How about passing a law that makes eveyone install a BIOS patch to block out
spam. ;-)
On the serious side Vernon has a point. Even with snail mail you can go
to the post office and the USPS will provide you with a form to fill out and
they will not put advertisements into your mail. If ISPs would only do the
same. As of yet, if all else fails, deleting a email box is easier and more
effective than taking a ballbat to a snail mail box.
--Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: "Vernon Schryver" <vjs@calcite.rhyolite.com>
To: <ietf@ietf.org>
Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 12:09 AM
Subject: Re: namedroppers, continued
> > From: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu
>
> > ...
> > The bootstrap problem will exist no matter what scheme we decide on.
>
> There are many spam solutions that do not have the bootstrapping
> problem. Examples include effective laws and honest intent and action
> by ISPs. Before saying those are hopeless, please note that the many
> bootstrap-limited proposals don't have proven prospects.
>
> > The point I was addressing was that there's been two major classes of
> > scheme proposed ...
>
> > However, the partitions created by each scheme are quite complementary,
> > ...
>
> Your observation of how those two solutions fit together is
> interesting...or would be if they did not suffer from other problems.
>
>
> > ...
> > > Moore's law causes a bunch of problems for the computing idea. ...
>
> > It may not be as big of a problem as we think. Rough back-of-envelope
> > calculations now: Let's say we assume a function X designed to take 10
> > seconds of CPU on my laptop (which has a 1.6Gz P-4 in it) to limit it to
8K
> > messages/day.
>
> http://www.intel.com/home/desktop/pentium4/ suggests state of the
commodity
> art is about twice that, which lets a spammer send 16K msgs/day.
> Moore's law is still a treadmill that you don't want to fight.
>
> > Now, this same function will take around 2 minutes on a
133mz
> > processor and be restricted to 800 mails/day. ...
>
> I would put the lower limit at around 48 MHz on 80486s, or ~8 times
> slower than a 133 MHz Pentium. Such machines go back less than 10 years.
> Would you expect your conservative correspondents to spend 15 minutes
> to send you a message, or would you just white-list them?
> Once you start white-listing, it's hard to have much enthusiasm for
> more fancier solutions.
>
>
> > Now how many people are still using a 133 system to do that much
outbound mail
> > themselves (and *NOT* just relaying all outbound mail to a smarthost)?
>
> I think recent FreeBSD and sendmail would still work fine at 48 MHz,
> although you probably want to stuff the thing to the gills with 64 MByte
> of RAM, or more if it can take it. There are many computing tasks that
> don't need 3 GHZ and 3 GByte.
>
> Aren't busy smarthosts significantly busier than 80K msgs/day?
> >From my old experience, that was true even when they were running
> at less than 50 MHz and with perhaps 100 MByte.
>
> Besides, no matter what inmates of glass houses and big ISPs would
> have you think, SMTP is a peer-to-peer protocol. A major damage spam
> is doing is helping government commissars and ISP salescritters convince
> people that the ancient Compuserve/AOL/Prodigy/whatever dumb-terminal-
> connected-to-central-servers is the only way to do public networking
> and computing.
>
>
And
> > even *MORE* to the point, what are the chances that a system that old
will be
> > upgraded software-wise to support a scheme, even if it takes zero
additional
> > CPU? ...
>
> Would you whitelist it for the next 10 years? If there are very
> few, white-listing works. If not, you've got that bootstrapping problem,
> and you've invited the white-listing camel into your tent.
>
>
> Vernon Schryver vjs@rhyolite.com
>