamp 
numbers...silliness).

I haven't looked closely at the Pennyblack scheme, but I expect 
cleverness with caches and background tasks will fix things. For 
example, maybe people with idle CPU/memory time will sell their time to 
spammers, at suitably close-to-zero rates. (Essentially equivalent to 
Joe Sixpack selling his machine as a spam machine, which is probably 
likely, and still cheap for the sender.)

Fixing the fundamental market distortion is the best approach to 
pursue. Not my problem.


--Tim May