Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
On Sun, 23 Mar 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote: On Sat, 22 Mar 2003, J.A. Terranson wrote: To date, my personal pet has been payment in computationally intensive solutions to questions posed by the recipient. This forced expenditure of effort, even if minor, removes the spammer's incentive for sending of email: the nature of the beast requires that the spam run be high volume and fast in order to pay off - slow down the run with computationally difficult questions, and the spammer will make no money. There is a problem here. There are different machines connected to the Net, their CPU power often differing in orders of magnitude. Either you will completely bog down the 486s still used as low-volume SMTP servers, or you will use a 486-friendly formula that will get barely noticed by a P4 machine, or you will have some CPU speed negotiating protocol, which will rely on the other side not lying about who they are. As you note, a speed negotiating protocol is just not feasable, and is therefore not worthy of further note. As to bogging down a 486 while creating no noticeable work for a P4... The disparity you note is likely not as severe as you think. You must realize that sites using 486s for SMTP servers are not likely to pushing much mail (MFN changed over to a P133 when we hit roughly 500 users, all of whom are very low volume). Lets say it takes a 486, oh, 30 minutes to perform the necessary computation to complete an SMTP delivery (to a non-whitelisted recipient - realize that most common recipients _will_ be whitelisted). What damage has been done? Zero. We have to consider the very-low-end systems, eg. Nokia Communicators or various PDAs, which can send mail too. Either we rule them out, or we open a loophole, or we will implement a complicated classification system for the devices that will end up as awfully hairy and still half-working after unsuccessful attempts to iron out all its kinks and holes. Again, KISS... And you most likely lose the ability to send mails using raw telnet. Do you have a compelling need to use raw telnet for mail? If you do, I would hope you are coming from a whitelisted address, or are *really* good at math ;-) Besides, can't you achieve something vaguely similar with simple tarpitting? Actually, yes - vaguely similar. Simple tarpitting doesn't really bog down the sending server as much, which is the central idea here: a single 486 sending an email will not be nearly as affected as a 2ghz Thunderbird trying to send out a million emails an hour. -- Yours, J.A. Terranson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote: I guess you have unlimited time and consider your time worthless. Its not That doesn't follow at all. I consider my limited time very valuble. I simply believe creating an artificial scarcity at the infrastructure level a bad way to address spam. the transport costs sender-pays is trying to price its our time. Sender-pays is trying to enable email recipients to establish a price for their eyeballs and attention. Advertisers do all the time. Cash exchange for mail transport will simply create a new profit center for ISPs. This is no different than the various request-permission-to-transmit proposals, aside from adding cost to the mix. Doing so will cut down on normal person to person discourse before it fixes spam. Presupposing micropayments for a new net.service has been a nonstarter for years, and I fully expect it to continue to be so. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] Strangers have the best candy.
Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, James A. Donald wrote: The intention is sender pays, recipient is paid, reflecting the real scarcity of readers time. Mailing lists would be sent Which in the real world will never happen. Sender-pays, if deployed, will end up being something like MS's Penny Black, where a third party collects a tax to allow sending mail. Those of us who don't care for such things will continue running MTAs that ignore the sillyness, and drop 456 - send more postage messages on the floor. out without postage, but with cryptographic signature, and subscribers would have to OK it. Letters to the list would be accompanied by payment, which would be something considerably less than a cent, which would yield a profit to the mailing list operators. Using our pre-existing, wildly popular micropayment infrastructure, no doubt? Signing messages and skipping the cash redistribution solves the problem without presupposing nonexistent clearing mechanisms. (Demanding message signing creates a different class of problems, of course.) -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fwd: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 14:18:10 -0500 From: Jamie Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal Mail-Followup-To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: clue inc X-URL: http://www.clueinc.net/ User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.3i On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote: I guess you have unlimited time and consider your time worthless. Its not That doesn't follow at all. I consider my limited time very valuble. I simply believe creating an artificial scarcity at the infrastructure level a bad way to address spam. What part of the infrastructure is being made scarce? You and I aren't part of the infrastructure. The selection of a value for our time is just another market force at work. the transport costs sender-pays is trying to price its our time. Sender-pays is trying to enable email recipients to establish a price for their eyeballs and attention. Advertisers do all the time. Cash exchange for mail transport will simply create a new profit center for ISPs. But its not cash for email transport. The transport cost is unaffected. Its cash for our eyeballs. I find this a distinction WITH a difference. Perhaps you do not. This is no different than the various request-permission-to-transmit proposals, aside from adding cost to the mix. Doing so will cut down on normal person to person discourse before it fixes spam. Yes, some Balkination may occur at the outset, but this is something that is recipient controlled not something mandated by ISPsm etc. Presupposing micropayments for a new net.service has been a nonstarter for years, and I fully expect it to continue to be so. The IETF anti-spam discussion seems to have broken down into a different religious camps, with many asserting that nothing that can't immediately be rolled out on a universal basis or isn't fully functional until universally accepted should even proposed. I disagree. Sender pays can be rolled out using PoW stamps almost immediately. Yes, some early adopters may find themselves cut off from senders who either can't or won't make the effort to create and attach computation stamps. For this reason sender-pays should be serious considered by most businesses until widely adopted. But for individuals inundated with spam it could be a quick and effective solution. Of course, the question they will ask when the spam stops is how many others aren't sending email cause they think I'm fringe. :) steve
Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
At 07:10 PM 3/22/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: On Saturday, March 22, 2003, at 03:49 PM, Steve Schear wrote: Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 14:18:10 -0500 From: Jamie Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal Mail-Followup-To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: clue inc X-URL: http://www.clueinc.net/ User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.3i On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote: I guess you have unlimited time and consider your time worthless. Its not That doesn't follow at all. I consider my limited time very valuble. I simply believe creating an artificial scarcity at the infrastructure level a bad way to address spam. What part of the infrastructure is being made scarce? You and I aren't part of the infrastructure. The selection of a value for our time is just another market force at work. The ISP or some regulatory agency setting the price for my eyeballs isn't my idea of a market force. As I understand your proposal, Steve, you propose some authority setting some price to send something. Tim, I guessed you missed my thread response to Bill... The question was never asked of me and I never said I supported having required ISP involvement in the pricing and settlement of send-pays. I think this should be end-user driven, perhaps supported by distributed servers akin to PGP key servers where senders can learn about their intended recipient's keys and cost to accept email. This cost can be in GHz-seconds for PoW or in some monetary unit once real values are practical. steve
Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
-- The intention is sender pays, recipient is paid, reflecting the real scarcity of readers time. Mailing lists would be sent out without postage, but with cryptographic signature, and subscribers would have to OK it. Letters to the list would be accompanied by payment, which would be something considerably less than a cent, which would yield a profit to the mailing list operators. On 22 Mar 2003 at 13:24, Thomas Shaddack wrote: However, it penalizes everyone without an infrastructure for electronic payment. Would need infrastructure for micropayments. At present NO ONE has any infrastructure for small electronic payments. Also the payments would have to be anonymous, or somehow grouped, or there would be massive loss of privacy. The obvious solution is chaumian micro cash. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG XbRtjiSCRH0VGobxmd0F5OSaviUp1XcQlfNA8RuC 43wJasFibfm7tEkw64d/V2etWo46wdb0klDarUL9Q
Re: CDR: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
On Saturday, March 22, 2003, at 03:49 PM, Steve Schear wrote: Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 14:18:10 -0500 From: Jamie Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal Mail-Followup-To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: clue inc X-URL: http://www.clueinc.net/ User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.3i On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote: I guess you have unlimited time and consider your time worthless. Its not That doesn't follow at all. I consider my limited time very valuble. I simply believe creating an artificial scarcity at the infrastructure level a bad way to address spam. What part of the infrastructure is being made scarce? You and I aren't part of the infrastructure. The selection of a value for our time is just another market force at work. I agree with Jamie's point, in that nearly _anytime_ some authority decides on pricing, this generated artificial scarcities. Examples abound: government places luxury tax on yachts or gas guzzler taxes on vehicles. The result is that artificial scarcities are created, and loopholes (such as grandfathered yachts or vehicles, or already-owned yachts or vehicles, become more valuable). Government taxes one channel of communication, and thus makes other channels more profitable. Nailing jelly to a tree. Aka the law of unintended consequences. The general name is market distortions. Nearly all efforts to set prices produce market distortions and require the threat of force to enforce. (An example is the oft-cited postage stamp: the U.S.P.S. needs to have laws banning competition in letter delivery, else they'll be run out of business.) As I understand your proposal, Steve, you propose some authority setting some price to send something. Hey, if Alice wants to send something over my network, who are you or the government to tell me she must pay me, or I must pay the next link in the chain, etc.? But its not cash for email transport. The transport cost is unaffected. Its cash for our eyeballs. I find this a distinction WITH a difference. Perhaps you do not. If Alice wishes to post a sign saying Pay me 25 cents or I won't see your message, this is her right, and her responsibility to figure out how to deploy technologically and sell to enough of her correspondents. Not a job for ISPs to do, except that they are also Alices and could presumably issue the same demand. In other words, there are many stages in the network, from ISPs to phone lines to fiber optics to customers, and so on, and none of them have any special status, only the ability to make contracts. So if a network hop, e.g., Tim's Hundred Kilometers, wishes to charge for traffic on the line he owns, so be it. Ditto for Steve's ISP. Ditto for Alices Eyeballs. To be sure, an accounting mess. But no different from the fact that a head of lettuce goes from farmer to truck to refrigerated rail car to truck to distribution point to supermarket to buyer with dozens or even several dozens of money transfers along the way. (Prices propagate in various ways, just as they did in neolithic times, just as they did along the Silk Road, just as they did a century ago.) It is not the job of any agency of men with guns to set prices at some particular point in this process. The fact that we don't yet know what, if any, market solution for unwanted e-mail will be is not grounds for jumping in with a market-distorting, statist solution. --Tim May
Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, James A. Donald wrote: The intention is sender pays, recipient is paid, reflecting the real scarcity of readers time. Mailing lists would be sent Which in the real world will never happen. Sender-pays, if deployed, will end up being something like MS's Penny Black, where a third party collects a tax to allow sending mail. Those of us who don't care for such things will continue running MTAs that ignore the sillyness, and drop 456 - send more postage messages on the floor. out without postage, but with cryptographic signature, and subscribers would have to OK it. Letters to the list would be accompanied by payment, which would be something considerably less than a cent, which would yield a profit to the mailing list operators. Using our pre-existing, wildly popular micropayment infrastructure, no doubt? Signing messages and skipping the cash redistribution solves the problem without presupposing nonexistent clearing mechanisms. (Demanding message signing creates a different class of problems, of course.) -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
The intention is sender pays, recipient is paid, reflecting the real scarcity of readers time. Mailing lists would be sent out without postage, but with cryptographic signature, and subscribers would have to OK it. Letters to the list would be accompanied by payment, which would be something considerably less than a cent, which would yield a profit to the mailing list operators. However, it penalizes everyone without an infrastructure for electronic payment. I don't own a creditcard suitable for Internet money transfers. I don't need it (and the USD/CZK exchange rate makes everything quite expensive), so for security reasons the option is disabled. Until recently, I hadn't a creditcard at all. What would I be supposed to do in order to send mail, then? What about public terminals, libraries? What about anonymous mails? Wouldn't it add either a high burden to the remailer operators, or nullify the remailer purpose, adding a shining payment trail right to the sender? What about improvised ad-hoc systems? When I have nothing other, I am able to send a mail with just a telnet client. Would it be possible with the new system too? It is another complication. Now not only the email infrastructure will rely on the Net itself, on the DNS and on the SMTP servers, but payment-transfer systems will be added to the equation, greatly affecting reliability. The idea smells bad.
Fwd: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 14:18:10 -0500 From: Jamie Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal Mail-Followup-To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: clue inc X-URL: http://www.clueinc.net/ User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.3i On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote: I guess you have unlimited time and consider your time worthless. Its not That doesn't follow at all. I consider my limited time very valuble. I simply believe creating an artificial scarcity at the infrastructure level a bad way to address spam. What part of the infrastructure is being made scarce? You and I aren't part of the infrastructure. The selection of a value for our time is just another market force at work. the transport costs sender-pays is trying to price its our time. Sender-pays is trying to enable email recipients to establish a price for their eyeballs and attention. Advertisers do all the time. Cash exchange for mail transport will simply create a new profit center for ISPs. But its not cash for email transport. The transport cost is unaffected. Its cash for our eyeballs. I find this a distinction WITH a difference. Perhaps you do not. This is no different than the various request-permission-to-transmit proposals, aside from adding cost to the mix. Doing so will cut down on normal person to person discourse before it fixes spam. Yes, some Balkination may occur at the outset, but this is something that is recipient controlled not something mandated by ISPsm etc. Presupposing micropayments for a new net.service has been a nonstarter for years, and I fully expect it to continue to be so. The IETF anti-spam discussion seems to have broken down into a different religious camps, with many asserting that nothing that can't immediately be rolled out on a universal basis or isn't fully functional until universally accepted should even proposed. I disagree. Sender pays can be rolled out using PoW stamps almost immediately. Yes, some early adopters may find themselves cut off from senders who either can't or won't make the effort to create and attach computation stamps. For this reason sender-pays should be serious considered by most businesses until widely adopted. But for individuals inundated with spam it could be a quick and effective solution. Of course, the question they will ask when the spam stops is how many others aren't sending email cause they think I'm fringe. :) steve
Re: CDR: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
On Saturday, March 22, 2003, at 03:49 PM, Steve Schear wrote: Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 14:18:10 -0500 From: Jamie Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal Mail-Followup-To: Steve Schear [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Organization: clue inc X-URL: http://www.clueinc.net/ User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.3i On Fri, 21 Mar 2003, Steve Schear wrote: I guess you have unlimited time and consider your time worthless. Its not That doesn't follow at all. I consider my limited time very valuble. I simply believe creating an artificial scarcity at the infrastructure level a bad way to address spam. What part of the infrastructure is being made scarce? You and I aren't part of the infrastructure. The selection of a value for our time is just another market force at work. I agree with Jamie's point, in that nearly _anytime_ some authority decides on pricing, this generated artificial scarcities. Examples abound: government places luxury tax on yachts or gas guzzler taxes on vehicles. The result is that artificial scarcities are created, and loopholes (such as grandfathered yachts or vehicles, or already-owned yachts or vehicles, become more valuable). Government taxes one channel of communication, and thus makes other channels more profitable. Nailing jelly to a tree. Aka the law of unintended consequences. The general name is market distortions. Nearly all efforts to set prices produce market distortions and require the threat of force to enforce. (An example is the oft-cited postage stamp: the U.S.P.S. needs to have laws banning competition in letter delivery, else they'll be run out of business.) As I understand your proposal, Steve, you propose some authority setting some price to send something. Hey, if Alice wants to send something over my network, who are you or the government to tell me she must pay me, or I must pay the next link in the chain, etc.? But its not cash for email transport. The transport cost is unaffected. Its cash for our eyeballs. I find this a distinction WITH a difference. Perhaps you do not. If Alice wishes to post a sign saying Pay me 25 cents or I won't see your message, this is her right, and her responsibility to figure out how to deploy technologically and sell to enough of her correspondents. Not a job for ISPs to do, except that they are also Alices and could presumably issue the same demand. In other words, there are many stages in the network, from ISPs to phone lines to fiber optics to customers, and so on, and none of them have any special status, only the ability to make contracts. So if a network hop, e.g., Tim's Hundred Kilometers, wishes to charge for traffic on the line he owns, so be it. Ditto for Steve's ISP. Ditto for Alices Eyeballs. To be sure, an accounting mess. But no different from the fact that a head of lettuce goes from farmer to truck to refrigerated rail car to truck to distribution point to supermarket to buyer with dozens or even several dozens of money transfers along the way. (Prices propagate in various ways, just as they did in neolithic times, just as they did along the Silk Road, just as they did a century ago.) It is not the job of any agency of men with guns to set prices at some particular point in this process. The fact that we don't yet know what, if any, market solution for unwanted e-mail will be is not grounds for jumping in with a market-distorting, statist solution. --Tim May
Re: CDR: Re: Spammers Would Be Made To Pay Under IBM Research Proposal
-- On 21 Mar 2003 at 23:01, Jamie Lawrence wrote: We all want to get rid of spam. I think most folks on this list are in favor of using market dynamics to influence behaviour. I think adding an artificial fee to sending email is stupid. It is creating false scarcity to fix a broken system. Further, it will end up becoming a new profit center for ISPs - send an email, pay 5 (or whatever) cents. I I know this is being thought about, but what about ad-hoc lists like CP? Who will pay for AOL delivery for that? Who pays for ASRG? Sender pays is stupid. Don't support false scarcity. The intention is sender pays, recipient is paid, reflecting the real scarcity of readers time. Mailing lists would be sent out without postage, but with cryptographic signature, and subscribers would have to OK it. Letters to the list would be accompanied by payment, which would be something considerably less than a cent, which would yield a profit to the mailing list operators. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG Y6FMx3kifAEols9uNP5y5vg8sKYvXPMDutZc4nWU 4vxTg06gsQlG1PONar3AxatOVjnthx9NfjJGIDu6C
