In my opinion, the various hashcash-to-stop-spam style schemes are not very useful, because spammers now routinely use automation to break into vast numbers of home computers and use them to send their spam. They're not paying for CPU time or other resources, so they won't care if it takes more effort to send. No amount of research into interesting methods to force people to spend CPU time to send mail will injure the spammers.
If you set the price to 1 minute of CPU, and spammers own 10% of all machines on the 'net, then the average machine can only receive 144 spams per day. That's a significant improvement on my situation.
Plus I'd've thought that having 100% CPU utilisation all the time might attract attention. But maybe not.
Cheers,
Ben.
-- http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html http://www.thebunker.net/
"There is no limit to what a man can do or how far he can go if he doesn't mind who gets the credit." - Robert Woodruff
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