[hashcash] Re: considering hashcash
- From: Atom 'Smasher' <atom@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: hashcash@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 02:17:32 -0400 (EDT)
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On Tue, 24 Aug 2004, Eric S. Johansson wrote:
Atom 'Smasher' wrote:
1) no support in pine. i could write my own script to handle outgoing
mail (or ~maybe~ even use hashcash-sendmail).
hashcash sendmail is a good solution or, if you want to wait a couple of
days, I have one solution coming up for postfix. And if you really want
to get fancy and full featured, take a look at camram (sorry, must toot
my own horn)
==============
if nothing else, i'm more motivated to try hashcash for ideological
reasons, and contribute to proving that a "proof of work" stamp is more
valuable and feasible than a "proof of payment" stamp.
after reading a bunch of stuff on the camram site, i'll have to check it
out for outbound stamping. damn... there's no freeBSD port for camram...
i'll have to build from source, like my ancestors did, in the old days...
3) hardly anyone uses it. this is the lamest reason not to use it,
especially since i hate it when people say that about pgp.
but it is easier to use than PGP.
=============
they're both easy to use, less easy to set up. of course a system that
requires *zero* human interaction is often perceived to be easier...
especially when the user isn't the one setting it up.
of course, when/if pgp becomes widely used, i can test for valid
signatures to bypass further testing of incoming messages.
4) spammers have us out-gunned. with >80% of spam coming from zombied
windoze boxes, spammers have a lot of cycles to find collisions. it may
slow down a spammer to generate hash based postage, but if the protocol
catches on, spammers will start using it... (it seems that most windoze
users have become accustomed to their machines running at full load).
I suggest you work the numbers. Make your assumptions about spam volume
and number of zombies. Then set your stamp size to various points and
find out how big a stamp is necessary to overwhelm the number of zombies
you have.
<<snip>>
===============
ok so we can't stop 'em, but we can slow 'em down quite a bit.
5) CRM114 is giving me ~99.9% accuracy. this is a highly demotivating
factor for filtering/screening my mail through anything else. i
recently had a friend fwd a spam to me, so i could check it out... a
brutal test for any spam filter... the message was classified as spam,
but only by a *VERY* slim score. if we were both using hashcash that
wouldn't have happened, but that type of situation is rare.
I agree that once you get it working, CRM is a nice filter for an
individual. I've got some enhancements wrapped around the inside of
camram to prevent e-mail from known parties from even touching the
content filter. So the chances of false positives drop even lower.
=================
hhmm... "known parties"... white lists and mailing lists...
white lists suck (and will get worse) because spammers (aka virus writers)
are getting better at what they do... in one month, i got 2 spams "From"
my wife (both were caught by CRM114). both messages came from a cable
modem in NYC; we live in a 100% M$-free home in NC. apparently someone's
infected machine found both of us as participants in an email and the
virus figured out that if an email is "From" one participant and "To"
another participant, it will be more likely to get past a filter (a white
list, particularly). i suspect we'll see more of this as whitelists become
more popular.
mailing lists seem like another great target for stamped email. anyone on
a yahoo mailing list has certainly seen spam come through the list. a
virus can search a mail folder looking for headers that identify the list
and send a stamped message "From" the user. how effective this is and how
popular it may become remains to be seen.
...atom
_________________________________________
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Where is Lee Harvey Oswald now that we really need him?
-- Bumper Sticker
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