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

[Eric S. Johansson]

Richard Clayton wrote:

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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)

actually, we mean burned literally.  the stamp creation process raises 
the temperature of the CPU.  Most systems are not build for full tilt 
computational load.  They do not have the ventilation necessary for 
reliable operation.  So, they may get by with the first 8-12 hours of 
stamp generation (i.e. roughly 2000-3000 stamps per machine) but the 
machine reliability after that time will degrade as the heat builds up. 
  Feel free to run this experiment yourself.  Take a cheat machine from 
your local chop shop, run hashcash in an infinite loop, and wait for the 
smoke detector to go off.

there is nothing quite like waking up to the smell of freshly roasted Intel.


> 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 :(

that is a nasty bit of news.  I'll run some numbers based on that and 
see what the ratio of spam to stamp engines would be.  gut sense is that 
it's still not horrible, just not as advantageous.  but you never know 
until you run the numbers.

thanks for the information and the source.

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