economics of spam (Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?)

[Bill Sommerfeld]

> The other side of this equation is what a second of CPU costs in
> monetary terms to a spammer.  (To an end user it is essentially free
> because his CPU is mostly idle anyway; the limiting factor for the
> user is his preference for fast mail delivery (and in the dialup
> case an unwillingness to sit waiting for tokens to be calcluated
> before his mail can be sent).

If you believe http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2988209.stm,
spammers are beginning to use viruses to deploy spam relays.

If a spammer has a zombie army of a few thousand compromised systems,
the spammer's cpu time costs for hashcash will also essentially be
free.  


						- Bill

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