On 3/13/07, Udhay Shankar N <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [ on 09:54 PM 3/13/2007 ]
> > You're not creating extra traffic. You're sending unsolicited
> > bulk email.
> My on average, my confirm challenge is about 800 bytes.
> Your reply will cost a few bytes too. Let's be generous,
> and say the whole thing adds up to 1k bytes. Thus, I'm
> generating about 300-400k bytes of traffic, total. That's
> about the same amount of traffic you'd generate by looking
> about about 5 extra news articles, or about 10 seconds of
> a steaming video.
> While there was a day when the "wasted bandwidth" argument against
> challenge/response was legitimate, that day has long past. There's
> plenty of bandwidth to go around.
Bandwidth is not the scarce commodity. Attention is.
Devdas alluded to this in his response as well - imagine if every one
of the ~1k names in my address book issued a challenge. Or any one of
the ~50k subscribers of the various lists I read. I wouldn't be able
to get anything done, let alone read the actual mail that I receive.
Challenge response systems are an attempt to make *your*
spamfiltering someone else's problem, and that is my problem with them.
My problem is that a significant fraction of the spam I get are
challenges to some forged email purporting to be from a domain I
control. To the point where *all* challenges are immediately bit
bucketed.
It's not that my email to you is "not that important" it's that I
cannot easily tell your challenge from spam.
Challenge response is an automatic noise amplifier in an already noisy
environment. You are contributing to everyone else's problem in
trying to solve yours.
-- Charles
