On 7/18/06, Eric S. Johansson <esj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[1] do we have anyone in the audience who works for an ISP or a hosting facility? It would be interesting to build an anti-spam e-mail service where people become users of stamps and participate in the good zombie culture. We also need someone to generate the zombie engine and user interface for authentication of requesters for stamps.
There's one small piece I've been confused about for a while now, and that's the definition of 'zombie' in this context. My understanding is that a zombie is an internet-connected PC which is infected with a trojan which allows a malicious 3rd party to access its resources. In the case of Hashcash the 3rd party would be a spammer who wants to use the zombie PC to generate stamps. Am I correct so far?
Or is the zombie PC used solely to send spam, without calculating the stamps? Or both?
So in the case of a 'good zombie culture' the PCs are running a legitimate background process which generates stamps both for the user and others in their trusted group. Almost like the SETI approach to distributed computing. Do I have that right?
