Re: [Asrg] Two ways to look at spam

Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 05:33:52PM +0100, Bruce Stephens wrote

[...]

>> So I think the best way to attack spam is to make sending email
>> expensive (in some way---this may involve computational cost rather
>> than some kind of financial framework) such that anybody sending me
>> email thinks a bit first (and so it won't be worthwhile sending to
>> large numbers of people).  So this would be attacking the volume
>> part of usual definitions of spam.
>
>   A few problems...
>
> 1) I don't throw away a pefectly good computer and buy the
> latest/greatest every year.  This email is coming from a 433 mhz
> machine with 128 megs of RAM.  How do I compare with someone who's
> just bought a 512 meg machine that runs at 3 gigahertz ?

Well, the 3GHz one is presumably about 1 order of magnitude faster
(give or take).  So if the usual cost of sending an email is 1 second
on a 3GHz CPU, then it might take 10 seconds on your slower one (or,
the 3GHz machine can send 10 times as many emails in the same time).

For *really* slow machines (such as mobile phones), I imagine the ISP
could charge per email, and provide the CPU power.  Something like that.

> 2) A beowolf cluster of cast-off 1 gigahertz machines will blow the
> "computational cost" to smithereens.

Yes, that's a real possibility.  It's still adding to the cost,
however: running clusters of cheap PCs is only relatively cheap, it'll
still take some running.

A more likely attack would be to include hashcash calculating code in
screensavers, Javascript on web pages, worms, etc., so you use the
zillions of PCs that other people are maintaining.

[...]

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