2003-05-07 - Stopping Spam with Client Side CPU Costs
DeclanMcCullagh writes about a recent proposal to stop spam by charging the spammers CPU cycles instead of money. Now I loath email blacklists (see SpamBlacklistsConsideredHarmful) and am incredibly leary of anything that makes it harder for email to get from point A to point B sucessfully. I think there will be significant unexpected social costs if we erect such barriers. Whether those costs are less then the costs of spam ... only time will tell.
My immediate concern is that I get very valuable (and completely unsolicited) email about community wireless networking all the time. I also send messages that I believe are valuable to people all the time. If I get a message which says "sorry you have to do X before you're allowed to email me" my general response is "rude bastard ... bye".
So while the hash cash proposal is primarily interesting to me because it doesn't involve money 1 and because it could be automated on the client side. I wonder how web mail companies would feel about this, I don't image hotmail will be thrilled about performing X arbitrarily expensive calculations on your behalf. And is there a middle ground between an operation which is "expensive enough" yet still "reasonable on a 386".
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Comments
1 Money is bad because automated transfers of money generally involve credit cards which tends to exclude minors, people with bad credit, people that opt our of the credit system, criminals etc.