In my opinion, the various hashcash-to-stop-spam style schemes are not very useful, because spammers now routinely use automation to break into vast numbers of home computers and use them to send their spam. They're not paying for CPU time or other resources, so they won't care if it takes more effort to send. No amount of research into interesting methods to force people to spend CPU time to send mail will injure the spammers.
By the way, this of course points out that most spammers these days, regardless of their protestations about being "legitimate businessmen", are in fact already multiple felons even to a libertarian like me. The stats places like Spamhaus produce show that all the biggest spammers are indeed based in the US even if they use foreign machines in their work, and throwing them in jail would probably help. The fact that the FBI and similar agencies rarely or never arrest anyone for breaking the law in the course of spamming just points out that the problem isn't a lack of laws or technology but raging incompetence and disinterest on the part of law enforcement. However, as this isn't a spam list, I'll get off of that rant right now. I've heard all sorts of other claims about how technology could help with spam, and they're usually well intentioned but misguided. Two in particular come to mind: 1. "We need public key authentication of all mail". Well, I'll point out that large integers are cheap and plentiful. "Authenticated" spam is pretty much as bad as non-"Authenticated" spam. If we use the authentication to only accept mail from people we already know we want to talk to, we've drastically reduced the usefulness of mail. 2. "The problem is SMTP -- we need to replace it." Every time I hear this, the speaker rarely has any actual improvements to offer over what SMTP already does, or, more often, doesn't understand what SMTP does. Anyway, enough ranting. Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
