----- Original Message ----- From: "Lloyd Wood" <l.wood@eim.surrey.ac.uk> To: "Ayyasamy, Senthilkumar (UMKC-Student)" <saq66@umkc.edu> Cc: "Fred Baker" <fred@cisco.com>; "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker@verisign.com>; <dwork@almaden.ibm.com>; <ietf@ietf.org>; <namedroppers@ops.ietf.org>; <iesg@ietf.org> Sent: Sunday, December 08, 2002 5:29 PM Subject: RE: namedroppers, continued > On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Ayyasamy, Senthilkumar (UMKC-Student) wrote: > > > " If I don't know you, and you want your e-mail to appear in my > > inbox, then you must attach to your message an easily verified > > "proof of computational effort", just for me and just for this > > message. > > > > If the proof of effort requires, say, 10 seconds to compute, then > > the economics of sending spam are radically altered, as a single > > machine can send only 8,000 messages per day. > > tracking moore's law could be a problem. > > > The recent proliferation of spam has lead to a renewed interest in > > these ideas. This work is about both the choice of functions that > > can be used to yield easily verifiable proofs of computational > > effort, and architectures for implementing the proof of effort > > approach. Filtering and/or forcing senders to pay in other > > currencies, such as human attention and money, will be covered as > > time permits" > > "Sender pays" is good. The penny black stamp effectively introduced a > flat-rate tax on sending letters, rather than a variable-rate tax on > receiving them, effectively turning mail into a common good available > to all society. Lloyd, in the US we pay .37 to mail a first-class letter. I don't know how many pence you pay in the UK but we still have "spam" bulk rate unwanted solicitations. Forcing the sender to pay doesn't solve a spam problem. I don't see how in could. It would force everyone to have to pay a price. > The government also undercut private messaging operators and > effectively put them out of business, but could use money earned > towards other services for society (having simplified and saved on its > operational costs along the way). > > So, computing as a social good - you want to send an email to someone > you're unknown to, you've got to provide proof that you're > participating in SETI@home, searching for big primes, in a distributed > crypto challenge, working on processing public GIS information, > autocomparing versions of typed ascii out-of-copyright texts (or raw > CD rips?) for accuracy, processing gene data or archived NASA tapes or > otherwise doing good things -- guess this would make each computing > charity (give us your spare cycles) the ticket server or PKI manager, > although you might want to try distributing that too. > > > for more details > > http://research.microsoft.com/research/sv/PennyBlack > > I don't see any discussion there of the computation as a social good, > or computational functions as utility functions. Microsoft, eh? > > http://www.glassinesurfer.com/f/gsrowlandhill.shtml > -- and here's the obligatory mention of Jeremy Bentham. > > L. > > <http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><L.Wood@ee.surrey.ac.uk> > >