| Slicing into Spam |
5 January 2004
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Microsoft's Penny Black Project May Reduce Spam
When the first rumors of Microsoft's "Penny Black" Project started flying, most presumed the Evil Empire of Mr. Gates had hit on a way to make people pay for e-mails. The suspicion was founded on the old hacker ethic that information should be free, and that Mr. Gates had built his fortune by making people pay for those freebies. As it turns out, the Penny Black project could slash the amount of spam in e-mail boxes, saving business millions if not billions.
Anyone who addresses the issue of spam, those unwanted e-mails offering cheap credit and better sex, immediately runs up against the two factors that make spam so prevalent: millions of copies made by computers at high speed and virtually zero cost. As processing speeds rise, computers can do more and more quicker and quicker. As the cost drops to zero, people will consume more of a good or service. To attack the problem, one must slow down the computer or raise the cost.
Penny Black, named after the postage stamp that changed Britain's mail system in the 1830s, merely makes the sender pay, not in money, but in computing resources. The approach requires a sender's computer to solve a cryptographic puzzle before it puts the e-mail through, something it can do in 10 or 20 seconds. For the sender of a single e-mail, this is a negligible delay. For someone who sends millions, this is crippling. With 80,000 seconds in a day, the 10-second delay caps the number of e-mails that a single machine can send at 8,000. Spammers send far more than that now.
Of course, one can simply buy another machine and double the number of e-mails that can be sent. However, a spammer must make a financial investment to do that. Suddenly, sending junk e-mail will require money going out. The richest of the spammers will continue to operate, but the others will be run out of business.
The project is far from done, farther from commercially wide-spread. However, Microsoft's plan does look like an effective approach that keeps legitimate uses of e-mail from suffering. Now if the company could find a way to keep Windows from crashing so often . . .
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